TheFriendlyArtificer

joined 1 year ago
[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The term, "enshitification" is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn't you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that's not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That's right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don't worry your pretty little head off. We know what's best.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 9 points 11 months ago

I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I'm trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don't know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.

Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can't maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.

They've spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can't even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it's a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.

And let's not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it's consistently returning better results than big G.

If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Speaking as a non Rustacean, I'm pretty okay with it becoming more integrated.

It's safe, performant, and isn't any more difficult to pick up than C++. C has a weird aura about it that makes it seem intimidating despite the fact that it is the simplest language (macros notwithstanding) that I've ever used.

Based on Google's recent track record of mind-boggling incompetence on all fronts, I want Go kept as far away from core functionality as humanly possible. This leaves either adding more cruft to an already ungainly C++, continuing to use Boost (another Google product) with C, or to pivot to a more modern language.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Same!

I'm an atheist. But I'd be willing to listen to any door to door Jesus salesman who talked about the salvation of bigfoots.

Plus, if you're planning on using Wayland with any wlroots compositor, Nvidia is essentially a non-starter.