KDE’s Plasma and apps are getting pretty usable touch-modes. Like automatically increasing spacings even on flight when you flip a convertible, but not just that. I’m on opensuse leap 15.5, with plasma 5(.27?).
For the on screen keyboard… I use Maliit. I have built it locally, it was a pain. But it works. It has a layout for my relatively rare language, and it’s integrated with plasma enough that you can enable-disable its autopopup with the taskbar icon. It’s not super convenient because all the buttons are spread over the 12" screen, but better than having to flip back to laptop to use a keyboard when I don’t need to type too much.
On wayland it has problems. With some apps it works… for others I have disabled wayland and made the app run in xwayland with an envvar. If you are interested, I can help you set it up, it’s not too much work but the magic words to make it work are not that easy to find.
Don’t follow tutorials, understand them. I’m so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn’t take a file name as an argument.
The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they’re too lazy to setup a legit use case.
A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.
Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn’t bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.
I’m absolutely going to do my best to understand and not copy/paste without doing that. I don’t like doing things to my computer that I don’t know what is happening, so that makes sense to me! I already ran into that issue plenty of times with my servers, so I’m trying to go all in now.
I love the smiling chameleon (I always thought of it as a female chameleon named “Susie”, this is before I learned the actual pronunciation), I hope they don’t replace it with some lame reblanding.
But that’s why I give both the relative and direct link.
Lemmy hasn’t come up with a good implementation for that issue. They should.
There’s a third party thing that works well for Lemmy instances but I haven’t gotten in the habit of using it. There’s no good mobile plug in for it either so I doubt it will catch on.
It really should be implemented in the core of both Lemmy and Kbin to not need to think about direct vs relative links in the vast majority of cases. And it shouldn’t feel like a hassle when you want to. This is both possible and attainable, but neither projects’ devs are interested in implementing it for various reasons.
I’m not going to contribute to either project because I don’t particularly like what Kbin is trying to be (this is just a personal preference and interest thing) and I don’t particularly like how the Lemmy devs are approaching the architecture and development of Lemmy on a technical basis.
There’s going to be a replacement for the core of lemmy that will just function better and make front end UIs way easier to build and maintain. I’m excited to see it take shape.
Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
I love that Linux is everything that Microsoft is not. I love that I have full control of my hardware. I have control over processes. I have control over packages. And user control is the default.
I can already join a Linux PC to a domain and run VPN. I can easily transfer files. I’m good.
Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
That’s a good point. I feel like there would be a lot of suspicion or skepticism behind it
Technically speaking, OpenRC doesn’t really have any benefits in the real world, some people may claim faster boot times, but that’s debatable on modern hardware. In fact objectively, it’s inferior to systemd in many ways.
The real advantage though is that it’s pretty simple and easy to use, understand and maintain. It follows the Unix philosophy of “do one thing, and do it right”. People who like to have full understanding and fine control over their systems would prefer using OpenRC or similar init systems (with a mix-and-match of other utilities and daemons as per their need), instead of relying on a giant monolothic package like systemd which keeps getting bloated with more and more “unnecessary” features with each release.
Basically, you can say that it’s a difference of ideology.
Systemd is not monolithical, it just happens that it’s made of elements optimized to work well together, instead of running everything through different text parsers when “mixing and matching” random daemons.
I tried PopOS finally after many glowing reviews… and it was beautiful, snappy and had lots of unique features. But while it was very friendly, I had trouble finding my way around. I think still aimed at linux users who are a little more knowledgable. (Not me.)
I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.
Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
There are some opinions mascaraing as fact here and some not very evidence driven at that.
Linux is a beneficiary of great timing. The pre-cursor to FreeBSD, BSD 386, already existed and was much more mature when Linux appeared. The reason that Linux became popular was primarily that AT&T launched a lawsuit against BSD which made its legal status questionable during a critical few years. This was at the dawn of the Internet and the distribution and collaboration that enabled. By the time the lawsuit was resolved, Linux was massively more popular and BSD was left behind. Ironically, early Linux never faced early legal trouble as it was not taken seriously by UNIX players. The Linux lawsuits came later but, by then, Linux had major corporate backers ( see SCO vs IBM with IBM being the on the Linux side ).
Hell, Linus himself has said that he would never even have created Linux is Minix had been free ( meaning explicitly free as in beer, not as in freedom at the time ). In fact, Linus did not want to adopt the GPL at first because it allowed charging for the software.
One reason that Linux was able to advance so quickly ( or exist at all ) was the existence of GNU and especially GCC. I hate the amount of credit GNU tries to take for moderns Linux distros but there is no denying its importance in making Linux viable early on.
Today, Linux succeeds over BSD primarily because of the greater corporate interest. Apple does not really use the BSD kernel either.
These days, the most popular license used in typical Linux installs is MIT and permissively licensed software is more common than GPL. Some MIT communities, like the X Window Project, are decades old and represent strong trends away from corporate dominance and exploration over time. The vibrancy of all the Open Source communities cannot be explained in terms of the world-view expressed in the comment above. I do not have the numbers in front of me to support this but it is my own impression that permissively licensed software generally succeeds more often at creating sustainable communities. Or maybe it is just the FSF. While there are many successful GPL programs, fewer than 500 of them are GNU and there are almost as many abandoned GNU projects as there are active ones.
In my view, the most important GNU program by far is GCC. That evil Apple company you cite created LLVM / Clang and licensed it permissively. They did by far the most work on it and yet have it away. Today, other evil companies like Microsoft contribute to Clang / LLVM as well. LLVM is of course the basis for the Rust language, another corporate contribution. The lack of GPL here does not seem to have prevented any of this innovation, the massive contributions to the community, or collaboration between these giant corporate interests. This is just one example.
I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn’t even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it’s not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I’ve used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.
I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don’t know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn’t game.
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