On Android, there's Newpipe which doesn't run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.
On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won't work on other Unixes.
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.
But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
I have had pretty good luck with this actually. You can get e.g. Matlab for Linux no problem, and even weird company-specific tools I want I usually find to be available. But then I guess most of the commercial software I want to use is software for people like me. I don't bother trying to use e.g. MS Office even on platforms it runs on, I don't do professional CAD, I don't do professional graphic design.
I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I'm not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn't there though.
Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?
I wouldn't really recommend IPFS for this. It's tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn't really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you'd have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you'd have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won't do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).
I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it's "basically all websockets for some reason", and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think "this is why you don't use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request" and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.
I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn't themselves Turing-complete.
Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user's ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.
Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don't actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.
Hello I am writing the firmware for MotherBoard 2021, a definitely completely different product than MotherBoard 2020, I am going to ship in in 2 weeks for Christmas, and I am going to write an image decoder on top of bare metal, and it is "not" going to let you hack the pants off the computer.
But if "You can fork it and do whatever, even remove the “please donate” thing, but if you distribute any spy/malware versions they have legal avenues to force it to get taken down", that sounds like open source to me? You can indeed modify and redistribute it in almost any way you would like!
Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don't really surface that anymore I guess?
They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.
We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.
On Android, there's Newpipe which doesn't run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.