Spyke

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Feature parity or get out

It's fucking weird people have such strong opinions about issues like X11 and systemd. They're meant to be working in the background away from the user, and that's exactly how I treat them. Actually systemd still provides some functions a user might have to interact with manually, for X11 I'm just baffled.

When I take an uber, I don't care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission.

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Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom – Purism

In Singapore, lots of boomers are downloading scam apps from facebook lured by promises of discounts and free gifts, handing out accessibility privileges, and they'll even argue vehemently against loved ones and bank staff when confronted. When it all inevitably blows up, they blame absolutely everyone except themselves, including praising Apple for some reason.

Being the largest voting block, they managed to get banks responsible for reimbursing their losses and there was even an idea floated of getting everyone to contribute to a shitty scam insurance fund. Many major banking apps are paranoid af and block usage from simple things like usb debugging turned on.

Absolutely stupidity. And there's nothing we can do about it when the politicians love them so much.

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"They just have to read the documentation"

NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it's a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.

Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.

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What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025?

Not at all. It's really hard to live without the practical features of a smartphone, like web browsing and maps. What I need is privacy, not to throw it all away for a dumbphone.

I believe a lot of the benefits you claim dumbphones provide are all caused by abandoning social media. There's nothing wrong with technology, it's just social media. You don't need to use a dumbphone just to escape social media.

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Japan Just Switched on Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant, Which Runs 24/7 on Nothing But Fresh Water and Seawater

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According to Japanese sources Mainichi, it is indeed treated waste water one one side and desalination brine on the other. Both the waste water and brine are meant to be dumped anyway, and it's also harmful to sea life to dump brine directly. Treated waste water isn't saline, so is perfect for diluting the brine. Might as well get some free power out of it.

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Breaking: Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions!

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They'll probably also release a new API to allow apps to check if user have enabled sideloading. Then overzealous apps like fucking mcdonalds will throw a hissy fit about it and refuse to work unless you turn it off. Also your bank too, just to really make it as hard as possible to include sideloaded apps. Sideloading will remain available, but so painful, most people just give up.

Just recently mcdonalds app stopped working when installed in a secondary profile. Long history of them trying to detect root hiding methods too. Fuck them. Once this sideload block thing arrives, mcdonalds would be the first to block it.

linux

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How can we make Linux more appealing as "just works"?

On top of being preinstalled, we also need google search-able instructions that avoid the terminal altogether. People are afraid of the terminal, it doesn't matter why, it just is.

Currently, most solutions to linux problems come in the form of terminal commands. We would have to start creating a whole new troubleshooting forum where instructions avoid the terminal and are just lists of buttons to press in a GUI. Probably helpful screenshots too.

Of course I have no idea if some things even have GUIs at all, like configuring user groups and permissions or firewall settings, someone would need to make them. Not to mention every DE or program would need a different set of instructions, GNOME or KDE, firewalld or iptables. It'll be a lot of work.

linux

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Distro suggestions for a dumb-dumb who only knows linux through meme osmosis

Go ahead with mint. It's the only distro I know with a fully featured setup wizard that holds your hand through the entire process. I am confident anyone who has used computers can use it.

But honestly, most modern distros are about as difficult as picking up an iOS/android phone for the first time. There are different ways of doing things, but they're still phones and can't be too different anyway. Same with mint, it's just a computer, it isn't all that different.

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Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions

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What if websites decide that chrome users earn much more ad revenue and start forcing users to switch with those "This website only supports Chrome" error messages? What if this practice gets popular? I'm sure there are ways to get around it, but the average users who bothered switching to Firefox at all, will just conclude that anything except chrome has a bad browsing experience.

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Immutable Distro Opinions

I heard both flatpak and immutability are obstacles to developers. How bad is it really?

I've had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should've been dead simple on other distros, I'm really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.

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Even PewDiePie thinks you should install Linux on your computer after saying he was "tortured by Windows"

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He has a degree in industrial engineering according to Wikipedia, logical thinking should come naturally to him. My high school decades ago teaches logic gates for it's computer literacy curriculum. He might not be a programmer, but probably has exposure to these topics in general education.

I mean no offence to you. But education departments these days assume "kids have phones and iPads and must be computer geniuses" and stop teaching general computer courses. That's a problem.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Can Nintendo request Google revoke authorization for emulator developers? Or publishers requesting revoking any of the hugely popular manga aggregator apps. Or maybe they'll just outright refuse them from the start, like they will with revanced.