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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • I haven’t read through the other responses in the thread, but I don’t think it’s the slightly old software that’s the problem. I think it has more to do with using older kernels, meaning that the latest hardware won’t always be supported (on the stable branch at least - there’s always testing and unstable too of course which may have better hardware support).

    That may have changed with recent releases though - I haven’t used Debian for several years now. But if your hardware is supported then it’s a pretty solid choice.

    Some other people sometimes mention that Debian isn’t as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint, but my experiences have been similar to yours - I found Debian to more user-friendly than Ubuntu for example. Assuming that the hardware works of course - if it doesn’t then it obviously is a worse choice.


  • I also don’t get why they seem to be popular with people who like to act scientific, because they seem very unscientific to me.

    They absolutely are. And it’s very aggravating to see people immediately invoking it without a second thought. They just assume it to be some absolute universal truth that should be accepted without question. But why?? How is that any different from religion at that point?


  • I utterly loathe Hanlon’s razor. It’s peak naivete, especially when it’s applied to groups of people that have ulterior motives - like business interests. It essentially gives companies a carte blanche to do evil shit, and when they get caught, all they have to do is blush and say “oops, how could that have possibly happened???!” But in reality, they were just doing some sort of self-serving behavior and hoping they could get away with it. And of course, they’ll just end up doing it again a few months or years later on when the attention has died away.

    Moral of the story: Hanlon’s razor does not apply to corporations or other business interests. If it’s your neighbors, well maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. If it’s a multinational conglomerate, hell no, fuck that. Assume guilt 100% of the time.




  • The whole notion of CSDs is a blueprint example of what happens when UI designers try to think things through too hard. They come up with grand solutions to trivial problems that are so poorly thought through that they create even bigger problems.

    Realistically, nobody is going rewrite their entire application just because of what a tiny cabal of Gnome developers think. Just read this post that was linked elsewhere in this thread. At the end, Tobias is basically arguing that people should go out there and harass the developers of all Linux desktop applications (including the entire KDE project!) to follow through on this ridiculous idea:

    Thus, our goal is for as many apps as possible to have the following properites [sic]

    • No title bar
    • Native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons
    • Respects the setting for showing/hiding minimize and maximize
    • Respects the setting for buttons to be on the left/right side of the window

    Which apps are affected? Basically, all applications not using GTK3 (and a few that do use GTK3). That includes GTK2, Qt, and Electron apps.

    If that alone doesn’t alert people of how out-of-touch the Gnome developers are, then I don’t know what would.








  • It’s called tivoization and started with a device called “Tivo” which was the first of its kind to attempt this procedure.

    There are probably lots of hardware devices in your house that use GPL software but prevent you from actually modifying it because the hardware will refuse to run modified copies. If a piece of software is licensed GPLv3, it would violate the license terms to do something like this.




  • The number-one frustration, cited by 45% of respondents, is dealing with “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite,” which often makes debugging more time-consuming. In fact, 66% of developers say they are spending more time fixing “almost-right” AI-generated code.

    Not surprising at all. When you write code, you’re actually thinking about it. And that’s valuable context when you’re debugging. When you just blindly follow snippets you got from some random other place, you’re not thinking about it and you don’t have that context.

    So it’s easy to see how this could lead to a net productivity loss. Spend more time writing it yourself and less time debugging, or let something else write it for you quickly, but spend a lot of time debugging. And on top of it all, no consideration of edge cases and valuable design requirement context can also get lost too.



  • Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”

    Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.

    So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.