Yup. I’ve heard this first about Home Assistant, but software like this often inadvertently acts like a pacifier for tech enthusiasts. We may have our neat solution for the moment and be content with that, but that doesn’t help anyone else, or us in the long term. Things will get worse with no push-back.
Disclaimer: That’s not to say that we shouldn’t advocate for those tools in the meantime as well. We just shouldn’t lose track of the actual problem.
Even if it’s only a thing that needs to be done once: Either the one-day delay has to go, or Google.
There’s nothing redeeming about their plans.
Fully agree on that. Always better to start fully fresh, even without such problems.
That said, it’s still important that it will ship pre-installed. That way app-developers who block GrapheneOS cannot excuse their actions anymore by saying that it was your decision to use another OS, and therefore not their problem.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
Even worse, those stats are also probably just a leftover from a giant spike coming from Singapore around that time:
That one eventually got cleaned up, although a lot of the spillover into other countries remains.
I did some math at the time, and it must’ve been about 1000 fake machines for every real one. And considering this was kept online for several weeks despite making news: Yes, stop using statcounter.
Depends. This happened at a German conference and I assume that this person is most likely German as well. Probably shouldn’t think about getting anywhere close to the US though.
There’s still the possibility of facing prosecution in Germany. Not sure how probable that is though.
Em dashes, weird quote marks are always a giveaway
In a random comment or blog? Sure. In a professionally proofread document? No, adding those might as well be part of the job description. After all, the LLMs picked also have to have picked that behaviour up from somewhere.
Anyway, OP should have included the source, but it can be found pretty easily: https://bsky.app/profile/sanders.senate.gov/post/3m7izwntr322z
What I don’t understand is why the person that owns the device wrote the following in their blog post:
How could a simple IP block disable a vacuum cleaner that is supposed to work offline as well? - Source
This seems like that device was sold to him as “offline” capable. Where does that claim even come from? From a cursory glance I don’t see that product advertised that way anywhere.
Now, I’d be totally in favor that such devices working offline should be the norm, but then again, the person writing the blog should know how these devices currently work.
Adding onto that, the app StreetComplete makes contributing stupidly easy. You basically get a bunch of quests generatef around you with missing or potentially outdated data that you can fill in by answering simple questions. Basically Pokemon Go, but infinitely more useful.
Oh please, stop the act, we can see your shitty referral link.
I do think those featues have become pretty common in PC gaming nowadays, which is why I’m more in favor of openSUSE as the beginner distro if I had to pick just one, but sure, let’s put that aside.
When it comes to Linux though I just don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all distro yet that I can safely recommend to everyone. And getting beginners onto a distro that fits them can greatly benefit their initial experience, so I think it’s worth it to give them a few simple choices. That said, you’re completely right that the way OP tries to explain the differences isn’t how you should do it. Ever. Less choices, less jargon, less mentions of fringe distros. It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.
Do you really want to recommend btrfs to beginners?
I mean, it’s the default on Fedora with all its spins, openSUSE, CachyOS and even SteamOS for its root partition.
So lots of people use it nowadays without even knowing.
Chiming in, I’ll say that I mostly agree with your points, except for one:
Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.
They won’t care about X11 vs Wayland, sure. A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works, and that’s where proper Wayland support becomes a must.
If you recommend someone a distro that can’t do those things and later have to tell them that they have to switch distros for that chances are high they’ll just go back to Windows.
What’s extra funny is that I already did all of this, and yet, I’ve been informed that my developer account is subject to deletion because I’m not active enough. Since my game does not get regular updates I said F this, let them delete my account. It’s still available for sideload on itch.io anyway. Jokes on me for believing that.
So yeah, it seems like Google is actively hostile towards building a library of software/games that just work and intentionally only wants live service garbage apps on their platform because those make more revenue.
Because it wasn’t mentioned, I’ll just note that Joplin has also has the option to sync with a dedicated server component.
While it doesn’t work in a P2P configuration like a Syncthing setup allows, I’d recommend it for anyone with access to a server.
This, so much. Looking back, it’s just insane that pretty much every program you don’t regularly use will beg for updates on Windows. There are some bandaids like WinGet now that I appreciate, but it’s still nowhere as seamless as when the OS and the whole ecosystem around it are designed with a package manager in mind.
A huge chunk of the time I have to spend on tinkering is probably already saved by me not having to wait for updates.
Mint is a fine distro, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that wants to do gaming right now either. None of the first class DEs are running on Wayland yet, which means that most monitor features of the last decade are not at all or badly supported.
I’d be wary of that fork. It’s run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn’t really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.
And they switched to a resolution one that can’t even Integer-scale, and, even worse, isn’t even the correct aspect ratio.
Personally, I’ve seen a few people doing similar things, and to me it’s always an indicator that the person needs to get their eyes checked. Any person with good eye sight or well adjusted glasses should immediately notice that the text actually becomes blurrier and harder to read despite the increased text size.
Exactly. This was less important before the internet got ubiquitous, but nowadays, when manufacturers can screw you remotely, it’s very important.
This kind of vertical integration, where a single entity controls both hardware and software shouldn’t exist.