Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn’t available in all countries so it’s sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren’t really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn’t have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it’s hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It’s very frustrating.

A lot of open source software is kind of ridiculous to many people. Why would you want to reverse engineer some proprietary device? Just choose one that is more open. It isn’t just about the challenge. It is also about extending freedom to do stuff as many places as possible. I might not want age verification in my operating system as its just another way to fingerprint me by big tech. And I probably won’t have it enabled or exposed. But having the option allows people to participate in the shitty, spying. predatory, manipulative, commercial hellscape version of the Internet which is increasingly facing regulation around the world. That is a freedom. Not a freedom I want but a freedom someone wants. It means they are not legally forced to use Microsoft or Apple to give all their data to the NSA and big predatory businesses.

Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.

I think we have been taught from birth that we can and should have it all. The most expensive car, the biggest house, the most powerful phone. It is a lie and its becoming increasingly unattainable for more people. It is pure consumerism and doesn’t make anyone happier. In truth people are lucky to have any sort of home which is a fucking travesty and an indictment on our society and politics. A 3 year old phone is still a phone. In a city you often don’t need a car at all, certainly you don’t need a lease for a massive truck that consumes all your income.

Windows has more and better software available than Linux (most free and open source software also runs on Windows). Most people don’t need it. Downscale your life and be happy.

All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I’m not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.

I think a lot of gear will be server/AI specific and won’t run in peoples home computers. GPUs with no graphics driver support, no video output etc. Some memory finding itself into HBM modules instead of DDR5. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have an agreement with the semiconductor cartels to crush it all so it doesn’t land in the consumer market.

Massive opportunity cost. People will say that could have been spent on social programs and I agree but realistically that can’t happen until voters stop being manipulated sheeple and wake the fuck up. Which in the USA is never. Brainwashed and neutered.

Until then that capital could have been invested in other industries, creating sustainable jobs and long term economic growth. But it is tied up in a bubble and a huge amount of wealth will be destroyed, invested in rapidly depreciating equipment and data centres that have no prospect of returning their investment.

If you thought it was hard to source computer parts at reasonable prices, imagine what the capital market must be like for anyone but the AI con artists. So when AI tanks, everything else is in limp mode, so the economy will be doubly fucked.

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Could go down a lot further, a lot quicker when OpenAI Enrons. The whole tech space is a house of cards. Better to get out early and lose a little than be caught late and lose a lot.

At the moment it’s a better browser than all the alternatives with more market share for my uses. Huge vote of no confidence in both the foundation and management. They need a cleanout and put people focussed purely on web tech and user experience in there.

They are trying to destroy the last credible non-shit browser engine. How do we rescue Mozilla from their board and management?

You misunderstand the use of the royal prerogative in countries like Australia. They aren’t for personal use by an individual to show favour to their friends and supporters. The process for their use is very different and there are considerable checks and balances on executive power. I can’t speak for the other countries on the list. It is literally true that “leaders cannot randomly pardon people” under our system. No Australian leader has that power. I am no constitutional scholar so I will refer you to Professer Anne Twomey who is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShMyCNrrQ-M

Rebuilding trust for most companies means some bullshit marketing campaign. New catch phrase. Some promotion. It rarely means admitting fault and changing direction. It would take something really huge for that to happen. Perhaps a combination of AI bubble burst, leadership change, shareholder revolt.

Everything anti-consumer in Windows is a deliberate choice aimed at extracting more revenue from customers. This isn’t unique to Microsoft. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

If like me you think a lot of companies have been incredibly short sighted and are burning their brands and customer loyalty for short term gains, just look at the stock prices. Short termism is making a killing for tech companies while the rest of the economy is treading water. Is it sustainable? I don’t think so. Does it matter for Microsoft or any of the other tech companies?

I have been a customer of companies that were awesome for years then sold out and their prices sky rocketed. They were clearly bleeding customers but every time they did they just put the price up more. Some people always stay for some reason. This can go on for years. As long as they keep screwing people faster than people leave they are probably making a lot more money in the short term than they would have made with a longer vision. That is business these days. People aren’t building products for the long term anymore. Now that thinking seems to have moved to companies. Modern business leaders are about gobbling revenues up like a locust plague then moving on to the next pasture.

SteamOS is an immutable Arch. Valves aim is to reduce support costs by ensuring everyone has the same build and to only support a hardware subset (AMD APUs) so it’s less general purpose than a regular Linux distro intentionally. A steam deck is just a PC though and it is usable for non gaming tasks the same way a gaming focussed immutable system like Bazzite is. I even did development on a Chromebook for a month or more years ago as a challenge. It’s possible. It wasn’t ideal. The further you get from steam hardware and use case the more hoops you will need to jump through.

Games generally run more or less the same on any Linux system if they have the same kernel , steam runtime, mesa and proton in my experience. CachyOS might get a few more FPS until the patches they use get more widely distributed. Some compositors will get a little more performance than others.

Some games have detection for Steam deck that works around bugs they haven’t bothered fixing for proton users in general. I have one game I had to set an environment variable so it would behave like on steam deck.

I think SteamOS on a mini amd apu system hooked up to a tv as a gaming system would make a lot of sense. Running it on a regular desktop for non gaming taks is more of a novelty thing. It’s less practical than using a more general distro.

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That’s where the puritans came from.

It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn’t participate in conversations and be taken seriously.

Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.

They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.

The bad guys normalised racism, fraud, sexism and a lot of other evils and had people cheering for them as they flouted the law and protected each other from prosecution. It has been bad for ever regardless of who was in power with the two tier justice system that protected the elites while punishing everyone else. But we are in the end game now. The masks are off

You too can be allowed to sample the vices of the wealthy elites, in moderation and under their control. In return all they ask is your loyalty. Seems kind of weird and out of touch to me. Regular people mostly just want good health, a place to raise a family, some free time and a decent income. No AI hallucination is going to substitute. They think so little of us.