Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
Hell, even borking my linux install was a relatively painless experience. I was updating from Fedora 43 to 44 and noticed at one point that my keyboard had power but nothing was displaying on my monitor. Capslock still responded so I wondered if the update had messed up the video display or something and restarted after seeing someone say that they saw the same and restarting seemed to actually kick off the update.
Well, for me, it fucked the dnf5 install, which I tried fixing from the command line for a bit before deciding to just grab the 44 iso and install it fresh. I kept my home and game partitions and just reinstalled the root dir, then created two new accounts, renamed one of them to my old username and took over the old home dir, logged in and it was like the update had just worked. Only thing I need to do to get back to where I was is reinstall some packages or software. All the settings are stored in my home dir, so even the ones I don’t have yet will get their old settings back when I do get around to installing them. All I had to do was install steam and it launched like it normally does, all my installed games still there.
And I’m pretty sure I could have even done this with a different distro and whatever was the same would have preserved settings, too.
No cloud involved or even saving any files specifically. I did ask an LLM what I should preserve to make sure I wasn’t missing anything but everything it suggested waa already in home. It could have gone even quicker if I wasn’t overthinking it so much, but it was just like an hour or so before I was back up and running once I started the install process.
Im laughing at the image of linux users trying to sell someone on linux by talking about how painless of an experience borking their computer was.
It really goes to show that giving people the tools to solve their problems is the better route. Windows has the same thing, if they bork the root partition you can hit repair and it tries to attempt to do what you describe but if it fails to automatically detect and resolve then thats it your fucked. But it might be a simple problem that the user could correct and fix if they were given the option or included in the process.
Hell, even borking my linux install was a relatively painless experience. I was updating from Fedora 43 to 44 and noticed at one point that my keyboard had power but nothing was displaying on my monitor. Capslock still responded so I wondered if the update had messed up the video display or something and restarted after seeing someone say that they saw the same and restarting seemed to actually kick off the update.
Well, for me, it fucked the dnf5 install, which I tried fixing from the command line for a bit before deciding to just grab the 44 iso and install it fresh. I kept my home and game partitions and just reinstalled the root dir, then created two new accounts, renamed one of them to my old username and took over the old home dir, logged in and it was like the update had just worked. Only thing I need to do to get back to where I was is reinstall some packages or software. All the settings are stored in my home dir, so even the ones I don’t have yet will get their old settings back when I do get around to installing them. All I had to do was install steam and it launched like it normally does, all my installed games still there.
And I’m pretty sure I could have even done this with a different distro and whatever was the same would have preserved settings, too.
No cloud involved or even saving any files specifically. I did ask an LLM what I should preserve to make sure I wasn’t missing anything but everything it suggested waa already in home. It could have gone even quicker if I wasn’t overthinking it so much, but it was just like an hour or so before I was back up and running once I started the install process.
Im laughing at the image of linux users trying to sell someone on linux by talking about how painless of an experience borking their computer was.
It really goes to show that giving people the tools to solve their problems is the better route. Windows has the same thing, if they bork the root partition you can hit repair and it tries to attempt to do what you describe but if it fails to automatically detect and resolve then thats it your fucked. But it might be a simple problem that the user could correct and fix if they were given the option or included in the process.