Thanks! Live photo of it ain’t worth sharing at the moment: just a broken external screen, extra macbook on the side, messy wires and some random trash on the table. However, it might be interesting to see how it looks in normal tiling scenarios (I use Krohnkite), and I have a screenshot from few days ago: https://ibb.co/yFgB9kK2 So because those extra KDE panels are “dodge windows”, they are usually hidden in non-float layouts and don’t take all that space. To see them, instead of hovering to the edge of the screen I usually just switch to empty workspace where they are all visible, and launch something from those panels there, for example a game.

Progressive rendering

This is really interesting. Now I wonder: would it be possible to use the same image for thumbnail and full view and instead control its display by maximum allowed transfer percentage? For example, by default, for thumbnails, all images on page are served only up to 15% of their full size, and when you click on them, the same image resumes downloading to 100% size. I mean, it’s definitely possible to implement this, but it would be nice to see this widely supported without getting too hacky.

I’m not sure, do you mean wallpaper sauce, or live photo of setup, or more screenshots with apps? I added screenshot to original post soon after posting, but edits can be problematic to sync.

Nope, I actually use them together, look at other reply.

I use it together with plasmashell, not as replacement. I rebound “win+space” to trigger Noctalia instead. I use Noctalia as top panel and I use 5 extra KDE panels stylized with panel-colorizer in “dodge windows” mode. To use Noctalia I simply added “noctalia” into normal KDE autostart apps. Noctalia also automatically recognizes KDE/Plasma virtual desktops as workspaces.

https://ibb.co/xKLr4SJj

I’ve been using Noctalia 5 on regular KDE/Plasma for a month or two. Currently it uses 53.9 MiB RAM according to ps_mem.

what would the benefits of k8s be?

Compared to what? Manually running software on machines? Automatic distribution of work, automatic networking, linking/transfer of resources, etc. I think their scenarios are often oneshot tasks that need to run somewhere and produce results that get used in other tasks or aggregated somewhere, etc.

How much RAM do you think they have? I think a top-notch scientific machine from literally 20 years ago might have like 4GB RAM, maybe a bit more. I’m not sure about non-control-plane kubelet runtime overhead, I see online sources showing numbers as little as 30MB, and as big as 1GB. But even with 1GB you will still have 3GB for work.

while at the same time they are planning (or already in the process) migration to k8s?

What’s the problem with running those 20 year old machines as kubelets?

Yeah, there are many places where it’s possible to draw the line, and I personally wouldn’t go into extreme self-sabotage for something like this. So, if there are few dozens alternative DE/WMs that do absolutely the same thing but are not vibecoded, it’s very little effort to switch using those, but if you literally have to give up on your whole system stack or even your whole hobby because of Krita or Blender or Linux Kernel accepting AI assisted code, that’s just too much.

Doesn’t seem to be full-featured alternative for desktops:

• https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/steam-and-proton.82093/

I guess it can be hard if possible at all to use apps like Blender, Krita, etc. Also, I’m getting quite used to Portage and Gentoo FreeBSD project is obsolete and unsupported now so it would be very risky to try to run it with FreeBSD kernel.

Yeah, but with Linux Kernel there is no choice. So people who are against AI can be unhappy with Linux Kernel as well but they only can choose to use alternative to Xfce but not to Linux Kernel. For now they can express their annoyance about it being allowed in kernel and hope that some day policy gets changed there as well. I don’t see any moral inconsistency here.

Wdym? UK started all of this. They’ve had age verification working since summer 2025, then EU joined and got it implemented in autumn for many sites like X for example where any NSFW content requires age verification (for more than half a year now), and US only started coming up with similar stupid laws almost a year afterwards.

Scientists don’t work on mundane problems. AI need training to solve mundane tasks. Just take stackoverflow as the literal example. It’s not science. We might need a new profession to produce training material for arbitrary areas of expertise, not limited to research level topics. A job like this might be talking about such topics on a searchable forum, for example. Each post can be evaluated by a separate AI system to assign score points to it. I don’t know whether this sounds more dystopian or fun. It’s definitely not that far from social credit systems.

Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)

It was and is a good thing. I think it’s a huge problem that when it fades away future next generations of AI will not be able to learn from it. And the culture at that point will be to depend on AI instead of having sites like those, so even getting it back isn’t going to work. Honestly I think maybe we need a new job: “experts” who just do some fun highly thematic stuff and post results online to train AI.