Spyke

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linux

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Microsoft causes learned helplessness

This feels like a bit of a sideways take. I'll preface this with that I love Linux, and its been my preferred operating system for years.

That being said, "helplessness" isn't Microsoft's fault. Most people do not want to know the ins-and-outs of how something works, and that's perfectly okay. I am a software developer, but despite the fact that I have an Android (Pixel) phone I generally do not care to root my phone, flash alternative ROMs, etc anymore. I use Linux on my PC, but I do not want to spend hours tinkering with my phone, only for it to most likely end up in a state that is less-than-par than what it came with. I am glad that Android is open enough (well, its not as cut-and-dry as that but its more open than iOS) for the people who do want to tinker around with it to be able to do so, but its not for me. If I'm out and trying to request an Uber, I don't want my phone to crash every time I open the app just because the ROM I'm using has a bug.

By the same token, there are times where I don't really want to mess around with going through a million settings on my PC when I just need it to allow me to do some work. That is a trade-off that you tend to make with Linux (though its certainly gotten a lot better over the years), and I can't fault people for not wanting to go through that. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't made that trade-off and had just stayed blind to the love/hate relationship I've come to form around Linux.

I do not want to tinker around with my keyboard, I just want it to allow me to type. I don't want to tinker around with my headphones, I just want to listen to music. I use my refrigerator every day, and while I have some rudimentary understanding of how it works, I really rather not tinker around with it - and if it stops working, you're not likely to find me trying to fix it myself (short of say, the light bulb going out).

A coworker of mine convinced another coworker to wipe their system and install Fedora, and use the Looking Glass + VFIO passthrough trick to have a Windows VM within Linux like he does. He spent both of his days off trying to get it to work (and facing weird issues that even I couldn't explain and find a solution for), and at the end of today he decided to reinstall Windows so that tomorrow he can have something reliable to use for work. This is exactly why I usually don't push people to use Linux. If they want to know more about it, sure I'm happy to show them the ropes - but selling it as a perfect solution is a bad idea and only makes Linux look bad.

If Microsoft didn't make an operating system that was simple enough for users who just want things to work, yet powerful enough for those who want to do more with it (such as making games, or using CAD software for engineering) then someone else would. I definitely get frustrated with Windows, but at the end of the day, it is what most of the world uses for a reason (just like Linux is used for most web servers around the world for a reason) - its the right tool for their job, whatever that job might be. Sure, the vague error codes that you get from Windows is frustrating at times, but Windows isn't open source and that is not likely to change. How is the old XP error code format of STOP CODE 0X003ABF VIOLATION OCCURRED AT KERNEL.DLL (along with the rest of the useless stack trace) going to help you anymore than the shorter ones that are generally found on Windows nowadays? You can't exactly go submit a pull request to fix the issue. In terms of the ability to search for the error, I've very rarely ever seen a Windows error code that didn't have a million and one causes (and ^2 the amount of potential "solutions" for the supposed cause). It's certainly not going someone whose just trying to do their homework for school, or edit their resume for job applications.

The same thing applies to the whole iOS vs Android debate. The same coworker who sold Linux to my other coworker uses an iPhone (actually, they both do as far as I'm aware), because its been reliable for him. He doesn't need to have the source code to iOS in order for it to do what he needs it to do. Quite frankly, the whole "sheeple" thing that you tend to hear people say, and this "Windows users are zombies" take being portrayed in this comment is incredibly childish. If you're not sharing the computer, the phone, etc and someone else owns it - why does it matter what they use?

I suppose you could argue that the majority of people these days don't want to troubleshoot anything, but can you really blame them? Imagine yourself before anything that you learnt about Linux, Windows, and computers in general - with the way things are built (think laptops and phones, with how their components tend to be soldered in) doing anything yourself to repair stuff is very difficult, and has a high chance of leaving you with a brick (which isn't a Microsoft invention). How many people have you seen try to fix a software related issue on their PC or phone, and ended up making the issue worse (which can be done just as easily, if not easier, on Linux)? Those stories are why a lot of people do not want to try to fix something and reach out to support, take it in for repair, replace it, etc.

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What UI design trend do you hate the most?

Websites that do not let me copy/paste my password in from my password manager, and break the auto-fill functionality.

Additionally, the ones that make you change the password every sixty days because they don't let me copy and paste the newly generated one in... It just feels like they're begging me to try to use an insecure one.

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Question about Vaultwarden

The Bitwarden clients all keep a cached copy of your password database, which can be viewed even if your server goes offline (you just can't make edits) - you can even export it when that is the case.

However, if you log out of Bitwarden, it erases the local cache off that device, which will require your server to be online in order to retrieve again (or export it from a different device that is still signed in).

games

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Unity: disappointed at how removal ToS has been framed. We removed it way before the pricing change was announced not because we didn't want people to see it.

LOL

We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were so low, not because we didn't want people to see it.

(emphasis theirs)

I don't believe that in the slightest. While yes, they did do that quite a while before the change took place, it was hosted there as an easy way to track changes to the ToS. I bet it was more of a "Any changes we make will stand out a lot more", not realizing that any big change they make was going to stand out regardless (this whole thing being an example).

I mean come on, they could've at least tried with a better lie. I would've gone "Eh, maybe" if they'd said something like "Our legal team suggested that we keep it hosted in a central location, on our website". But really, "not enough people looked at it"?? What a joke.

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Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

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This is such a ridiculous position.

I'm not the original person you responded to, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I disagree. While I personally do not think that all Chromium browsers (especially since there are projects like ungoogled-chromium) transmit your personal data, I can't verify this myself because the Chromium codebase is far too much of an undertaking for myself to review.

While the same is also true for Firefox (and really any potential open source browser), on a pure personal-trust factor I trust Mozilla/Firefox to be more caring about protecting my personal data than I do Google, who literally revolves around data collection. Inevitably its a moot point for me since I do use Google services anyways, but I don't think its that far reaching for someone who potentially doesn't to take the original person's stance.

linux

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Share your best DE tricks, shortcuts and apps youve found!

I posted about this on the KDE community a couple of weeks ago, but Dolphin (their file manager) has a nice trick for archives (zips, tar's, etc) - in the extract menu, there's an "Extract, Autodetect Subfolder" button which will:

  • If the archive has an inner subfolder (and just that), it will extract this as expected
  • If the archive doesn't have an inner subfolder, and all the files are at the root level, it will create a new folder for you and extract the files there

This way, you don't end up with files splattered all over say, your downloads folder. Easily one of my favorite features, and is something I wish every File Manager had. It feels like someone had the same pain that I do (and I'm sure plenty others) of extracting something, and regretting it - but then they went as far as to fix the problem for everyone and implemented a feature for it (I'd love to have the knowledge to contribute to KDE someday)!

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Can you filter out posts on Lemmy that are in languages other than one you speak?

In your settings, you can set your preferred languages - since you're on lemmy.world this link should take you there. You can hold control down to select multiple options if you're on desktop (and mobile should have a selection box pop up).

Though be sure to keep "undetermined" enabled, otherwise a lot of stuff will vanish. Also note that this only works for posts/comments where people have actually selected the correct language (if someone posts something in German, but marks it as English for example, it will still pop up).

memes

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Life is tough as a Lemmy admin... 🥲

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I believe they work on Lemmy full time, and earn money from a grant - which I think is tied to them implementing certain features if I'm remembering things correctly.

That being said, I do hope that all of this isn't killing their interest in Lemmy...

linux

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NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux Graphics Driver Is Out with Wayland Improvements, More

I tried out the beta version of 545 last week, I swear it made the render issue with XWayland apps worse. Even if it's back to the 535 state, it still makes using Wayland on Nvidia very difficult unless every application you plan to use is Wayland native. It'll be a while before that's the case for me.

I plan to just pick up a 6700 XT next week. I'm tired of being a second class citizen in Nvidia's eyes.

That being said, I appreciate the devs themselves who've been working on improving what they can (there's a couple that I've even seen participating in the Freedesktop GitLab). I assume the lackluster Linux support comes from the management side of things. I may not like the company, but I obviously don't have disdain for every single person there.

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Is Lemmy THE reddit alternative for you? Are you thinking about moving somewhere else?

I'd say it is for me, I feel like I'm invested in Lemmy's potential for growth, and it being based on ActivityPub makes it the one I want to stick with in comparison to some of the others.

People seem really pleasant here which is a nice change from Reddit, it certainly feels like there are less trolls (for now at least).

Lemmy is getting better day by day, 0.18.1 seems to be fantastic and has smoothed out a lot of the rough edges that I was seeing, and not to mention we're getting quite a circle of various apps for both Android and iOS, along with some alternative web-based frontends as well!