TL;DR: get a 2nd hand reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…

there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is,

Indeed, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/15163037 unfortunately too cheap usually comes at a non financial cost.

Sure, it’s the same problem with most of electronics, it’s the console business model, or ink printer, where the device itself is “too” cheap and companies make money on content. Unfortunately it comes with shackles. I’m all for breaking the shackles but unfortunately has to be aware of what they are getting into, not just the trouble but also potentially supporting the company promoting DRMs and more.

I work in XR and Meta/Facebook is the embodiment of that problem. The Quest is too cheap compared to alternatives like Lynx (standalone designing in France, unfortunately still running on Android but at least rootable) or even the “old” now Valve Index, which in addition to its price also requires a gaming desktop.

So… it’s a money making machine for corporations. Hopefully recycling is done in a way that provide 0 support for the corporations locking down its device, promoting its marketplace BUT also, sadly less realistic, doesn’t also prevent companies who try to sell genuine alternative that do NOT promote such business model from existing.

Libraries (and Libby, the app they use) are also making it difficult to do anything but read in a browser or use Kindle.

Sadly too true. To be fair though I don’t think ANY librarian want that.

Here in Belgium we have an online library ( lirtuel.be ) that isn’t actually too bad. I looked it up and they say they provided ePub/PDF so I registered right away. Then… I discovered what they meant wasn’t ePub/PDF but rather DRMed ePub/PDF (here is an example https://www.lirtuel.be/resources/67aaf2124e480409978b68fb with ePub logo on the top right). Anyway I contacted them explaining that my ebook reader (reMarkable) does not support DRM and thus I couldn’t read the content. They pointed me to their documentation https://confluence.demarque.com/confluence/cantook-station/fr/faq/verrou-numerique-et-identifiant-adobe/qu-est-ce-qu-un-verrou-numerique-drm which implies it’s all “normal” to use that. I insisted, they didn’t reply.

Long story short, I’m either not using their service anymore or using DeGourou https://github.com/Bingwithyou/DeGourou to make the content legally loaned actually usable. Sad state of affairs but I’m convinced none of the actual librarians, namely people who care for making knowledge discoverable and accessible like that. I’m sure they’ve been coerced by same big publishers.

reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…

I’m not saying anybody deserve to be mistreated … but come on, at this point if you buy something from Amazon it’s Stockholm syndrome. Just do NOT. It’s that easy.

F*ck Bezos and other billionaires. Stop making them even richer from your pain. Stop your mind from being literally enslaved!

Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna…

FWIW I did just try deepseek-r1:1.5b (the smallest model available via ollama today) and … not bad at all for 1.1Gb!

It’s still AI BS generating slop without “thinking” at all … but from the few tests I ran, it might be one of the “least worst” smaller model I tried.

There are plenty of ways and they are all safe. Don’t think of DeepSeek as anything more than a (extremely large, like bigger than a AAA) videogame. It does take resources, e.g disk space and RAM and GPU VRAM (if you have some) but you can use “just” the weights and thus the executable might come from another project, an open-source one that will not “phone home” (assuming that’s your worry).

I detail this kind of things and more in https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but to be more pragmatic I’d recommend ollama which supports https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1

So, assuming you have a relatively entry level computer you can install ollama then ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b and try.

Google was “cool” 2 decades ago… or before they combined both monetization (through ad) with power (through monopoly) they inexorably transformed EXACTLY to Microsoft the same way Facebook/Meta did the Google playbook.

Those huge tech corporations are pulled by the market to follow the same, sadly successful, strategy playbook and keep no uniqueness.

Google has been the new Microsoft for years already but through careful marketing consumers somehow believe they aren’t.

Wow look at Mr FancyPants over there, your server has a screen, I just got something (RPi) the size of a matchbox! /s

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Windows

Take that back… /s

Takes literally minutes to try with 0 install and no risk for your data : https://distrosea.com/start/kubuntu-24.10-default/

I’m not saying you should enjoy it (even though I do, Debian stable with Plasma for a while now) but it’s so convenient to give any distribution with any desktop environment a try that IMHO it’s wrong not to spend few minutes and see what you might be missing.

I’d then buy bacon to eat the Brussels sprout, they aren’t actually that bad, just stinky to boil.

If I were the dad I’d get tricked once… then keep the evil one and use it as weight comparison point for all others. I don’t need to unwrap any. The light ones, if there are any, are the good ones. I’d do that while looking in her eyes grinning knowing how long this little ordeal took for her to make.

So… actually (put on fedora hat) it’s a GREAT way to learn!

What I do NOT recommend though is distro hopping with your data and your daily life setup. Namely the safest to learn is main system is stable, easy to setup and fix, you’re comfortable with even if you are not “proud” to claim it on Lemmy BUT the weird stuff you do on the side, it’s on a dedicate harddrive (ideally not even partition, just so that you can even mess that up) and you go LinuxFromScratch of whatever rock your boat knowing your data is safe and if you fuck up you can still go on with your day.

Care to explain how it does in a way that other distributions don’t?

That I understand, and I’m also on that boat. That’s what I tried to express separating the system, i.e. parts with dependencies, vs “just” applications and giving an example like Blender.

I understand for that aspect but for anything that is lower down the stack IMHO what are actual features needed and people can’t wait on are very very few and the trade off is probably for most people not worth it.

Obviously not everybody has the same taste for risk and some people might find it thrilling to install a system back at a random moment if it brings them 1 FPS extra or a very obscure feature that nobody else needs so I find it great that alternative exist. What I’m arguing for though is that people who do take a higher risk do so knowingly.

Edit: as an example of bleeding edge, there are some applications I download from the repository, build and run so they are basically as new as they can be. Again this is extremely precious to me, but it’s not part of the “system”, they are “leafs” on the dependency tree thus never leading to any catastrophic effect.

I’m gaming pretty much daily, VR and flat, and… I don’t even know what those abbreviations mean. I’m not saying these aren’t important to you and other gamers but also want to suggest that a lot of “features” pushed by the industry are for other casual yet frequent gamers like me totally unimportant.

Debian stable. I don’t understand why people would want an unstable system.

I get wanting the latest applications, and by that I mean end-user tools one uses frequently, e.g. Blender or Steam, but for anything that those rely on, very very rarely does one genuinely need anything “new” urgently. I’d argue pretty much never but I’d be curious to discover counter examples. Just fa couple of days ago https://lemmy.ml/post/24882836/16154377 arguing about the topic too. Even for drivers for gaming, which are supposedly changing relatively “fast” there is rarely an actual need for it. Quite often it’s a desire to get the latest but the actual impact is not that significant.

TL;DR: IMHO stable system with security updates running few bleeding edge apps isolated is the best compromise.