I never thought I’d witness the release of 3.0 in my lifetime

Yeah, well maybe you should put this into your graph as a choice. You might not like it but Ubuntu still has a major support for anything Linux related. Any manufacturer or software development - if they support Linux, there is a high chance that they mean basically Ubuntu, quite often they tested it just there. This is a HUGE advantage for any beginner.

Beginners don’t care about behind the curtain stuff, they just want things to work. And you might not like Canonical but Ubuntu does this

AI generation can be used for disinformation which can literally destabilize or right away end the world as we know it.

But fake Taylor Swift pictures, this is where we draw the line …

Can someone list those piracy subscription services so we can avoid them as responsible citizens?

I mean Notepad++ is like a monument to Microsoft incompetence and them not caring about technically minded people for decades. Where a single guy beats trillion dollar company’s ass, actually not just beats, absolutely destroys big time. And they were either not able or didn’t care with responding and providing some power text editor. The fact that their OS was able to acquire any significant market share in developer’s community is an ultimate triumph of marketing department

I’d see 2 reasons:

1. A lot of people put a lot of money into it and they won’t give them up. They’ll keep buying and selling, keeping it sort of artificially afloat even if it has no real world usage. Well there is actually one which leads me to the next point
2. The illegal market (and gambling) has a use case for cryptocurrencies so they actually use them

But to put it simply - they don’t die because they don’t have to. There is no single company that would pull the plug. By it’s design, they can coexist in our world and no one can stop it, doesn’t matter if people use it or not

It’s like a torrent with millions of seeders. As long as there is at least one seeder, the torrent will exist even if the files it contains aren’t really useful

I was very sceptical towards the recent hypes (space exploration, cryptocurencies, self driving cars, …) which turned out to be fads but this time … this time I’m going to guess it isn’t going to be a fad. Well it depends what we imagine by “AI” - will you have a robot pal like in movie I Robot or AI Artificial Intelligence? Probably not. Will AI predictions and learning be put into majority of programms and quite clever AI voice-assistants will appear like in movie Her? Yeah, I guess this could happen. My main reasons are:

1. It actually isn’t that difficult, machine learning isn’t new and very theoretically speaking, as long as you have enough computation power, nothing is stopping you. Like at the moment I can’t think of any limit
2. Laws to stop it would be very difficult. You cannot just say “No AI!”, I mean people can run it at home, how do you want to stop it? Which leads me to other point
3. The OpenSource community had also made progress in the area
4. Major players are heavily investing into it

Of course they will! This is the sad, sad reality of todays internet - the power is so centralized in the hands of like 4 companies, that every business basically can’t ignore them. Like you can but by that you’re just hurting yourself from the business point of view. Elon Musk can literally say Fuck You to advertisers and they still need to advertise there. This is just crazy. On nation level the anti-monopoly bureau would take action but we don’t have world wide anti-monopoly bureau.

That’s why when people tell me “Oh, Elon Musk just bankrupted Twitter” I say “Did he?”. At this point I believe he can do anything he wants, he can murder like dozen people, blow up the headquartes or start selling drugs to children and Twitter would still be fine

I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it