kbity

That’s incredible. Certified “Directive #4” moment.

There’s even rumours that the next version of Windows is going to inject a bunch of AI buzzword stuff into the operating system. Like, how is that going to make the user experience any more intuitive? Sounds like you’re just going to have to fight an overconfident ChatGPT wannabe that thinks it knows what you want to do better than you do, every time you try opening a program or saving a document.

The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it’s constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software (for example, the Snap packaging system basically requires it). People joke that some day you won’t be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they’ve taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it’s ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system. People worry that some day, you won’t be able to run a Linux system that’s compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd.

Whether that’s a realistic worry or not I don’t know, and I don’t really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race (I’m using a systemd-based distro but that wasn’t a factor in my decision), but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.

Yeah, federated network things.

Did you read the article? Excerpts include:

Generally, in business, it is sensible to provide your customers with what they want. With Twitter, the meme-makers’ favourite billionaire is doing the opposite. The cyber-trucker is trying his best to cull his customer base.

Threads is what would happen if Twitter and Instagram made out in a bowling alley. It’s all their worst parts combined - but it may well succeed. Rocket-man Musk’s changes to Twitter have not exactly made it ‘brand friendly’. Threads, meanwhile, is shaping up to be a paradise for in-your-face brands - and the AdTech industry would love for you to join them

and

Threads’ naffness won’t stop its success. It’s data-scraping fluffily dressed up as substandard corporate twaddle. It’s a cringe-inducing privacy invasion. It’s not meant for users, but that doesn’t really matter: you’re not a user, you’re a product.

It’s describing Threads as a product not for users, but advertisers. The perfect brand-friendly non-place for companies to stick their marketing crap. That doesn’t really come across as a ringing endorsement to me.

Centralisation in this instance refers to control over the network and standard itself rather than control over what’s posted on it. There’s no single authority that can unilaterally change how every Fediverse instance and system works - for example, there isn’t anyone who can decree that from now on Lemmy will no longer allow connections from Canada, or that nobody is allowed to post pictures of capybaras any more.

It’s intended to prevent a /u/spez or Elon Musk situation where one asshole can bring down the entire ecosystem built around an API. Nothing stops anyone else from hosting their own instance if they dislike lemmy.world, whereas if you don’t like Twitter, you can’t just host your own copy of it.

Meanwhile, it will insist on showing you awful recommendations from channels you have never watched no matter how long you ignore them or how many times you click “not interested”.

Granted, I think there is an important distinction between the two. I’d call stuff like Discord and Snapchat “social media”, in they’re mediums with “Web 2.0” socialisation elements, but not Facebook/Twitter/Friends Reunited sorts of things like “social networks” tend to be.

Well, you’re paying for all that performance, might as well get as much out of it as possible. God knows Snaps or Windows 11 can sometimes drag even the best hardware down to a crawl.

Because the last decade has shown the rather terrible consequences of private, proprietary and profit-driven networks like Twitter and Meta’s various crap becoming de facto part of the common infrastructure of public life. A lot of public transit services publish service updates on Twitter. Most politicians have a Twitter presence. Many restaurants and small businesses don’t even have websites anymore - just Facebook pages.

We want to stop exploitative for-profit entities from furthering their stranglehold on essential parts of everyday life. Nobody should be forced against their will to use crap like Facebook or Twitter, and that means advancing viable alternatives to those platforms that can fill the role they do in the internet era. If the “digital town square” idea is to live on, it should be as a commons like an actual town square, not a publicly-traded company or a billionaire’s personal cult compound.

The users Facebook deserves. Zuck can keep them, somehow I think we’ll do just fine without these outrage-farming reactionaries.

If you want one for your phone, Feedly is pretty good. On desktop, I use Liferea.

Seconding Liferea.

For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton’s contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.