I mean this subtitle right here gave me a pretty good idea what’s this initiative is all about already, but that’s just me I guess

But what does that mean exactly? Fairphones with long support duration? Solar powered software developers?

I get a rough direction from that, but nothing else, but it’s a headline, that’s ok.

What really bugs me is that the body of the text doesn’t really explain it either, but needs hundreds of words for that. It’s just fluff for a press statement that should have fit into a tweet.

Also, keep in mind that people from different countries work on KDE, and English is not their first language, I don’t know what are your expectations… on how the writing should be…

Well, given that I’m from Germany and English is not my first language, and also given that I’m neither very good at it nor do I have a PR team, I would expect writing at least on my level, I guess?

But here’s the thing, take a look at Google or MS posts about sustainably and being green, and you’ll realize, truly realize how one could say so much without saying anything… this wall of text that you’re talking about is full of insights

And these companies are the benchmark? I mean, can’t we expect more from a nonprofit? There are some insights, yes, but they’re drowning in the wall of text.

Just as an insight for you: a news article is supposed to increase in detail level from top to bottom. The headline shows the rough topic, subtitle slightly expands on that, the first paragraphs tell the actual story, the next paragraphs provide more and more context. The idea is, that a reader can stop reading if she feels like there’s been enough context.

Look at the article here and ask yourself if it fits this description.

Why would I not say that?

Clearly they can’t get their point across. And I don’t know, why people down vote me for that.

KDE starts a new initiative, and does so by creating a giant wall of text that says very little about the initiative itself. So little in fact, that people here obviously don’t understand what they’re actually trying to do. That is bad communication. Simple as that. And given that this is not a random blog post, but a press statement, I’m pretty sure a bunch of people read it before publishing it.

I’m not sure, if you’re involved with the project, but if so: you really need to work on your communication.

You want hardware to last longer by providing software for it. That’s it. Great goal, but you don’t need half a bachelor’s thesis for that, and you also don’t need to tiptoe around the point.

Without fail, every Linux installation I had destroyed itself after a while.

Be it a full boot partition, some weird driver compatibility, etc, etc.

My Windows installations (granted, all work laptops) never destroyed themselves. Yes, some bugs here and there, but it worked well enough for home usage. You can’t discount that.

… And then something happens and they want you to install Windows again.

As much as I like Linux, compared to Windows and Mac OS it’s high maintenance. Once in a while, things will bork themselves. And you need to have at least a rough understanding of what’s happening to fix it.

Also (and that’s not a Linux problem per se) people seem to think if Windows breaks, MS or they themselves are at fault, if Linux breaks, that weird nerd and his hacker stuff are at fault.

What else am I missing?

The fact that 90% of people don’t give a removed about ads, privacy or their operating system in general. They want a machine to open a browser, that’s it. If Windows comes pre-installed, they’ll use Windows.

The only realistic chance we’ve got is that MS shoots itself in the foot once more by all that Recall crap and businesses drop Windows. But that’s a long shot.

Rather the wrong ones.

95% seem to be essentially professional box tickers. They don’t care about security, but only about process compliance. As long as the scanner finds no CVEs, the app is secure.

I want people who actually know, how I can improve my code. I’m pretty sure I screwed up security stuff, but will never know.

If hardware/budget allow it, you might want to throw in a cheap SSD and some more RAM. Something like 50€ could greatly improve usability.

500nits according to the store.

Ok, now I have to assume you’re trolling.

Look at my comments above, that they’re not the first is exactly my point. They re-invent things instead of investing a tenth of the effort in the existing solution and their solutions are worse.

And please don’t come with that corporate apologetics. You make it seem like a corporation never makes any errors whatsoever and even the stupidest error isn’t just stupidity, but corporate genius we mere mortals just don’t understand. That’s not the case. Canonical simply is not very good at this.

Yes, maybe they do have some products that do work and are actually better than the competition, but again, actually read my comments and you’ll see that I already covered that.

Seriously, are you paid by them?

You obviously don’t understand my point. If we want to flex, I have a combined CS/business degree, so I do understand the system quite well.

What canonical is doing is essentially a make or buy decision. Make our own solution or “buy” an existing one. Since in the foss world buying is almost free, you have to have good reasons to invest quite a lot of money into developing your own solution. Good reasons would be better technology, better integration into the existing ecosystem, lower costs, etc - or vendor lock-in.

Canonicals solutions are never better than what the community already agreed upon. They are not cheaper for Canonical, since they have to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They don’t integrate better, since the rest of the system is more or less vanilla Linux.

So the only remaining rationale would be vendor lock-in. Canonical wants its customers to build upon their products so that it can retain those customers easier. This might actually be a valid reason for snap. Canonical has kind of cornered the market here, but it’s definitely not true for Mir, Unity, etc. Those were doomed from the start and a huge waste of money.

You see, wasting money is not productive. It’s kind of the opposite.

They “think” that, but it’s definitely not the case.

Apart from the obvious vendor lock-in, their solutions were never the better approach from a technical or usability standpoint. Snaps aren’t that great, their Wayland competitor wasn’t particularly good, Unity was divisive. So they put tons of work into bad solutions for problems that have been solved elsewhere and better. Not the smartest business move.

I still need a cable modem. And as far as I know, none of the ones that can be used with my provider support any other OS.

Or, I keep using my Fritzbox, which is a single device and does everything I want.

As far as I know, there is no cable modem/router integrated device.

What’s the deal with / as tmpfs about? I’m so trying to understand nixos.

Then you’re still looking at a mess of devices and a relatively power hungry system plus you still have your ISPs modem

I need my Internet for work, so I just replaced my ISPs modem with a FritzBox, which is not ideal, but serves me well, gets updates for quite a while and works pretty much always.

Dell Precision, HP Probook for example. There are probably more, but these are the ones that I know of.

Honestly, the value proposition of old business computers is almost unbeatable.

Yes, it’s not the most recent hardware, but decent enough, especially the chonky boi ThinkPads are very easy to repair/upgrade and built like tanks (though only Russian ones, they barely withstand an RPG hit, which is a shame).

How about Chromebooks?

You can put Linux on most of them and they’re perfectly capable of (even designed for) running Chrome and Firefox.

I already tried that using virtual machine manager, I can see the “bios screen” and the blinking cursor after “booting from disk”, but that’s it.

So there is nothing happening, at least vm manager doesn’t even register any RAM usage, just one core at 100%.