It’s the best at what it does, but had been getting shitty in the way you described. However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow. I’ll put up with the nitro pushing and understand that’s my cost of doing business. If they go public, I’ll probably actively start looking for an alternative, because that always kills a product and it will for sure mean “AI” will be forced into it.
As a dev that recently transitioned from a decade of sys admin experience, to two years of ServiceNow admin/developer/et all, to now full stack development, I have found AI useful for somethings. I asked it how to do a thing, and it regurgitated a bunch of code that didn’t do what I was looking for, however, it did give me a framework for what files I needed to modify. I then put nose to the grindstone and write all of the rest of the code myself, researching the docs when needed, and I got it done.
For me, if I use AI to assist in something code, I always type everything out myself whether it’s right or not, because like taking notes, typing it out does help learn what I’m doing, not just finding a solution and running with it. I’ve disabled most of the auto complete copilot garbage in Visual Studio because it would generate huge blocks of code that may or may not be correct, and the accept button is the tab key, which I use frequently. I still have some degree of auto complete for single lines, but that’s it.
My advice would be to use AI as a prompt to get ideas or steer direction, but if you want to get better at coding and problem solving, I would suggest trying to find solutions yourself because digging through docs will be far more beneficial to your growth. AI does a good job of helping fill the gaps in packages or frameworks when your ignorant to all of the functions and stuff, but striving to understand them instead of relying on unreliable tools will make you a much better developer long term
I want to reenforce the other response you got with yes to all of you questions. I use steam and discord daily on my Linux install. I don’t use blender, but as mentioned is was developed for Linux, so should have no issues. If you have an old laptop or something around, try flashing on a distro and give it a whirl. Otherwise you may be able to get something dirt cheap on Craigslist if you want to have a lengthy try without configuring a dual boot, running off the install drive, or nuking your current setup.
I went all in on mine fairly blind and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in a couple of years. Go with something more stable if you’re hesitant or not well versed in computers and terminal. I went Arch because I wanted to force myself to learn more about how Linux is built and operates. It took me a full day to get loaded to a desktop mostly reading the wiki and deciding what items I wanted and how I wanted them configured. Linux 10 years ago is so different from the current versions, so if you’ve tried it before with issue, forget that experience and treat it as a first time experience.
Probably that too, but specifically the ability to spin up a private space to communicate with people for things like video games. Anyone that’s using it as their means of customer service is an idiot.
Apparently I struck a chord with my post, so I’m curious what is better than discord, and free that made my statement controversial?
Also, I don’t see locking data from search engines as a bad thing. The fediverse isn’t search engine searchable either and Google, bing, etc, don’t natively have the right to index private data.