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They're the GOP lite in the way nicotine is arsenic lite.
Yeah, it may kill you eventually, but it's extremely not the same thing.
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Nah, the right time to criticize is after they win and before the next election. The alleged left of the US is seemingly more than happy to chill for three years until it's time to usher in a fascist again.
Where are the massive protests demanding reform of structural issues on year two of the term? I missed those. I remember protracted arguments about partial student debt relief for months, now it's back to "oh, crap, the electoral system is messed up".
I promise there are better tools to improve a decaying worldwide superpower than advocating for it to be run by a fascist nutcase. I would say you can learn from Argentina and the Netherlands' mistakes... but you already did Trump once. You know how this goes.
They're faking. Everybody knows after 35 "a group chat" is where your surviving family shares fascist memes.
So much. Yes. How do we all agree on this and yet it hasn't sunk in after twenty five years?
I mean, Blender got it. Be like Blender.
Gimp never even needed to be as robust as Photoshop. All anybody needs is a OSS alternative to casually touch up a photo every now and then if you aren't forced by life to be one of Adobe's hostages. Just give me a vaguely Photoshop-like thing with a semi-competent context aware filter that isn't physically painful to use. Kryta and others will pick up the slack for all the painting stuff.
I know I'm not the norm and this isn't going to change anytime soon, but I find the US-style customer service thing to be straight-up creepy.
The first few times I was in the US and a server or a reception desk person asked me how was my day in a cheerful way I was thrown all the way and actually answered, which then threw them and made me feel super self conscious. To this day when one of them approaches me that way at any point during the interaction I just wanna say "it's just me, you can stop that now, I just want a sandwich". It honestly makes the entire experience feel terrible to me. I kinda hate going out in anglo countries that do that.
I've even been to a few spots whose gimmick is "being rude to customers" as a gag and they're not rude, they're just acting like normal human beings who are at work and honestly it's much better. I don't need a man-servant, I just want to buy some food from you and for you to let me eat it there on the table because I don't have anywhere better to be right now. We don't have to make it into a whole thing.
LinkedIn was just as much of a destination for the Twitter exodus as Mastodon and they had been adjusting in that direction for a while beforehand.
LinkedIn is just Twitter for the most annoying people you know now. And that's saying a lot, because Twitter was already Twitter for the most annoying people you know before it became Twitter for the most annoying nazis you know.
I'd agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I'm a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it's very directly in their way.
Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn't use to work to work better.
A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.
To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn't try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal...
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I'm trying to provide a perspective on those.
I am always amused by how "Linux newbie" guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at "well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help".
Look, I'm not particularly new to Linux, but also don't daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I've ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they're trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.
I don't know if I agree.
A lot of of this article is in a very familiar tone for "are we the baddies" corporate employees, and it's less a deterioration of conditions than a realization of ongoing facts.
The language is everywhere. "We made data-driven decisions" is a big red flag for me, for instance. It often translates to "we obsessed over a maximizing a single data point because we confirmation-biased it into a justification for the thing we wanted to do". Real data driven decisions are called science, and nobody in corporations has the time to do actual science, outside of hard research funding, which is not the case of building a UX toolset.
Likewise for his passing defense of tracking cookies or the lack of firewalls between search and ads. And how telling is it that he at one point defines the essence of "don't be evil" as "long term success at the cost of short term losses". That's not what that means.
It really does sound like the culture had convinced itself that it was working for "the greater good" as a strategy for long term success, but you hear the same thing from a lot of other large corporations. It mostly sounds like what actually changed for this guy to dislike Google is management style and working conditions. Which hey, sure, it's a part of it. But not what lies at the core of the issues. If you take short term losses for long term success you're just a corporation with a long term plan for growth, not a nice corporation. It's techbro speak and the attitude that has driven startups through the entirety of the VC-dominated era of business.
The degradation we see in Google is not triggered by a change of ethos, it's the chickens coming home to roost now that tech businesses are switching from a focus on growth to a focus on profit as the tech business ecosystem matures and free money goes away for a while.
Well, I am now baffled about two pieces of content, so... that worked?
Look, I don't mind the link being up here. It's fine.
But if I had stumbled upon it I'd very much have noted somewhere that
a) you could play DOS games on the Deck since day one.
b) there are many ways to run DOSbox on Deck, including through Retroarch and emudeck
c) there are plenty of ways to buy and play DOS games legitimately that way, especially by purchasing GOG builds that come with the original DOS files as a bonus, and
d) that if the entire point of a product is to streamline the look and feel of the process to match Steam Big Picture/SteamOS but it requires a bunch of command line stuff in desktop mode maybe it's not ready for prime time, or at least not as much as EmuDeck is. But also,
e) there are probably much easier ways to get a third party browser to boot up on SteamOS and go to this place than doing all that, right?
I don't understand how this piece came together, why it's framed the way it is or what it's even trying to say. I do understand posting it, although maybe not for any of those reasons you list. I don't think I'm being elitist here, there are much, much easier ways to point people to ways of playing DOS games on the Deck that require less fiddling than this and the innovative bits aren't the ones being mentioned in the article, which just adds to the confusion.
On the other subject you bring up... I genuinely think that just engaging with this space in the way that makes more sense to you works better to generate new engagement than trying to game the system to promote people not going on Reddit. But then, I was never on Reddit in the first place and I do enjoy the 90s forum board feel of this iteration of it, so who knows.
This entire article is utterly baffling if you know anything at all about what they're talking about. What the absolute hell did I just read?
Who in the world celebrated that?
Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but... nobody did that.
The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.
Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it's Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don't begrudge people finding communities wherever. It's just... you know, come on.
Social media, mostly.
I'm obviously not Dutch, but can an English speaker around here break down to me in simple terms what this means for majorities looking forward? Not familiar with the inner workings of parliament in the Netherlands.
This. There is zero chance of creating change by voting for a third party selectively in a FPTP system.
Electoral systems are known to be extremely stable because all the power is in the hands of people who benefit from the current system, again by definition. Crucially, it doesn't matter WHO they are, if they won with this system, they are for this system.
To get electoral reform you need those who benefit to find it either ethically important or politically expedient to enact reform. Right now is actually a good time to start bringing up that issue, because one has to assume there is a growing realization in Democrats and at least a segment of semi-reasonable conservatives that the current system is exposed to very, very bad things in a short timeframe.
So if the US is going to get electoral reform done without going through the process of setting the country, and subsequently the planet, on fire you need a) a Dem in power, and b) a massive consensus and outright downpour of activist pressure for this on every level of government. Probably forever, seeing how the entire rest of the system is a mess, but baby steps.
Unfortunately if we've learned anything from Twitter and Reddit is that captive audiences are suuuuper captive.
But they're not doing any favors to the goal of stopping the bleeding towards TikTok that would have happened anyway, that's for sure.
I can't imagine anybody in the US would advocate for the nonsense in the OP above ruthlessly, relentlessly campaigning for this instead.
It's like they're cosplaying at politics.
How to make that relevant again: Get a time machine.
The fascists are already on the ballot, in case anybody missed that detail.
I swear, this stuff barely played back when it seemed like an idle concern of the politically inclined. Today it seems entirely detached from reality.
But hey, by all means, absolutely get the kind of reform that would make this make sense again. I want a world in which this thread doesn't feel like either disingenuous trolling, a conservative psyop or entirely delusional. I want a world where Americans can vote for multiple parties and get proper coalitions and stuff.
But seriously, until that point, just vote for whoever the Democrat is.
Also right wing extremist.
Not every time, but enough times that I just assume at this point.
I mean... maybe.
But then again only one of those is your choice.
I mean, not really, Biden did win a primary and he's the incumbent President. But even conceding the point, you get a choice between a couple of options. One of those is the guy that told people to drink bleach during a pandemic and has overtly stated he'll weaponize the US government to hunt down his political rivals.
They could run a rock and I'll still blame you personally if you collaborate with the rise of fascism. For the second time. With the same guy.
I genuinely can't believe we're gonna have to have this conversation for a whole year again. Americans are broken.