Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I’m practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.

This would be a stunning own goal by Red Hat (and let’s face it, they are the largest driving force behind Fedora, if not in complete and total control of the project). Steam and gaming have brought so many new users to Linux - maybe even doubled the entire userbase - that if anything, they should be doing all they can to support it even better if they really want to increase the size of the userbase.

Even if flatpak is still an option, it will still drive a lot of new and existing users to use non Fedora-based distros, which would be sad for the project. I myself have never been a Fedora user, but I’m really grateful to see a lot of the positive things they do for the Linux community, so this would be a very sad step in my opinion. On the other hand, it would make me even happier if we see more users switching to Debian-based distros instead.

Really? That’s interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn’t know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

Wikipedia is quite resilient - you can even put it on a USB drive. As long as you have a free operating system, there will always be ways to access it.

Agreed. People just think the first tool that they learned is the easiest to use. I’ve been a longtime Gimp user and find it pretty easy to do what I want.* The few times someone asked me to do something in Photoshop, I was pretty helpless. Of course, I’m a pretty basic user - I wouldn’t dispute that Photoshop is more powerful, but which one is easier to use is very subjective and the vast majority of the time, it just boils down to which one you use more often.

I’ve seen the same with people who grew up on Libreoffice and then started smashing their computer when they were asked to use MSOffice.

To add to subignition’s point, there is a value in learning useful software. More complicated software means that there is a learning curve - so while you are less productive while learning how to use it, once you gain more experience, you ultimately become more productive. On the other hand, if you want the software to be useful to everyone regardless of his level of experience, you ultimately have to eliminate more complex functionality that makes the software more useful.

Software is increasingly being distilled down to more and more basic elements, and ultimately, I think that means that people are able to get less done with them these days. This is just my opinion, but in general I have seen computer literacy dropping and people’s productivity likewise decreasing, at least from what I’ve observed from the 1990s up until today. Especially at work, the Linux users that I see are much more knowledgeable and productive than Apple users.

But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

Whatever. The next generation will have to learn to trust whether the material is true or not by using sources like Wikipedia or books by well-regarded authors.

The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context. Anyone trying to address the facts and information produced by these models is completely missing the point.

The handbook is outstanding. Read as much of it as you can. Even if you’re not a Void user, you’ll learn so much!

https://docs.voidlinux.org/

It’s really annoying. It no different from people who go into Linux forums and talk about how much they love Windows.

Void Linux uses runit, for example. Here’s the documentation they provide on how to use it: https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/services/index.html

It only takes 5-10 minutes to read and understand how to manage all your services and write your own. Simple and fast. If only systemd were this easy!

Ubuntu is doing stupid things with packages, replacing them with their proprietary packaging system (called Snap). It has been controversial, the way that they are pushing it, especially since the Snap server is proprietary and non-open source.

A lot of people won’t consider using Ubuntu at all for this reason alone, and it makes sense - when you consider that there are so many other distros to choose from these days, Ubuntu just doesn’t really provide a whole lot of added value anymore.

100% agree. But I like posting articles like these because it brings me back to how I learned programming, and Linux specifically - namely by reading a bunch of articles from similar link aggregators and sharing sites.

My hope is that sharing articles like these is a form of planting the seeds for another cycle for people to learn the way that I did.

I just disabled this today and life is so much better. Thanks! Everything works so much better now.

You’re right, but I think the main reason companies like it is because it’s easier to get rid of contractors than full-time employees.

Vim when I can, and when I can’t, Neovim with plugins (LazyVim). Both are fast. I have had troubles with Neovim and configuration, and it does some things that really annoy me (like autoclosing parentheses - it just messes up everything). Honestly, the only feature that I really need is Go To Definition.

But vim - I absolutely love it. I started using it nearly 20 years ago and it still does everything one could want if you’re willing to learn the keymaps and commands. Macros, ci), block indentation and so on. It’s even great for editing XML. If the codebases I’m working on these days weren’t so large and complicated, I would still be using it with very little configuration in my .vimrc.

The bigger problem in my opinion is more about the fact that all elections that select a single winner will always end up in stupid degenerate systems like this where flaws and imperfections exist.

The best thing to do (again, my opinion) is to abolish all single winner races and have multiple winners with proportional representation. Get rid of directly elected presidents and have a prime minister selected by a proportionally representative parliament instead. All presidential systems suck, and the larger the number of people voting, the harder and harder it sucks. It’s not just a USA problem - you also see it in France and Turkey, where they also have an all-powerful president that is elected nationally and the election is a complete shit-show every time without fail. On the other hand, having a prime minister selected as the head of state from a proportionally elected parliament is a much fairer and more stable system in my opinion. It has downsides too of course, but nowhere near as bad as nationally elected presidential systems.

In any case, the example you pointed out is a potential flaw in approval voting, but I don’t think it’s very likely to happen. First of all, it would require all those voters in the second round to conspire a particular way, which isn’t very likely. Secondly, there’s the fact that the numbers would have to line up in a very particular way which has a very low probability of happening - tweak a few numbers here and there, and the spoiler effect vanishes. Sure, the scenario you point out is a hypothetical flaw in approval voting, but I think it’s a much smaller effect and probability of actually influencing anything - definitely nowhere near as much of a strategic voting effect as in plurality voting systems.

And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they’re using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit’s CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!