• 0 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 1st, 2023

help-circle





  • Matrix I have doubts about. The idea of Tox was nicer, but the implementation quality and the scandal at some point didn’t help.

    Tox felt more playable, like piping files over it or a remote shell over it (I know, bad associations, but still), or even using it for VPN. I think there were clients allowing to do such stuff, and the protocol allows it.

    EDIT: I mean, it’s still alive, just don’t see it claiming the place of FOSS old Skype replacement as it did.

    GNUNet - all you people mentioning it have peers? I tried to set it up a few weeks ago, couldn’t get peers.

    Yggdrasil - feels cool.

    I2P - not intended for that, I think.




  • In Russian it’s called Вендекапец and is a bit like second coming.

    Maybe it’s not happening yet, but the bigger share it has, the faster it’ll grow.

    And MS and Apple have only themselves to blame.

    20 years ago, when the first Linux offensive happened, so to say, with Mandrake and a wave of Linux-native games and proprietary products, and IBM support, people would criticize Linux for having inconsistent chaotic UIs and experience. I was a Windows-only kid, so this is retrospective and people can correct me.

    Not sure if anybody remembers, but then you could find most of Windows’ important settings in one place, and it looked so polished and patient and relaxing, both 2000 and XP.

    Mac OS X was all about toys and shiny colors, but there was also the spirit of it being very polished and consistent and light and fresh.

    So - Linux can still be very usable. While both MacOS and Windows even look cheap, I wonder how they managed to achieve that. Even Gnome doesn’t look cheap despite desperately trying to imitate MacOS. Not even speaking about ergonomics.


  • Well, people blamed old (archaic, what it had when it was an Amiga program) UI for being hard to use, but the new one is even harder, so dunno.

    I touched Blender with the old UI somewhere in late 00s on Windows, managed to sculpt and render a few clumsy objects. I don’t remember how long it took, but it feels as if the new one took twice that for the same.

    EDIT: On the actual subject - yes, that too. I sometimes think that (moderate) positive inflation is not always better than deflation. It encourages a narrow way of thinking where we always stop at first local optimum. Say, MSO is cheaper right now than LO - then we choose MSO, period. Nobody thinks about finding a bigger optimum, because constant inflation psychologically encourages you to think that way. That’s just clumsy philosophy.






  • I’ve been thinking for some time what to answer and concluded that the normie world is a world of pain.

    We - as in FOSS OS users and FOSS paradigm users - desperately need open hardware, so that the rest of the industry could eat all the rubber dicks they want without affecting us significantly.

    And I mean not only hardware design, but fabs.

    It may seem an impossible future, with semiconductor deficit etc, and Taiwan being that important.

    And with starting a fab being so expensive.

    Still, they only way a conclusive FOSS victory resulting in even balance happens is if there is a public fab producing general-purpose hardware with public design.

    Because right now lots of resources are being wasted on catching up in inherently disadvantageous areas, like supporting proprietary hardware which is always harder for FOSS developers than for MS or Apple.

    Without full-chain FOSS hardware production it’ll always be bare survival.


  • What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”?

    I remember that it does too much, but without specifics. It’s been 4+ years since I touched Ubuntu.

    They used to be a little FOSS-only

    I vaguely remember that “Amazon lens” for Unity, I don’t think they ever were that much FOSS-only.

    No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives.

    It’s fine. That’d still be goal fulfilled.

    Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it.

    How so?

    There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

    I recently had a problem with LO, while editing a document with lots of math formulae - from time to time while adding a formula about half of others (in the whole document) would just become empty.

    Not sure something like that would happen under Apple suite’s analog of Word, whatever it’s called.

    It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both.

    With that I agree, somewhere in 2012 I somehow realized that it’s already much better than the alternatives, and yes, for a housewife’s desktop just as well, if one’s honest and thinks of their own needs.

    And if one’s comparing it to advertising of the competing commercial products, then it’s hopeless.



  • rottingleaf@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux reaches new high 3.82%
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.

    Can’t do that if you play games.

    Also that’s half of the reason Windows hasn’t lost the war on home desktop PCs yet. Another half is office applications.

    Actually, these are thirds.

    Another reason making me say so is that no major user-friendly distribution wants to be just that, they all have a particular madness with no good reason for it.

    So I don’t know what to recommend, there should be something off the top of my head, but that’d be “just install Debian, it’s fine”.

    So, any single reason of these going away would accelerate Linux adoption notably. Any two would make it a trend visible to housewives. And all three would resemble the flight of ICQ users to Skype.