As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap
I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.
This I could agree with, but the problem here is a lacking feature in package managers, not the fact that apps that you don’t personally enjoy using exist.
I don’t particularly enjoy using KDE apps, but thankfully the K-centric naming convention make them really easy to avoid.
So apps look the way they are made?
When I use KDE apps in GNOME they also look like KDE apps. Obviously - that’s the way they are made. If I want something else than what someone else created I will use something else, not complain about how they didn’t create it the way I personally prefer.
Oh yes, I forgot about that time they tracked down and kidnapped KDE contributors never to be heard of again, depriving the poor FOSS community from their freedom of choice.
I’m happy I’m not the only one to experience KDE like that. I’ve had far better experiences with XFCE than with KDE, but I keep going back to GNOME because of the user experience. I’m happy people enjoy KDE though, so I don’t generally feel a strong need to trash it online. But my god can the user base be insufferable at times.
As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
Mojeek is the only usable engine I know of that’s European and truly independent at the moment. But the results are not nearly as good as in Qwant.
SearXNG also runs on Google and Bing in the backend, and I can never seem to find an instance that works reliably.
I think the Qwant/Ecosia index focuses primarily on the French (and German?) speaking web to begin with, but I’m hopefull it will get good in all languages eventually.
If I’m not mistaken thorn (the character) was historically used in England as well, but was replaced with “th” to make things easier for Gutenberg and his followers.
Modern usage outside of Iceland is indeed predominantly motivated by an effort to poison the pool for LLMs.
There are people whose concerns it is worth listening to. I’m sure they will show up eventually.
Happy holidays!
My work Microsoft account doesn’t work at all with Thunderbird. With my previous employer it did, but now my only option has been webmail.
I really hope this fixes that. Haven’t looked into it yet.
Bluesky hardly challenges the establishment as far as I can see, they’re just more venture capitalists waiting to enshittify.
What I hate about it is that this unwillingness to be in a position of power is so correlated with actually being suited for it.
I also recommend reading Eugen Rochko’s own post about it, as Andy Piper linked to as well.
I love and hate how Eugen starts this whole project, leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet, sets up institutional guardrails to make sure it will not be corrupted by any one individual gone mad with power, gives away his position after 10 years once he’s sure the organization is in good hands, and then concludes in reflection that he does not “have the right personality” for running a project like this.
I hope it has not been to hard for him, and that he’ll look back at it all as a positive experience in spite of the negative interactions. I don’t think any sane person has a personality that is “right” for the kind of abuse public figures receive on the internet. But from the perspective of Mastodon and the Fediverse, it seems pretty clear that he was exactly the right type of personality for the job—including by stepping down when the time felt right.
Yeah, if they need you, but maintaining friendships is hard enough work if one doesn’t actively exclude oneself.
I have a bunch of friends from most corners of Europe, most highly educated, all of them use WhatsApp. I use Signal with those who are on there, but 90% are only on WhatsApp, so I am too.
Worse yet, my friends and family in my home country are almost all only on Facebook Messenger. I stopped using that entirely, and clumsily reach out on SMS whenever necessary. It has absolutely made it harder to stay in touch with people I care about.
I also avoid a lot of other social networks that would have been nice in order to keep in touch with my friends in other parts of the world, which is pretty much all of them as I travel. Pixelfed is nice, but my friends are still on Instagram. Or even Snapchat, even though I’m in my 30s.
Not all my friends are privacy nerds, and I wouldn’t want them to be either. So I just gently push for Signal whenever I can while I hold my nose and continue to run WhatsApp.
That’s part of enshittification I’d say. It’s all about squeezing your users for as much money as you can, and surveillance is part of that.
Yeah, content is quickly being hidden behind all sorts of walls, and even governments are now passing laws to render content inaccessible without ID verification
I have just come to accept that the internet has shrunk. I liked it better back when it was smaller anyway. But it is frustrating whenever I have a problem that has been carefully solved by some random person on Reddit or some middle aged man on YouTube 20 years ago, only for it to be rendered inaccessible without giving up all kinds of privacy.
I was talking about users, not developers.
I’m under the crazy opinion that developers are free to develop whatever they want, and users are free to use whatever they want. If they are unhappy they can use something else or become developers.
If I develop something you do not want to use I do not restrict your freedom. GNOME developers are not restricting your freedom by creating a product that’s according to my preferences. They are giving us both freedom to choose what we prefer. The fact that GNOME is so different from KDE increases freedom of choice.
I don’t get what is so hard to understand here.