> I'll start off by saying that I hate mechanical keyboards with a passion.

Interesting. Could you explain why that is?

I hate the long travel distance and I hate noisy keyboards and they are uncomfortable af. They feel and sound like an old soviet typewriter like the ones my grandfather used to have.

> They feel and sound like an old soviet typewriter like the ones my grandfather used to have.

Just to be sure: you know that they don't all feel and sound the same?

I'm sure tools exist, but for a DIY solution that any LLM can help you piece together:

- Silero VAD for chunking audio;

- Whisper for transcribing;

- phi3 or bart-large-cnn (which is finetuned to summarize) for summarizing;

This entire stack can run with your machine in airplane mode once you've downloaded the models.

The problem is that while the goals of today's government may align with all of society (which is already never going to happen), that says nothing about a future government. That future government may have far more nefarious interests and then use data gathered under the government that was trusted to achieve their goals.

Static website written entirely in Emacs' org-mode with a slightly customized publish script that gets executed on a push to `main`. Hosted on GitHub Pages.

Until a few months ago I would have suggested Pop!_OS. I had been a happy user myself for several years and it's nice that almost everything works out of the box. Personally I recently got a new laptop and switched, but would still have recommended Pop!_OS to a non-expert user. However...

A few months ago my girlfriend started trying Linux and went with Pop!_OS on my advice. For most regular use it does indeed work fine, but she has needs for specific software that only exists for Windows. And that's where quite a few issues appeared. Both on the 22.04 and the new COSMIC version, the Lutris/Wine combination has... quirks. It's a pain to get her software working. It also just randomly _stops_ working. Whereas on a spare machine with just Ubuntu 24.04, all that stuff just works instantly.

Granted, not the most typical usecase, but even non-expert users can have hobbies that require obscure software. And more important than anything is that their software continues to work easily. I'm not sure I would recommend Ubuntu to a non-expert. It has its own quirks.

This comment ended up being less coherent and more ranty than I wanted, but there's a non-expert's Pop!_OS experience.

It depends on the product, of course. Currently I typically recommend fly.io with a Dockerfile for getting something online quickly and cheaply, including the Dockerfile and the fly config in the git repo.

If the product gains traction you can either scale up at Fly, chose to move to a different cloud offering or even decide to self-host.

Thanks :)

The ideal tech stack for a solo dev to use in 2025 is the one you are most comfortable with.

The ideal tech stack for a solo dev to use in 2025 is also the one that is most suitable to the problem that you are trying to solve.

Unless those two are wildly different from each other — such as one being Ruby and the other being Haskell — learning the same concepts that you already know in a new language takes a few weeks at best.

Personally I picked up Python for a couple of small LLM demos that I have given, but ironically the sample application is otherwise written in .NET (because I am most comfortable hacking GUI applications with .NET), with the Python parts being invoked as a subprocess.