I like games culture and anime culture. Have empathy.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • yup, this hits the nail on the head for me. I consider myself very tech literate; I am my family’s IT guy. I even have Mint installed in a separate drive but I seldom use it unless I have nothing else to do for an afternoon. And the reason is that the more I know about windows (be it editing the registry, troubleshooting services, learning diagnostics tools…) the less comparatively capable I feel in a linux environment. It’s like moving countries after I spent my whole life learning this city and I could’t even speak my native language anymore. Yeah I know it works out of the box and there’s wine and I can make my UX the same. But, going back to my metaphor, that feels like moving to a different country and just not leaving my house and only talking to the people I knew back home. Yeah it would be the same if I severely constrict my comfort zone. You just have to learn a bunch of new shit and leave all you know behind and that’s just one distro. Because YEAH linux isn’t an OS it’s a whole family of operating systems. The nerd yelling that it’s a kernel is right in the worst way possible. I can learn Mint but I can form an opinion on Linux because I still wouldn’t know shit about Arch or Fedora or Gentoo or what-have-you. It’s all very daunting and what I have is functional. No, not “functional enough”. This does literally everything I want in less than 4 clicks, everything is plug-and-play, everything works out of the box (and if it doesn’t you’re sure as shit it wouldn’t work out of the box on linux), my knowledge on windows is applicable on every machine I find, it’s the system everyone expects me to have (I’m fucking sure the software my uni made me install for online tests wouldn’t have a Linux installer). It’s not just that the path of least resistance points to mac/windows, Linux as a whole also has very potent repelling field. I still want to learn it but not because I see any practical value/utility in it.






  • they need us, not the other way around.

    Yeah, until they get a foot on the door. A single foot of theirs is stronger than the whole fediverse. Google used the depend on the android open source project. Then AOSP depended on google. Then they started phasing out base apps like email, browser, gallery, sms/phone, calendar, file manager, music player, etc., in favor of proprietary google apps and made everything require google play services. Other vendors stopped using the AOSP apps as well, and made their own versions in response, up to and including entire app stores like samsung apps. Today most users only know the proprietary android experience, even the UI is proprietary (android ONE, pixel UI, MIUI, etc). Even open source enthusiasts have a hard time installing AOSP or a custom ROM because of hardware level locked bootloaders. Others have mentioned the embrace-extend-extinguish tactic and this is what it is.



  • TempleOS - a very gifted individual made his own OS from scratch by himself but was thwarted by his own schizophrenia and delusions of persecusion. He was also incredibly racist. Ultimately though it’s very sad story seeing him lose his grip on reality thinking government agencies were after him and he was a prophet doing God’s work. It’s a decade long saga, he ended up homeless for a long while and died a few years ago.

    John McAffee - talking about delusional tech guys, this one takes it to the highest level. This guy travelled the world running from the u.s. govt for tax evasion, won a game of russian roulette through quantum immortality (debatable), killed his neighbor for poisoning his dog(allegedly), and was an avid crypto enthusiast. He was found dead in a spanish prison right before he could be brought back to his homeland. It was declared a suicide but many people don’t believe that.







  • A few points:

    -I feel like even this short guide is overcomplicating it for 90% of potential users. Just add a tl;dr at the start about checking out the relevant settings (top bar, notifications), subscribing to magazines, and navigating to the “subscribed” feed. Like, if I want a hot shower I don’t need to know where the water comes from or how pressure is determined by the bermoulli formula, just say what do I press to get the water to come out hot.

    -Explain that collapsible comments are coming and there’s a userscript for people who are into that.

    -I don’t think that this separation of tiers is efficient for anyone. Like, if I want to know how to see the local feed is that lurker or addict.

    -I think it’s overcomplicating threads and microblogs. Yeah, I didn’t know there was a difference between replies and comments but it’s never been relevant for me this past month. One is like reddit and is compatible with lemmy, the other is like twitter and lets you talk to mastodon users (and misskey, and calckey,…).

    -On that note, some people get overly confused with the concept of federation (in part because people usually overcomplicate it when explaining), and this problem is compounded on a platform that also interacts with instances from other platforms. You can just keep it simple and say “you have an account on a website which has its own content. There are others that look exactly the same with different users and content, but you have access* to all of that too”.
    *unless admins decide to defederate specifically from your website, like what beehaw did.

    Ironic that I said to keep things short and then wrote a huge comment.