Hemingways_Shotgun

A crackdown by whom?

The people who have the power to change it are the people who want it the way that it is.

Protests don’t matter. Boycotts don’t matter. For one simple reason.

You’re not their customer. The people buying the data they collect from you are. There will never be enough people willing to do away with their precious smartphones and tablets to make a dent in ithat.

My previous Motorola also has an e/OS/ spin. But sadly my current one does not.

Any Google app that would have Gemini baked in has long since been disabled on my phone. I’m presuming it’s bullshit isn’t going to be able to access my Fossify Messages or Dialer or Gallery or every other app I’ve replaced and disabled, especially since I’ve also disabled the Assistant and Google Apps.

(If I’m wrong please correct me.)

Sure. That might end up being a socially healthy place for adults to end up.

But it will never work that way for young teens. Their brains aren’t done baking yet. They don’t have the emotional maturity to understand that enough to be “okay with it because it’s just a fake”.

That’s why we protect kids rather than just telling them “hey it’s okay…it’s only a fake.”

I’m not even going to begin describing all the ways that what you just said is fucked up.

I’ll just point out that online deepfake technology is FAR more accessible to the average 13 year old to use on their peers than “porno mags” were in our day.

You want to compare taking your 13 year old classmates photo off of Facebook, running it through an AI and in five seconds creating photo-realistic adult content featuring them, and compare that to getting your dad’s skin-mag from under his mattress when he’s not home, cutting your classmates face out of a yearbook, taping it on, then sneaking THAT into the computer lab at school so that you can photocopy it and pass it around in home room, and then putting the skin-mag BACK under the mattress before your dad finds out.

Is that right…is THAT what you’re trying to say? Are those the two things that you’re trying say are equivalent?

When a stock price is all that matters, everything gets reduced to line items on a spreadsheet. That includes humanity.

I just use Syncthing. No cloud, just keeps any folders I choose on any devices synced with one another. Never had a problem, and while the files yes accessible on the internet technically, they’re not stored anywhere except the devices that have access to them. Works like a charm.

I usually move to Lineage once my two year warranty is up, just in case.

I know that by law hardware manufacturers can’t deny hardware warranty based on your software (at least where I’m from…I worked in for one of the big three telco’s up here in Canada)

But I’d rather not have that argument with the manufacturer, so I wait for it to run out. If my phone has a rom available I run that until the hardware dies and then I upgrade.

In the absence of being able to switch to Graphene (Don’t own a pixel), I’ve done everything I can to replace Google Apps with FOSS alternatives, and disabled Google Assistant on my device entirely.

I know none of that will stop a determined Google eventually fucking with me, but at least I’m trying.

I’m so damned tired of the modern corporate world.

Been running Manjaro for years. Don’t really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that’s not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

GIMP for example is nowhere near feature parity with Photoshop

Yeah. That’s exactly my point…maybe I wasn’t clear.

The problem is that no one specific FOSS tool has feature parity. To get the same abilities as Photoshop, you have to use a workflow that is a combination of GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus instead of having it in the one package, which is why Adobe is the industry standard.

Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn’t even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!

That’s sort of where I see the issue as well. What proprietary software does is takes the features of a bunch of different pieces of kit and puts them together into one package.

There isn’t one particular thing that Propietary software does the FOSS software can’t. The problem is that you need multiple different software solutions to do it.

So while Illustrator offers Paragraph Spacing (for example) Inkscape doesn’t, you get that in Scribus. But Scribus lacks the more advanced pathing vector tools, which Inkscape offers. Meanwhile neither of them have strong photo editing abilities, which GIMP brings to the table, but GIMP can’t really do painting well, which KRITA brings to the table…and so on and so on.

Every open source alternative does something as good as their proprietary alternaties. But not everything. You have to use a combination in order to match the capability of one adobe product, and that’s just not feasible in a professional environment.

If you wan’t to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn’t worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.

Then, I would argue, the alternative isn’t to sign petitions to make the corporate guys make their proprietary stuff available on FOSS operating systems. The alternative is to contribute to the FOSS alternatives in order to make them as good as the proprietary.

I’m not saying that you in particular haven’t contributed (either financially or developmentally). I don’t know you, so this isn’t particularly directed at you.

But in general, the “FOSS isn’t as good as proprietary stuff” crowd has overwhelmingly never actually tried to fund or contribute to the development of the software itself and their complaints amount to “Why isn’t my free thing as good as the thing they make me pay for?”

In which case the answer is “of course it isn’t…you’re telling me the software developed on the evenings and weekends by enthusiasts doing it in the spare time for NO money isn’t as polished as a fully funded business software!? NO WAY!!! I’M SHOOKETH!!!”

The alternative to the (perceived) quality disparity between FOSS and Proprietary isn’t to go begging at the Corporations doorstep; it’s to make the FOSS alternatives good enough to take the throne of “industry standard” away from the corporations.

It’s not impossible…hell, Blender is the poster child for pretty much doing exactly that. It’s not the “industry standard”, but it’s accepted in the industry in ways that GIMP and Inkscape still aren’t. And the reason is because it’s good enough to be there.

Depends on what you’re using it for.

Writer, Presentation, etc… yeah. works great. No problems at all.

Calc/Excel…sure…will work for pretty basic stuff. But as soon as you get a relatively complex spreadsheet, interoperability goes out the window.

For example, I have a few spreadsheets that I work on at home (where I use Linux) and at work (where I use windows). I can’t work on it in one without screwing up the formatting, forumlae, and advanced filtering in the other, and vice versa. I’m forced to use OnlyOffice in order to be able to do so.

They already tried it. It’s called Threads. It exists. People use it. And other instances have the choice to simply not federate with them.

To me (as unpopular as this sounds) that’s the beautiful thing about FOSS and about Federation in particular. No one is stopping anyone from creating their own instance. Even Corporations.

It’s the ultimate expression of “Anyone can do what they want, say what they want, believe what they want…but no one else is in any way obligated to listen to them/federate with them”

I know of companies that host small mastodon instances for their staff to communicate back and forth. I know of similar setups with lemmy instances. Anyone can use the technology for anything they wish to.

I don’t know about that, to be honest.

I don’t have any hard data to back me up, but anecdotally I find that most FOSS software I use is headquartered in Europe. Quite often Germany. There are many maintainers from all over the world, but I feel like (again…in my experience) Europe has always been bigger into starting such projects.

Everything from wife-killers, toenail-eaters, to geniuses

Stop spying on me please.

The word “Celt” is largely meaningless. There were no such specific societal group as “Celts”.

“Celts” refers to speakers of similar (though not the same) languages within a celtic language group which includes Gauls (Who became Germans), Celtiberians, who became Portuguese, the Gaels, who became the English and Irish, etc… etc…

Saying that “Celts” are a society is like saying Peru, Argentina, Mexico, etc… are all one single people. (pro tip…they’re not)

So no, “celt” isn’t derogatory, and it certainly isn’t a synonym for “druid”.

That’s a very fair point. But it’s still annoying.

Not when every app decides to use a different point version of the same damn platform.

"Hello Mr. Application. I see you’d like to use the Freedesktop-SDK 23.08.27

“Oh…well hello other application. What’s this? You want to use Freedesktop-SDK 24.08.10? Well…I guess so…”

Edited to add: Yes, I know that flatpaks will upgrade to use updated platforms. But it doesn’t automatically remove the old one, forcing you to have to run flatpak remove --unused every week just to keep your drive clean. That’s hardly user friendly for the average person.