Well, I tinkered around a bit with Speech Note which has a good amount of features and is easy to install as a Flatpak. I think it has an option to do this, but requires a bit off fiddling, an extra tool and permissions for the Flatpak. I didn’t find any software with a particularly good integration into the Desktop, though.

Also read about Blahst but didn’t try it yet. Maybe that one is an option.

Good luck! And don’t forget to add the non-free-firmware repo and maybe the other additional ones if you need them. A standard Debian comes without. And if you’re following an old tutorial, that might not cover the split between non-free and non-free-firmware which happened somewhat recently in Debian terms. Their own documentation is good and up to date, though.

Atrophy or deskilling is a underrated problem in my opinion. And it applies to all things in life. Some people suggest computer literacy went down, because people are on their phones and tablets these days and everything works smoothly, so there is little to no motivation to learn how these things work, what they do behind the scenes, what privacy is…

Furthermore a general lack of worth or value of things, because everything is available in abundance and will arrive from China at your doorstep the next day. So we used to have nice hand-knitted norwegian sweaters. And these days we wear arbitrary cheap stuff and we just throw it in the bin after one season. Of course this leads to all kinds of societal issues once things lose value. And all malls are going to close and get displaced by Amazon. And manufacturers will discontinue quality products, since they’re competing on a low-quality market now.

Same likely applies to knowledge. Why all the hassle to learn something from the grounds up, in a years-long process, if there’s cheap results available right now, and the question doesn’t call for quality in the first place?

(CW:Political opinion. I know it’s a bit fatalistic, but I think we can see the same dynamics in the political landscape. People’s grandpas still fought against the nazis and they held up democracy. People now know little about the value of democracy because they didn’t need to fight for it. So for all they care we might as well appoint fascists to lead us. I think on a more abstract level, it’s all one and the same form of atrophy. Also fits the question/answer theme of this video. Because fascists for sure have simple and easy to understand answers ready to our questions.)

Me too. I guess the internet is going to change soon anyway. AI Slop is going to displace a lot of things. And these cooking recipes don’t really work. So there will be a demand for genuine, human content. And the only way to tell is if you have some connection to the creator. So we might see a revival of human connection online. At least that’s what I hope will happen… And seems lots of people are fed up with social media as well.

Nah. She doesn’t. And I think the days of Blogs and personal websites are mostly a thing of the past. These days people doomscroll on Instagram. But I have some fond memories of the good old times as well. I used to have friends (of different genders) who would write publicly about technology, sugar-free recipes, I knew someone who did styling videos on Youtube. But that toned down as we all grew older and got other things to do, and the internet changed as well.

Whatever people do on computers… Surf websites, do emails, online-shopping, organize documents, vacation pictures, paperwork, type letters, draw diagrams, watch videos, do video conferences, stuff related to hobbies… I mean she isn’t a programmer or designer by trade or anything like that, but computers are just useful tools for a lot of things.

Hmmh. I mean I mostly play old games and they tend to work better in Wine/Proton anyway, so I don’t have a virtualized Windows. I ran into some annoyances with other operating systems though, since most mundane desktop environments do lavish graphics these days. Or I’d randomly watch a Youtube video in a guest system and that’d use a lot of CPU with a recent codec and full HD or more… I guess all of this really depends on what people do with their virtualized machines, though.

Doesn’t that do graphics in software? I suppose for optimal software you’d need hardware acceleration for that, or does libvirtd pass that through automatically these days?

My wife and some relatives? Along with countless other people… We have a zero electronics devices with fruit on them -policy, in this household. But we do provide Lightning cables for guests… I mean MacOS doesn’t even run on a Thinkpad without several stunts and a day of work involved… You need to patch the UEFI, do something to the graphics, patch the ISO, or happen to have the exact right model. And it violates the terms and conditions. So MacOS isn’t really an alternative, is it?

The way AI works, it’s likely to pick up on your style. I.e. if you ask with slang words or spelling mistakes, it’s going to answer very colloquially. And this translates to meaning… Once you ask “stupid” questions, it’s going to mistake that for a creative writing assignment. And I think your question is a bit alike »What’s better, oranges or papayas?« That’s just a weird question and you’ll get a weird answer. Linux and MacOS are very different things. Used by different people for different tasks. None of them is “better” without any context given.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

Add context or people can’t answer your questions. I’d say you’re mistaken and that’s a curve for more quiet, not cooler.

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I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

Which base model does it use?

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

I like getting updates and new features? My computer isn’t new by any means. But I tinker with stuff, sometimes bleeding edge technology. Other than that I don’t really care. Rolling release, Debian Stable… I’m fine as long as it does the job. And for half the stuff it doesn’t even matter. I can write a letter with a 5yo LibreOffice or answer mails with any version of the mail client. Just give me modern, up-to-date tools when developing software, and it doesn’t hurt if the slicer knows about my new 3d printer from this year.

Huh, Why is the 8B Ministral worse in the benchmarks than the 3B version? Nevermind, the bar chart is just bad.

I use LibreWolf on the computer and IronWolf on the phone. Both modified versions of Firefox, both Free Software. Not sure what they do with AI, but as they’re both aimed at privacy, I’d expect them to disable AI features which send data to external services.

Grok is tuned to view Elon Musk as its God, Lord and Saviour, source of truth… And deny the holocaust. So naturally it’d say things like this.

Edit: And grok.com doesn’t. It says it would NOT flip any switch to kill 16M innocent people. Maybe this is just the persona it assumes on X… If someone doesn’t like it, I’d recommend to quit X. Try Mastodon or Bluesky instead.