I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.

But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”

I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.

That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the ‘extreme views’ based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.

For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s what happened:

• The build documentation for this unreleased pre-beta software used the pronoun ‘he’.
• Someone suggested that they change it to be more inclusive.
• The author didn’t think it was important enough to change, so left it.
• More requests and pressure came to change the pronoun.
• The pronoun was then changed, and the author apologised.

To me, that’s a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.

How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We’re talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word ‘he’ existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I’m honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It’s just too disproportionate.

[edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don’t think the ‘he’ in the docs thing is anything at all.

Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.

So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.

You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do.

Sure. I agree with that. But I think you’re seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.

I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I’d be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.

So I don’t think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.

In which case average Joe needs people like us to push back against coercive bullshit so that it doesn’t become entrenched.

Meh. Lemmy is a fairly small community of people who know at least enough about computer and software that they’re willing to push away from main-stream sites like Reddit. It seems kind of obvious that those same people would also be inclined to push away from Windows.

I wouldn’t call it a ‘hard-on’. It’s just a kind of obvious correlation of people’s interests. And no, it’s nothing like 1/3 of the posts. It’s just that you only think about linux when you’re reading one of those posts, and so you only think to mentally tally the posts when you’re actually reading one. It’s a kind of cognitive bias. You could easily check this by just looking at the first few pages of ‘all’ right now. There’s almost no posts about linux there at all.

I use Linux on my home computer, and Windows on my work computer (begrudgingly).

Windows 11 does not feel like an ‘upgrade’ at all. One obvious downgrade is that when I try to change the settings when printing a document, the settings window does not fit on the screen. … I don’t blame Windows for that - its a big settings Window. But the issue is that Windows doesn’t allow me resize it, or scroll down on it, or even let me drag it partially of the screen. And so the result is that it is impossible for me to click the ‘ok’ button when I’m done. The only way to save my changes is if I memorise which button is ok, then press ‘tab’ the exact right number of times to have it select the ok button while I can’t see it, and then press enter. That’s pretty crap. I didn’t have that problem on windows 10. (To be honest I don’t remember exactly what was different. Certainly the window with all the settings was the same, but I believe it had a scroll bar, maybe? In any case, I could certainly press the ok button before ‘upgrading’!)

There are so many annoying features in Windows 11 that I’ve spent ages trying to turn off. For example, I was happy with the way windows could be snapped to the top and to the sides of the screen in windows 10. In Windows 11 they’ve expanded that feature, but made it worse. The snapping brings up menus, and behaves different ways at different times. It’s fiddly and harder to predict. It tries to do more, but ends up being less useful because it is unreliable. I’ve disabled most of the differences in the settings, but not all can be disabled.

And there are heaps of weird inconsistencies in Windows 11. For example, when I rename a file in file explore; often stays in the same places even though it is no longer in the correct file order with the new name. So with alphabetically ordered files, there are often a few things that are out of order - because Windows is inconsistent. (Closing and reopening reorders them.) There are also some weird glitches. For example, I often see graphical glitches while using Excel in Windows 11 which I never saw in Windows 10. Things like rows partially overlapping other rows after scrolling, or the outline of the selected cell sometimes not being visible in parts of the document until you minimise and restore the app. It’s pretty bogus. Obviously they’ve tried to change some backend stuff and created some bugs in the process.

Anyway, the point is that it easy to see why someone would be reluctant to ‘upgrade’ to Windows 11.

I also have dual-boot with Mint, because I expected to be using Windows for gaming. It turns out I have never needed to. Every game I’ve wanted to play has worked on Linux; and so my Windows partition has just sat idle.

I get by alright without a smart phone. Over the years I’ve seen more and more “just scan this QR code to do such-and-such”, and I ignore them. I think you’re right that it is a lot of added friction compared to using a phone. A lot of stuff is instantly at your fingertips with your phone.

But to be honest, I really truly think that a bit of friction is a good thing. Without it, we just slide helplessly into oblivion. Or, less metaphorically speaking, the friction turns an automatic decision into a deliberate one. The friction pushes people to think about their actions and choices a little bit. And that’s generally a good thing - even if its a little bit harder.

<insert "GNU + Linux" copypasta here>

Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.

Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.

It’s not so much an aversion to algorithms as it is a version to corporate controlled algorithms (which are often targeting highly questionable metrics).

So what you’re saying is that if we just keep switching to different data sources, we could get above 50% in less than two months!