I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?

Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.

I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.

The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.

I remember a show of hands on distro use at a linux conference in the mid 2000s and just about everyone used Debian. I think we were all suprised. I suspect that would be different today with Ubuntu variants, Arch, Fedora but I doubt the handful of actual Red Hat users has changed. They always presented themselves as a much bigger distro than they ever were and their advertising and media coverage gave a very skewed impression.

I would see people using Centos and ask why and it was because they were in IT, but not grass roots linux users, and they thought Red Hat was the major Linux distro because of all the publicity they bought and the certifications. Red Hat’s importance was that their relatively small number of enterprise customers brought in real revenue which funded full time developers and was a huge benefit to Linux. But for average Linux users they were and remain a bit of a side show.