Carl [he/him]

being bi is equivalent to eating babies

might want to rethink your example there

Yeah I was thinking about that, which is why I pointed out that Apple’s plan only worked because of the massive growth in personal computing. Google was able to create marketshare for Android during the massive growth in smartphones, but those conditions haven’t existed for anyone for a while.

Generally how these things go is that after the growth phase comes consolidation and monopoly - we’re far more likely to see Apple and MS merge into one corporation than we are to see a third option emerge as a serious competitor.

I think the big thing that everyone is missing here is that schools and workplaces need to push it into people’s lives. For that to happen Linux (or at least one of its distros backed by a hardware distributor) needs to develop killer features for those markets and successfully sell to them in large enough numbers that the average computer user - who does not care what their OS is because they only use it for email and work - will make sure that their at-home setup is compatible with their work machine.

That moment is when market forces will take over and drive real growth in desktop Linux, rather than the tiny little bumps we’ve seen the past few years thanks to the Steam Deck coming out and MS pissing its users off.

This is how Apple built its marketshare against the Microsoft domination of the 90s. For a long time it was the go-to “school computer”, and then those kids grew up and now a huge piece of the tech industry and culture is more or less Apple only. It’s unclear if this process can be repeated, since Apple’s marketshare was carved out during a time of massive growth in the industry that is unlikely to repeat, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible if the right conditions reveal themselves.

I will say that it is highly unlikely that the people here would like the change if it happens - imagine Google slinging fully locked down “linux” machines en masse and everybody else needing to download their kernel fork that’s loaded with spyware (“for security reasons”) in order to connect to Google Teams for work. Maybe I’m being pessimistic but I just don’t see mass adoption of a new OS happening without some kind of fuckery like this that renders the version of Linux that gets mass adopted unrecognizable from the version we’re all using now.

The other option is state intervention, as with NeoKylin in China, although the Chinese government seems to be limiting themselves to just government computers with that distro.

If I could get a Motorola Droid 4 with a modern processor that would be peak.

I miss smaller sizes. I’m currently on the cheapest phone my carrier offers after my last one broke, and it’s still way bigger than it needs to be. Shit literally slowly pulls my pants down if I have it in my pocket.

I miss the fingerprint reader on the back. I don’t know which brain genius moved that function to the front but it was so much more convenient on the back.

I miss wired headphones. Bluetooth can’t go five minutes without cutting out for a couple of seconds, and while I’ve tried to use a usb-c to 3.5mm dongle that adds an extra failure point compared to just having the port. And if phones are going to be these giant bricks in your pocket anyway they might as well bring it back.

And last but certainly not least I miss a physical landscape keyboard. There are a few gimmicky ass-phones that offer this feature but they all suck for different reasons. Swype is fine but I spend as much time correcting typos and incorrectly predicted words as I do typing, plus the loss of screen real estate to the software keyboard can make some sites and apps totally unusable in landscape mode.

I would do TV shows and movies that I like. Yeah streaming but having a local copy is great and often faster especially where I live.

This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don’t need cutting edge, simple as.

“you’ll own nothing and be happy” is also a fair descriptor of software piracy come to think of it

Fan orders are a terrible idea don’t do them. Watch in release order, feel free to skip parts that aren’t interesting. The fact of the matter is that the entire series has been written by the seat of the pants of the people making it, meaning that there are absolutely no insights to be gained by watching prequels before the originals, and every entry in the series has taken great pains to be comprehensible on its own. If you skip stuff you might miss out on some “I RECOGNIZE THAT!” moments in later material, but that’s fine.

Also… the prequels are really bad. You may want to skip them entirely. I would suggest watching the Original Trilogy, The Clone Wars (the 2D animated tv movie, not the 3D animated tv show), the Mandalorian season 1, and then Andor seasons 1 & 2. Those series represent everything worthwhile in the Star Wars TV and movie canon, literally nothing else is worth your time.