I agree that phone operating systems are way to locked down and hostile to user privacy. I wasnt holding them up as an example of what we should strive to replicate. I was just pointing out that I find the assistant feature on phones to be useful with how it can handle natural language query and preform different actions and I’ve heard many people say the same thing. With linux yeah we have enough choice where there will always be non AI distros but I think once the tools become good enough they will get adopted by ubuntu, fedora, mint etc. A tool like https://github.com/qwersyk/Newelle could one day be shipped with ubuntu and I think it would be good. Giving users a local first private AI that can help them do things would be a huge usability improvement in my opinion. Just the calendar event booking alone would sell me.

I also agree with you on AI productivity, sometimes its better and sometimes its worse and sometimes its catastrophically wrong. I’m mainly trying to make the argument that Copilot(and other AI assistant implementations) are a good feature/workflow for the users. I accept that their current state is unpolished and copilot is marketed to do way more than it can do. But I think its core concept is solid and the features are being built out and they will get to a point where its commonplace and in every major desktop. I’ve been following people who are using AI on their linux systems directly linked up to the terminal and it looks useful to be able to say “book and event on x day doing x” or “send John and email saying X” or “what was that file I downloaded yesterday”. These kind of actions currently work with Claude + tools but unreliably at the moment and the safety aspect is yet to be solved.

I’m sure someone will read this and say “but you could just send that email with a single command” but a normal user isnt going to send an email by typing in like thunderbird -s -t test@google.com -bcc mydad@google.com -m “hello” for sending an email but an AI can easily turn a natural language request into this command. So from the normal user perspective they go from having to open up a gui and enter out all the fields to pressing a button and typing out what they want or even saying what they want into a mic.

I think its fine to have by default but issue is that when people run into critical problems its not easy to restore from the back up. Currently if you cook your system you need to put a live USB in and then run timeshift and restore.

I would consider it to be an easy to use backup tool if the timeshift backups are in the grub menu to be booted into if there is any issues with the main install. But I dont know if this is possible or not.

If I’m talking with someone that only knows a few distro names saying you use arch gets what you are using across without having to explain what EndevourOS is.

Yes I can agree with someone doing this and I wouldnt find that cringe.

Its not being elitist. I dont consider arch to be hard to install or maintain or anything. Its just cringe that people want to tell people that they use arch when they dont use arch. It means they are ashamed of the distro they run.

If you want to go around telling people you use arch btw while on mint themed like arch thats fine but its not elitist to find that behavior cringe.

No I dont use arch and I’ve never claimed I use arch. I just point out that if you dont use arch its cringe to tell people you run arch. Thats just common sense I thought but there are many non arch users that are feeling attacked by me pointing that out.

Yes my phone does run samsungOS but it also runs the android kernel. We generalize when we say “android” the same as we generalize when we call all linux distros “linux”

Yes I am using it differently than the distrowatch websites search filter. And I would not call distrowatches search filter a conventional understanding of the word.

Im not saying independent as in they do everything themself from scratch im saying it as in they are self governing.

rolling back or restoring data from a cooked system?

Yes rolling back is easy but restoring from a major error using timeshift is not.

They do. They have their own identity, community and user culture. Go make a post on the arch fourms, endevour fourms and cachy fourms and it will be 3 different experiences because they cater to different niches of people. Majority of Arch users will never get their system as optimized as cachy.

There is little different in actual use between all linux distros. They all feel mostly the same but the differences are there and they are what makes linux cool.

Linux isnt windows so I reject that comparison. But by your logic anything running nix is nixOS or anything using debian is debian. Plenty of distros share repos, kernels, software but they are still independent distros.

No the issue is once enabled your home directory becomes onedrive. People feel they are saving files into their users/myuser/Documents but they’re actually saving it to users/myuser/Onedrive/Documents. These files are being synced off into the cloud and only pulled down when requested. Then the user decides they dont want onedrive and so they turn it off by unlinking their account. Now they feel they’ve lost their files but they havent the files are still in one drive and they need to go get them after that they have local files as normal.

Its purely user error encouraged by microsofts pushy implementation and bad design.

Just wait until you actually need to restore using timeshift.

TwoDrive or not TwoDrive that is the question

No if you download the local copies back then delete them from OneDrive, OneDrive will delete the local copies you restored to your computer.

No because they would go to the download folder which isnt synced with onedrive.

users aren’t “Using OneDrive” intentionally

Yes this is the biggest issue with onedrive but its still on users to administer their system at the end of the day. That means doing the bare minimum research when removing something as integral as Onedrive. You cant just turn off a home directory sync service and not make sure your stuff has been downloaded out of that service.

I’ve done full manual installs and archinstall installs of mainline arch and I would argue endevouros is arch

If I said I had just installed Arch and someone found out that i had installed EndevourOS I would consider that lying. To me Endevour has a completely different philosophy and culture than Arch. Its preconfigured to someone elses liking which is basically the complete opposite of Arch. They’re different in every way except sharing the same packages which a ton of distros do. If EndevourOS isnt its own distro then a ton of distros get erased and linux becomes instantly less diverse.

I do not understand why anyone cares if an endevouros user says they use arch lol

Well I agree it would be weird for someone to get upset over it I think having a baseline care for people to be truthful and accurate is perfectly understandable. Lying to me means there is something wrong like a person is trying to cover for something. I dont want people to think they should be embarrassed for saying they use endevour and feel pressured to say they use arch instead. Plus I would say arch being arch is an iconic part of linux culture and ought to be preserved.

Its only funny if you’re actually an arch user tho.

I do not get why people on distros like Endevour or Cachy say that they use arch. It makes me cringe everytime. Be proud of your distro, they are all good.

Yes one drive replaces the default path locations with its own onedrive locations but the local folders are still there under ~/users/user/Documents etc. Also Disabling onedrive doesnt delete the copies, they are still there in microsoft cloud the user needs to go grab them. The users are using a tool that moves unused files to the cloud, its expected that they take the necessary steps to reverse that when they stop using that tool. You cant just disable onedrive and expect everything to magically be downloaded back unless you click the download all button or go to the website.

The issue is users dont know how it works and dont want to know. I dont blame them since microsoft is so dogshit at ui/ux to the point where its malicious.

No. I read the entire book and then forget everything. Nowdays i try to at least jot down my thoughts in a post reading review so i can go back and see what i thought about the book but I even forget that sometimes.