Agreed, but on the other hand, maybe this could push them to be better involved in the collective defense of Europe, not just for new arms but older ones as well. The more countries that contribute to Europe’s collective defense, the better.

Interesting! I was already vaguely aware some of these efforts, but that was still quite informative. Nonetheless, from what I’ve observed, it seems that these kinds of funding initiatives aren’t very popular politically. Most people don’t benefit from it enough, and then it’s only natural to ask why we are spending, néé, wasting money on them. I think better messaging is needed on these types of issues.

And education would help a lot too - most people don’t think about where the software that they are using is coming from and that is a big problem. When you present people with two pieces of software, they don’t really give any thought to where those pieces of software came from or how it’s made. So they won’t be able to understand issues like the fact that vendors can just pull the rugs from under their feet whenever they feel like it. If people don’t understand concepts like these, then obviously they won’t understand how to avoid these things from happening!

I do think there’s hope on the horizon though. If we can brand Microsoft et. al. as American companies and successfully convince people to be more and more skeptical of the USA as a whole, then maybe we have a chance in stimulating people to take more initiative in getting off these products and adopting other ones.

We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it’s still more replaceable.

Nextcloud is a great start point, but it’s terribly underfunded… as are all of our “alternatives” to big tech companies.

We’ve had FUCKING DECADES to do something about this. DECADES!!!

When will we ever learn…

Looks like there’s been plenty of recent updates to me: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commits/master/

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.

Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.

You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably

Considering how great these “market economics” have been working out for us these past 50 years, it’s really hard to see why…

But yes, I’m sure he’ll have all the answers.

What annoys me most is typical liberals like this talk about “the economy” in a singular sense, and whether something can be simply “good” or “bad” for the economy as a whole. To them, “good for the economy” is a translation for the ultra-wealthy getting even wealthier (because they are the ones most invested in it). No consideration of whether this is beneficial for average people or not. I suppose we’re supposed to be happy that our overlords are padding their accounts with even more zeroes? Hooray…

I really hope that we can try to change the dialogue around what the economy really is and how its effects are not uniform across the entire human population.

Yes, a lot of developers have done this. Many examples have been posted on this thread (OsmAnd, Conversations, Davx5) - Mindustry is another example. free on f-droid (and Google store too I think), but $10 on Steam.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn’t happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.

I don’t have any suggestions, but this is incredibly impressive. I haven’t heard of jmp.chat before, but it sounds like you can create multiple identities using different phone numbers - is that correct?

If so, that sounds amazing. I really hate how the modern world is trying to force people into a singular identity online, and the way that they’re using phone numbers to do it. This sounds like it could be a pretty decent method to avoid that.

+1, I would recommend neovim with lazyvim. The documentation is excellent, and it’s very easy to set up.

https://www.lazyvim.org/installation

What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?

Welcome to the crowd! Eventually, you realize that an operating system is just an operating system: something you use to get work done, and the less you notice it, the better it’s doing its job. The pride of setting it all up mostly ends very shortly after you’re done. At that point, you realize that pretty much all distros are the same, give or take.

That said, there are always moments that make you realize that your OS is amazing. When you’re faced with a new and difficult task that you don’t know how to achieve, then you look at your distro’s documentation and solve it in a few elegant steps. And I’m not an Arch user, but that’s when the Arch wiki will really be your friend, as well as all the other resources that Arch has for its users. I can’t think of examples of these kinds of moments because they’re so rare, but those are the moments that feel great and really make you appreciate your OS.