Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human
Just like society, the web moves forward when people think, compare, and discover for themselves. Vivaldi believes the act of browsing is an active one. It is about seeking, questioning, and making up your own mind.
Across the industry, artificial assistants are being embedded directly into browsers, and pitched as a quicker path to answers. Google is bringing Gemini into Chrome to summarize pages and, in future, work across tabs and navigate sites on a user’s behalf. Microsoft is promoting Edge as an AI browser, including new modes that scan what is on screen and anticipate actions.
These moves are reshaping the address bar into an assistant prompt, turning the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.
This shift has major consequences for the web as we know it. Independent research shows users are less likely to click through to original sources when an AI summary is present, which means fewer visits for publishers, creators, and communities that keep the web vibrant. A recent study by PewResearch found users clicked traditional results roughly half as often when AI summaries appeared. Publishers warn of dramatic traffic losses when AI overviews sit above links.
The stakes are high. New AI-native browsers and agent platforms are arriving, while regulators debate remedies that could reshape how people reach information online. The next phase of the browser wars is not about tab speed, it is about who intermediates knowledge, who benefits from attention, who controls the pathway to information, and who gets to monetize you.
Today, as other browsers race to build AI that controls how you experience the web, we are making a clear promise:
We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship. Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting. Our curiosity loses oxygen and the diversity of the web dies.
Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Vivaldi
The field of machine learning in general remains an exciting one and may lead to features that are actually useful.
But right now, there is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.
Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.
We will stay true to our identity, giving users control and enabling people to use the browser in combination with whatever tools they want to use. Our focus is on building a powerful personal and private browser for you to explore the web on your own terms. We will not turn exploration into passive consumption.
We’re fighting for a better web.
vivaldi.com/blog/keep-explorin…
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.Athena Chapekis (Pew Research Center)


ClipperDefiance
in reply to Trent • • •The only immutable distro I've tried is Bazzite. It's gaming-oriented, but can work well as a desktop. It also does offer a KDE edition, but for some reason they intentionally ship with some GNOME programs instead of the KDE ones. For example, a fresh KDE edition installation includes Ptyxis instead of Konsole.
Also, DistroWatch's search has the option to only show immutable distros. It's under the Distribution Category option. I figure that might help you find a few more options.
Trent
in reply to ClipperDefiance • • •lasagnaisland
in reply to ClipperDefiance • • •as of bazzite 44, konsole is now the default terminal on kde
(but bazzite kde still defaults to gnome disks)
Mordikan
in reply to Trent • • •I run NixOS as a daily driver and on a box for docker containers.
I will say that it is stable to point that since nothing seems to ever really break, I don't feel I really understand the configuration as well as I could (since I'm not having to fix things and learn).
I started with just traditional NixOS but later moved to using flakes. Because of flakes input pinning, it's much more reproducible but also even more stable. The biggest benefit I see to flakes is the use of local git for updating. Since I have git logs for auditing, if something were to go wrong, I'd just find that change in log and revert to before that commit hash (or just revert to different generation).
The biggest problem I've had is how procedurally some tasks change and sometimes are made more difficult. Symlinks is a good example of that. In Arch, symlinking is just a basic one-liner. In NixOS, it's a matter of writing config more verbosely to the
configuration.nixfile :That's a good takeaway from NixOS: things are more verbose in setup, but tend to get set once and never again.
novafunc
in reply to Mordikan • • •I like Fedora Atomic with bootc for this reason. While Nix language is quite confusing and gets even more confusing when you find online advice that has a different setup than you that introduces compatibilities, bootc is just an OCI containers that I can run bash commands in to get stuff set up.
It's still not one-to-one. Generally, I find that using bash to set things up makes more things easier than harder compared to Nix. Though Nix does make some stuff simpler.
That being said, I haven't tried NixOS in a while. I'm sure that with a decent LLMs, today its easier than ever to make a competent NixOS config. I've been meaning to try, but haven't found the time.
like this
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Lemmert
in reply to Trent • • •I run Silverblue on 2 devices (my main computer and laptop) for half a year. It works and I didn't have any major issues with it. Though as you might have experienced with other immutable distros, some things like configuring gdm might be a bit more work. But for most things there is a flatpak. The only software that couldn't be installed that wat was my vpn.
If you want to try out something new, NixOS or Guix might be more up your alley
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to Trent • • •All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.
I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.
yxc999
in reply to Trent • • •TerHu
in reply to Trent • • •