Saturday, April 04
Daily News Stuff 4 April 2026
Plasmotoxosis Edition
Everyone's favourite anticommunist angel is back. The Saga of Tanya the Misunderstood returns this July, after 97 long years away.
Plasmotoxosis Edition
Top Story
- Half of planned US datacenter builds have been delayed or canceled. (Tom's Hardware)
Unfortunately this does not represent a collapse in the AI industry - not yet, anyway - but a shortage in key electrical distribution components thanks to the ongoing trade war with China, something that will be resolved relatively quickly as other countries gleefully pick China's bones clean. Metaphorically.
Tech News
- High-end OLED gaming monitors from Asus are arriving broken thanks to shoddy environmentally friendly packaging. (Tom's Hardware)
You'll own nothing, and what you do own will arrive broken.
- Arm will power 90% of AI servers based on Arm processors in 2029, says Arm. (Tom's Hardware)
They say "custom processors", but they mean Arm.
- Microsoft is telling business and retail customers alike not to rely on its Copilot AI products for anything that matters. (Tom's Hardware)
But they still want you to keep handing them your money.
- First time as farce, second time also as farce: Don't go looking for Claude Code on GitHub. Not now. You'll just find yourself downloading malware. (Bleeping Computer)
The authentic copies have been taken down by Anthropic leaving only an army of leprous zombie clone corpses.
- But security researchers already got a chance to look at the code and see what Anthropic knows about you from the files you feed to Claude Code. (The Register)
And the answer is, everything.
- PC makers have figured out how to keep making money with the price of key components headed into cislunar orbit: Stop marketing to the filthy poors. (WCCFTech)
If you have computer, treat it like the one remaining intact moa egg. Not like other formerly remaining intact moa egg, which someone took out of its case and dropped.
- For the rest of us, Google is shipping a $3 USB drive containing a bootable image of ChromeOS that will breathe new life into superannuated Windows hardware. (Liliputing)
Or you could just install any other flavour of Linux. But ChromeOS is good for non-technical users.
- The project at work that has been consuming all my waking hours for the past two months is done, just in time for the Easter long weekend here. I am sleep.
Musical Interlude
Everyone's favourite anticommunist angel is back. The Saga of Tanya the Misunderstood returns this July, after 97 long years away.
For real.
Disclaimer: Close only counts in hand grenades and proximity fuses.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:32 PM
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1
I've been thinking about maybe turning one of my old PCs into a Linux machine. Although other than having had a Unix account or two in the 80's, I'm not very conversant on it.
Can you suggest a Distribution?
Can you suggest a Distribution?
Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, April 05 2026 12:21 PM (XWgGM)
2
I have had a lot of luck with Devuan Daedalus install media. Devuan is the non-systemd fork of Debian, which is the root of one of the three (1) major families of distributions these days.
(Another root is Arch, whose non-systemd version is Artix. Neither seem to really be for newbies.)
Linux Mint and Ubuntu tend to more commonly be suggested for newbies.
The process is to take a 'good' newbie distribution with a graphical installer, save it to a memory stick using the program rufus(2), then boot to the memory stick.
Modern linuxes are like, or can be like, a Unix account in the 1980s. Every distribution is a quilt of pieces jigsawed together, and some distributions have a graphical installer that allows for many choices.
Cinnamon (a desktop environment) with LightDM (a display manager, does the log on) is one of several reasonably Windowsy experiences. (XFCE looks more like a modern Mac to me.) This runs nice on 4GB of ram, and hardware that might be too slow for the latest windows 10.
But, a graphical installer that boots on /your/ hardware is going to be easiest. This can be trial and error.
Once you get the GUI up, and can log in, you can see enough of what happens to start refining your mental model, and to operate less blindly.
What happens is that people try linux, and then either they don't like it, or they develop really specific tastes.
My tastes were maybe dysfunctionally weird before I got a modern linux installed. There are probably worse people than me to take advice from, but I would have a hard time telling you who they are.
(1) according to some sources.
(2) FOSS program that runs under windows, it is a 'burn an iso to...' program that works well with linux isos and memory sticks.
(Another root is Arch, whose non-systemd version is Artix. Neither seem to really be for newbies.)
Linux Mint and Ubuntu tend to more commonly be suggested for newbies.
The process is to take a 'good' newbie distribution with a graphical installer, save it to a memory stick using the program rufus(2), then boot to the memory stick.
Modern linuxes are like, or can be like, a Unix account in the 1980s. Every distribution is a quilt of pieces jigsawed together, and some distributions have a graphical installer that allows for many choices.
Cinnamon (a desktop environment) with LightDM (a display manager, does the log on) is one of several reasonably Windowsy experiences. (XFCE looks more like a modern Mac to me.) This runs nice on 4GB of ram, and hardware that might be too slow for the latest windows 10.
But, a graphical installer that boots on /your/ hardware is going to be easiest. This can be trial and error.
Once you get the GUI up, and can log in, you can see enough of what happens to start refining your mental model, and to operate less blindly.
What happens is that people try linux, and then either they don't like it, or they develop really specific tastes.
My tastes were maybe dysfunctionally weird before I got a modern linux installed. There are probably worse people than me to take advice from, but I would have a hard time telling you who they are.
(1) according to some sources.
(2) FOSS program that runs under windows, it is a 'burn an iso to...' program that works well with linux isos and memory sticks.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 05 2026 03:12 PM (s6adZ)
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