It’s internet explorer vs Netscape navigator. Even Safari. Gemini gets pushed by Android phones. MS lost the smartphone OS war. Also lost TVs. Also lost home assistant speaker/mics. Microsoft and every other company without a major mobile OS under their unbrella is fighting a battle with a major handicap against Google

It does. On Linux you can stick to graphical applications like you do on windows, it’s just when people get on Linux they suddenly have the interest to try more things that they didn’t try on windows. 90% of the time I’m using handbrake for videos conversions. Then there’s the 10% of the time where command line ffmpeg because the functionality of the software is often greater than everything that the graphical interface has implemented or ever plans to implement.

This applies to windows too. General users usually don’t need to go into PowerShell or a WSL shell but a lot of professional users will do so. Not just IT but people that process videos, images, a lot scientist, not just Matlab types, but people that got to do mapping stuff. You grab map files, terrain data - whatever - then you need to process it for another application. A lot of cases, good luck finding a GUI that hits your specific use case but some guy that had the same problem years ago got a one liner bash command, better chance for niche use cases in my opinion.

If you play games on Steam and you ever wanted to skip intro movies or a launcher and you Google for a solution and you get an answer that says to add something to the games launch options in Steam. That’s pretty close to what people mostly do in a terminal.

Especially when on windows freeware is so frequently adware and/or abandoned last updated for windows 7 and it’s a wildcsrd if that specific functionality that is really just ffmpeg or imagemagick in the background doing the work

Deleting a huge amount of files. You’ll come across cases windows, Mac, Linux where the animations add a ton of time to the operation compared to just rm -rf 'ing a folder. Folder with a ton of files. Terminal searching for a file can be so much faster and responsive compared to GUI file explorer

Creating graphical interfaces is of critical importance for user applications for accessibility but plenty of times it’s just way faster to do it in a terminal - same with Windows and Mac.

I have a 2 drive TerraMaster. I’m no advanced user of NAS’s. It was easy setup and use for me

Manufacturing specifically, cheaper overseas is the basic answer but I think there’s one more in additional. The west, particularly former colonial powers and their beneficiaries, which is most of Europe, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc - socially all treat manual labor that isn’t at least art-adjacent with a level of dissaproval and it seems worse the younger you go.

Like it’s not enough to work to live. Your work also has to be an aesthetic choice. So you can have very exploitative industries like the various art/entertainment industries and regardless of how bad they are, any job where you can say you work in like film or fashion is a social plus. You can be broke working in a restaurant and for a fashion brand. You can work for those and be really abrasive, abusive, a destructive addict but as long as you’re in the socially acceptable professions, you’re socially adjacent to champagne socialist/wealthy liberals/whatever. Like you can in the same sentence complain about gentrification and cultural appropriation while living in a gentrified neighborhood and teaching yoga and selling healthy versions of “unhealthy” ethnic foods and be socially preferable to a factory worker or plumber that’s a great person. City reputation, it’s the Paris and Portland hip social scene special

You can be an incredible person but if you’re dating profile says Amazon Warehouse or GE Appliances assembler, plumber, etc - that’s going to be rougher. And I think it’s worse the younger you go where people really want to be entertainers/influencers. It’s too socially looked down on to be a laborer. Too much is made about the values of a person from their occupation. The vast majority of people in social work organizations I’ve met got the job because they needed a job rather than a desire to help others. Same with nursing. They may have a higher likelihood of having humanist opinions but it’s definitely not certain and I’d say from my experience of those I’ve met, most of everyone treats it as work and nothing more. It’s not their identify and not representative of their beliefs. So manual laborers are diverse in all regards but get judged as if manual laborers equals chauvinist or bad with money or something. There’s not a clear path forward in the current generations to building a competitive manufacturing employee base. Attitudes are already well engrained and there’s little effort for future generations to remove the stigma from non-art/adjacent fields. It’s only a discussion like most social maladys people have identified the past decade

Well, a solution are immigrants. Immigrants are fine working labor as long as they can support themselves and their family. Immigrants are more keen to the belief of sacrificial generations. One generation suffers so their children can live well. Immigrants deal with racism, bullying of their children for being different, violence in poorer neighborhoods they can afford, live wherever work is built rather than the cities that are most trendy. Immigrants are the backbone of western society and culture. Culture because without the immigrants and their immediate children, all these artist/influencers would have to do the labor jobs that keep infrastructure and production going

The stuff about chasing out high ability foreign researchers. Same there. Science and engineering are social negative occupations. Only good for stable family life but not nightlife and adventure. That’s not true. Science and engineering is a diverse workforce in all regards but stereotypes have become socially acceptable. Prejudice is socially acceptable as long as you don’t say something overtly racist or something. Just call it preference or just being cautious or mental health. So the science and engineering fields are filled with immigrants and the immediate children of immigrants. Sacrifice social points for potential economic stability. We’re coming to a point where science and engineering is becoming far more competitive to keep up internationally and job requirements harder. Not guaranteed work anymore and social negative. For ones born in the west, may not be worth the risk to do worse socially and possibly crash out from the science/engineering world. Decline in interest towards science/engineering

A solution is immigration. Both children of immigrants and immigrant scientist/engineers are cornerstones of modern western science and engineering. But blanket anti-immigration is the hot thing currently. People don’t want to compete in quality with immigrants but want the wealth from quality that immigrants bring to the table in international trade competition. The reality I believe is that without immigrants, the quality of new products in the west tanks and western products become outdated. I’ve seen and heard opinions like, “anyone with family in China should not be able to get a security clearance.” Going as far as anyone with family in Asia is a security threat. People like that are basic veteran infantry mindset and/or have never worked in science and technology in the west. Anti-immigration would be a major detriment to every western military along with the countries manufacturing base.

So to me western countries need to work on the social stigma of manual labor and STEM work, and probably increase immigration. Make the too good for non-entertainment and hospitality people content with stuff like universal healthcare and cheaper housing. Everyone benefits from those

Sweet. I have really high hopes for cosmic and system76 for making inroads with mainstream users someday. Cosmic is way more stable compared to a year ago. It will probably be good enough for 26.04

I do think it’s Gaza. For decades until the last couple of years, the plight of Palestinians have been mostly ignored. The whole of Europe and algosphere in the middle east have had active or passive public approval for middle east policy for the past century. Vietnam war reporting soured the public on far east colonialism and war reporting went softball afterwards and that softball unraveled in the 2010s and now Gaza is the modern day Vietnam war for reporting on disregard for life from pretty much ourselves. Israel is an ally of our countries.

So now government policy is incredibly misaligned with public opinion now and what was a steady grind at enacting internet control is suddenly a mad rush for governments. Israel is a line in the sand for the powerful like Vietnam was in the 60/70s was for media control/influence

Minisforum V3 from what I’ve read seems good with Linux now

Headline wasn’t so interesting. Actual details is exciting. Much faster than microsd express but much smaller than full size SD Express. For a phone it may still be preferable for a microsd sized device for space considerations, I miss you UFS cards, and sacrifice top speed. These being in the new GPD Win and I think it was OneXPlayer, solid use case for PC handhelds. Smaller than full sized SD but faster than microSD express, that’s amazing for cameras video and photo. My hope has now left UFS cards and SD Express and now shifted to wanting this being highly adopted. Got to learn how the heat is compared to the current fast full size SD Express and compact flash express cards

I remember in 2019 my workplace was doing large guest lectures from experts teaching how to work with millennials entering the workplace. The teacher early on tried to emphasize that most millennials at that point were late 20s up to almost 40 so everyone’s been working with them for a good amount of time now and the crowd was not interested in that.

Just venting about their teenage children who were gen z but wasn’t a term used much for a couple more years. Just as entertaining were old millennials in denial and certain they were gen x. Not as entertaining were old gen z that thought they were millennials but learned they were actually gen z and it was a moment of shrug shoulder and pretty much being like, “neat.” Like thinking your astrological sign or zodiac animal was one thing your whole life but was off by one.

Similar to like 2021/2022 when I started hearing about how terrible gen z workers out of college were because of growing up on tiktok. Gen z in the workforce at that time grew up on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. Twitter was genz and millennials tertiary social media. When TikTok came out they had been working for years already or just about to finish undergrad college. 2021/2022 gen z who had the brain rot got that well before TikTok became popular

I see the modern internet as sometime in the early 2010s when YouTube shifted heavily towards monetisation and changing up the UI for that, Facebook started to shift from VC money to monetizing the platform culminating in its post-IPO super monetization. Facebook buying Instagram and then eventually monetizing it heavy with advertisements

Facebook IPO, YouTube profitability push from Google, Instagram profitability push from Facebook. That all came together to birth the modern online influencer. An incredibly fast rapid shift from a short decade of body acceptance and mild movements against over consumption to now 6th graders have skincare routines and therapy shopping seems bigger than it has ever been

I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

Canceling NordVPN was a pain. It took numerous emails across numerous days for them to cancel and remove my credit card info. Lesson learned, I only pay with PayPal where I can revoke permission for recurring payments or pay with crypto. Went expressvpn to the cheaper nordvpn then to proton unlimited

I’ve reviewed code, in particular I’ve looked over merge requests on occasion but mostly out of academic interest than being very concerned over security. Just want to see how people accomplish a task. Learning.

I’ve monitored network traffic just because sometimes I just want to do that rather than paranoia. Practice and learning.

I’ve run code through a local sonarqube instance and whatever other scanning software I feel like trying along with building applications from source but again it’s not from paranoia but for personal interest that’s mostly just making sure I’m in practice of being able to do so.

I’m not a security professional so I don’t have the background and experience to really notice things that can be problematic like people I know who have a career directly cyber-net-etc-security related rather than my tangential

So really I don’t audit code. At least not huge codebases. When it’s just a few 100 line files of python to accomplish something, I’ll read them. There’s usually a requirements.txt in there though pulling in pip packages and I know I haven’t audited up the dependencies. At work there’s standards handled by people where it’s their job to determine whether the code you’ve written and dependencies pass the minimum to be deployable to computers on the network and that too is mostly handled by security scanning software both open source and closed commercial software

Professionally I do use VS Code but at home I have Lapce installed. It opens really fast. I don’t do anything extensive at home so I haven’t explored the plugin ecosystem yet but it’s fast. That’s most of what I care for at home

I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even sub for minimalist usage. Currently use Proton Unlimited and probably at around ~200GB usage for storage and active use the VPN and email. But something fediverse is more interesting to me. I doubt it can suitably replace Proton for me now but it’s at least cheap. Nice to see cloud document/office stuff. Proton still doesn’t have a Linux sync application so that’s a weakness. Less sensitive stuff I’ll use Firefox sync for passwords but that Chrome web browser integration I think is a major feature for the Google ecosystem

I know a lot of people are opposed completely to crypto but for privacy services I would prefer paying with crypto. I prefer numerous options but I generally think Monero should be the minimum. Maybe trocador.app to support more. I will probably sub with a credit card to check it out and support though