Spyke

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Your PC will thank you...

Am I the only one who never promotes Linux?

I'm currently holding an opinion that everyone who can enjoy Linux will eventually try it on their own.

I think, despite what many people say, an average user still has a very rough time using it, and in my opinion you need some level of nerdiness in order to overcome adaptation pains, and such people already use internet in a nerdy way and will try out Linux on their own eventually.

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12-Year-Old Spends Entire Hiking Trip Fantasizing About Which Video Game He’ll Play When He Gets Home

I've used to do semi-competitive swimming as a child. Honestly one of the worst (as in boring, great for health and fixed my scoliosis) types of sport to do for an agitated child who wants to explore the world.

For an hour and a half you do laps while staring at the tiles on the bottom of your olympic pool. Would spend the entire time memorizing every crack on the tiles as well as doing entire video game playthroughs in my head lol

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Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative

The problem I see with federated wikis is potential creation of echo chambers. Current Wikipedia is often a political tug-of-war between different ideological crowds. For instance, on Russian Wikipedia, Russian Civil War article is an infamous point of struggle between communist and monarchist sympathizers, who often have to settle at something resembling a compromise.

If both sides had their own wikis, each would have very biased interpretation of events. A person who identifies as either communist or monarchist would visit only the corresponding wiki, only seeing narrative that fits into their current world view, never being exposed to opposing opinions.

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Hot take

Not a hot take, I keep saying the same thing in different threads. I was not able to switch to Linux for years before I understood that I have problems with Gnome not with Linux itself, tried KDE and given I was migrating from Windows it clicked immediately.

After you gain some experience, DE becomes mostly irrelevant, but it is crucial for starting off in an unfamiliar environment.

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Your PC will thank you...

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Yeah, that's the thing. Two categories of users can properly enjoy Linux (in my opinion):

  • Technically advanced users who can figure out a lot on their own
  • Technically illiterate users ("Show me where to click to get to Facebook")

While average users are the ones to suffer. They are technically picky enough to require more advanced features than "click to open Google", but not nerdy enough to spend hours reading stack overflow to make something they need work.

Most average users will be actively displeased that their settings menu is now different and confusing, office tools have slightly different UI, and some specialized software is missing.

Average user does not spend hours learning GIMP, they blame Linux for not having Photoshop and quit. Sad but true

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FLOSS communities right now

While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.

Discord's main problems:

  • Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
  • Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support

However alternatives we have are not ideal either:

  1. Old-school web forums
    • Great for info archival / organized tech support
    • Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what's new
    • Due to slower pace of communication, it's harder to just log in and "hang out" with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.

  1. FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that's what most use)
    • Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
    • Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it's a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There's often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
    • it's FOSS and Private, though

Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive

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What eternity feels like

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I've recently had so many random freezes of the system, hangs on shutdown, panics on shutdown, freezes in system updates, that hard reset became a thing I did several times a day. Yet there were no systemd logs, nothing in dmesg, literally zero information on what happened.

I was skeptical in blaming Nvidia because at this point it became a Linux chiche, but then I started to switch to integrated graphics (disabling dGPU) and all of the problems miraculously went away.

linux

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Firefox Devs Working on Tab Previews

I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.

Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.

However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.