• 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of “thank yous” is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

    I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?


  • I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

    When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

    Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

    I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.


  • I worked at a sandwich shop and had given my two weeks notice a few days earlier. My manager came to me and asked me to clean up the bathroom…alright. I could smell it before I even opened the door.

    I told my manager I’d clean it if he’d still give me the employee discount after I was gone. “Done”. That’s when I knew it was really bad.

    When I opened the door I discovered someone had ass-blasted the bathroom. I’m not talking about blowing up the toilet, they did that too, but they had dropped their drawers and point-blank diarhea shotgunned the pipes under the sink.

    My manager didn’t honor the employee discount after I was gone, either.




  • You’ve listed a lot of good reasons why open-source for business isn’t used more frequently, and they’re all consistent with my experience as well. Are you familiar with any consulting companies / vendors who DO advocate open-source solutions?

    I’ve been considering starting a FOSS MSP / FOSS B2B consulting firm, but I’ve consistently come to the same conclusion that the tech industry and business culture here are almost innoculated against open-source. If you know any firms that DO recommend open-source solutions I’d love to check them out.


  • Karl Marx was a philosopher and economist. He wanted to understand class relations and social conflict, so he developed theories to explain why things are the way they are. A Marxist uses Marx’s theories to understand why the world is the way it is.

    Marx had a lot of theories, such as historical materialism - that all history was primarily motivated by socio-economic forces, not supernatural forces or grand conspiracy. Marx wrote that the dominate socio-economic system running the world in his time was capitalism/imperialism which fueled capital accumulation through exploitation and alienation, and used technology to further this process with imperialist wars for resources etc… He also focused on class struggle between those with the most resources, and those with the fewest resources - the bourgeoisie (capitalists) vs. the proletariat (workers/peasants).

    Marx went further than trying to explain why the world is the way it is, he also theorized on how humanity could replace the dominate socio-economic system, and what a non-exploitative non-alienating socio-economic system might look like. “Marxist” refers to anyone who believes Marx’s theories are valid and uses them to understand the way things are.



  • Gnome provides a more consistent user experience because Gnome apps usually have fewer features and don’t offer many customization options by default. KDE apps usually have a lot of settings and customization options, but the user interface might be a little less intuitive or you may have to search in a settings menu to find what you’re looking for.

    In my experience Gnome is pretty, intuitive, and well integrated, but I tend to settle on KDE Plasma because KDE apps often have more advanced functionality and more options for configuration. If you’re the type who likes to explore device/app settings to configure things exactly how you want, then consider KDE Plasma. If you’d rather have a minimal but consistent experience out-of-the-box without any tinkering then Gnome is probably the better choice for you.


  • It is supposedly a personal moral failing every time someone drives too old, too tired, or too impaired, but if trains, busses, & walking were the default ways to get around then this chronic societal problem would diminish dramatically. For the vast majority of US citizens busses, trains, walking, biking, etc are not viable options because US infrastructure & city planning overwhelmingly neglects everything but the automobile.

    Incompetent driving is rooted in systemic failures, not personal moral ones.





  • The immutable Fedora releases, like Kinoite, have been the best development distros for me. Immutable Fedora releases come with Toolbox for making per-project containers, so you can have separate de-cluttered dev environments for each project. Toolbox containers are not isolated environments like virtual machines, so performance is on-par with bare-metal as well.

    I don’t know if Sliverblue or Kinoite is the right choice for your exact workflow, but if you’re looking for a Linux host that “just works” out of the box, has a trivial learning curve, and provides serious quality of life improvements then definitely look into Fedora Kinoite.




  • It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.

    There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?

    The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.


  • The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is “scheduled to replace” the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says “There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage”. The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it’s impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.

    Here’s a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.



  • All too often I think the discussion misses the fact that there is no alternative to driving for the vast majority of US citizens. Busses, trains, walking, biking, etc are not viable options because US infrastructure & city planning overwhelmingly neglects everything but the automobile.

    It is supposedly a personal moral failing every time someone drives too old, too tired, or too impaired, but if trains, busses, & walking were the default ways to get around then this chronic societal problem would diminish dramatically. Incompetent driving is rooted in systemic failures, not personal moral ones.