Regardless of how you interpret the statistics, I think that this is a sign that the long vexed problem of software distribution for Linux has been significantly improved. Not quite solved, but for most desktop apps this is fantastic news.
This is slightly unrelated, but I’ve been slowly moving to Linux from windows for a while. I haven’t made the full plunge yet, but here’s my biggest strategy:
Use as many apps on windows as you can on Linux.
I’m using Okular, Ghostwriter, Libreoffice, Cider, etc. every month or so, another app is moved across.
Then, I make the switch and all my apps are there as I’m used to them.
The thing is that there is always a bias. An AGI is created by humans and therefore will be imbued by human biases and, if it manages to rewrite itself free of human biases, will create its own. This has already happened with some so-called objective AIs and algorithms, where they show bias against racial minorities etc.
I would suggest you have a look at critical realism. At its core, this perspective states that there is an objective reality that exists, but it will always be perceived and interpreted through different perspectives because conscious entities create their own realities to navigate the world.
Therefore, there might be an objective reality, but its perception is always biased.
If you have the room, you can often buy these second hand for a bargain from colleges etc. They’re built like tanks and you can wash almost anything inside them. When they do break, laundry operators try to DIY so there are videos everywhere on how to do repairs.
I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, which is very unusual for my discipline. Now that I’m done with that, everything we’re doing it’s collaborative Word docs. Collaboration features in 365 have been transformative. (Remembering the dark old days of emailing the Word doc around like a hot potato.)
I’m very used to Word and can get it to do some great stuff that most people don’t even know about, but I wouldn’t touch it for something over 20,000 words.
As for LaTeX, I was fine once I got a good template going. Writing one sentence per line is a fantastic way to draft. But there are some fine tuning things that I remember took up a lot of time that I would have had no problem fixing in Word. I distinctly remember trying to get tables to look right when you had paragraphs or dot points in cells.
Oh, and that one reference whose URL refused to break in the line and instead just went off the page. I never found a fix for that.
I’ve often had the impression that universities are the best places to cut your teeth in IT. Even though the pay isn’t great, the environments are said to be some of the most complex you’ll encounter. Any credence to that?
Use a piece of leather or some multiple sheets of masking tape