cabbage

I’m so tired of open source developers being treated like public persons of whom relentless criticism for any character flaw, big or small, is fully justified. I’ve been guilty of this as well.

We’re talking about a bunch of highly qualified nerds who have decided to give away their work for free. Of course many of them will have some quirks. Everybody has bad days, and on the internet a few moments of weakness will haunt you forever.

It’s of course worth keeping the questionable things in mind, but the FOSS community also needs to get better at letting people enjoy things. Most of us are only human.

I think the user you responded to misread “piracy” for “privacy”. I did too at first.

Can’t rally add anything helpful, except that if I were to do piracy I would want privacy. The way the wind is blowing it’s a matter of time before windows starts snitching on its users.

You’d think this was a safe prediction, yet here we are.

Cool! I always love keeping up with GIMP, thanks for working on it!

Apparently it was added in GIMP in 1999 to sample that bitmaps could be used as brushes, and nobody bothered to remove it. At this point I guess there would be an outrage if they did.

They have been on Mastodon for many years already. As for why it takes so long to leave Twitter I guess it’s the same reason as everyone else - giving up on reaching the people there seems like a big loss to some.

Yeah, I think it’s reasonably run and invite-only now, so the ban should probably be lifted. @[email protected] , something to consider? :)

Yeah, they are looking for “early twitter”, without reflecting too much on why “early twitter” that they loved turned into what it is today. I think many are forgetting that it took a turn for the worse long before Musk bought it.

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.

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.