I’ve only felt the need to change distros once, from Linux Mint to EndeavourOS, because I wanted Wayland support. I realize there were ways to get Wayland working on Mint in the past, but I’ve already made the switch and have already gotten used to my current setup. I personally don’t feel like I’m missing out by sticking to one distro, tbh. If you’re enjoying Mint, I’d suggest to stick with it, unless another distro fulfills a specific need you can’t get on Mint.

https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox ?

I haven’t, but I’ll keep this in mind for the future – thanks.

I believe I was when I tried it before, but it’s possible I may have misconfigured things

I’ll give it a shot later today, thanks

edit: Tried out mistral-7b-instruct-v0.1.Q4_K_M.ggufvia the LM Studio app. it runs smoother than I expected – I get about 7-8 tokens/sec. I’ll definitely be playing around with this some more later.

That’s good to know. I do have 8GB VRAM, so maybe I’ll look into it eventually.

I’m looking forward to the day where these tools will be more accessible, too. I’ve tried playing with some of these models in the past, but my setup can’t handle them yet.

Good question. In the past, there have been some federation issues. However, things have seemed fine for awhile now. I will admit that it’s entirely possible that there are issues that I may not be aware of. I don’t do any extensive testing as I’m just a regular user, and /kbin is a younger platform which tries to do something different from lemmy and mastodon. If the Collections feature interests you, I might suggest just making a kbin account to give it a test run. You can essentially have the same feed you do now thanks to federation, but with the added benefit of feeds more suited to your interests. Public Collections are also very useful for discovering similar communities across the fediverse.

kbin has this – the feature is called collections. https://kbin.social/magazines/collections

you can make public ones that others can follow, or private ones to make curated feeds for yourself.

To add further context–I’d like to emphasize that an understanding of written Chinese would help with Kanji, but like you said, to a limited extent. When reading Kanji, there are cases where you’d have to be cognizant of Onyomi and Kunyomi (Basically pronunciations rooted in Chinese vs. Japanese). Not as important if you are strictly “reading”, I suppose. However, this would also not provide insight when reading Hiragana nor Katakana, how particles are used, rules for conjugation (polite vs. casual, past vs. non-past tense, etc.), further reducing mutual intelligibility. In some cases, Chinese characters may be visually identical to Japanese Kanji, yet have different meanings or applications. Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese is also a whole other topic.

Examples where there is some similarity:
JP: 走る
EN: Run (verb)

CN: 走路
EN: Walk (verb)

Matching characters, unrelated meaning and application:
JP: 勉強
EN: Study (noun)

CN: 勉強
EN: Reluctantly (adverb)

Furthermore, Chinese uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, whereas Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. Japanese also regularly uses subject omission, so it’s important to consider these things if you’re moving from one language to the other. Missing an understanding of these differences could lead to pretty different interpretations of a sentence.

That being said, having a background in Chinese would be more beneficial when picking up Japanese than the other way around, IMO.

It sounds like you’ve taken the appropriate precautions. I’m sure others will have better suggestions, but perhaps you can try running a VM for a week or so as if you’ve made the switch and take note of anything you feel you may be lacking.

EndeavourOS. I like having a relatively bloat-free setup. It’s also been nice because it’s been easy to manage so far.

If you receive these notifications on mobile, you can use kdeconnect (gsconnect on GNOME) which sends pop up notifications on your desktop from your phone, as a workaround.

join us

This is awesome, OP. I’ve crossposted this to @linguistics to give you a little more visibility. Cheers.

Well, if that extends beyond paying to be the default search engine, I’d be happy to take a look at a source if you have one. Changing search engines is also only a matter of a few clicks.

Classic…ask for more info and they disappear

I prefer supporting browser alternatives as opposed to supporting Google’s monopoly of web browsing

You should really watch this, because it’s clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.

https://youtu.be/7h7anorDy9A?t=205

Bangs are awesome, and so are the Vim keybinds

This does not spark joy.