Linux is as good as Linux is, just as Windows is as good as Windows is and MacOS is as good as it is.
All operating systems have their place, purpose, and use cases, so the question is subjective. Different OS’s are good or bad for different people, and different scenario’s which is why they all have a part of the market share.
MacOS has ease of use and excellent intercompatibility with other Apple products, and Windows has boatloads of compatible software and compatibility with Microsoft’s Active Directory domains in businesses.
What Linux has is cost effectiveness and true ownership and control.
At the moment most people prefer ease of use for home computing, but on a long enough timeline Linux will obtain this as well, just look at what Valve did with SteamOS and the steam deck when it comes to that. Making it easy to use there is, I suspect, one of the major reasons the steam deck as a device is so well reviewed, and partly why we have seen such an increase in market share recently I suspect.
So right now, most people probably prefer another OS because of ease of use, but at some point in the future, Linux will probably be holding all the cards. It just seems that those who develop the distributions are often tied up with other goals apart from ease of use for the common user in the contemporary, but eventually they will begin to tackle this goal as well.
I tried to install my client cert in “CA Certificate” but the certificate manager app in GrapheneOS said that it was the wrong kind of cert to be used in “CA Certificate”. It is, after all, a client cert, not a CA cert.
I’m using a customized self-hosted Semantic MediaWiki installation, and can’t imagine doing it any other way—it’s like Wikipedia with the added ability to aggregate and live-update information from related pages. For instance, I can create a story event page with the place, date, and list of characters involved—and just from that, each character’s page has a map of all the places they’ve been, a timeline of all the events they’ve been present at, and a list of all the characters they’ve met; and it all gets updated whenever I add or edit an event.
Plus it’s on a web server, so I can access it from any device with an internet connection.
As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.
On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.
I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.
I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.
If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.
A bit of an aside, but breezewiki.com is a great open sourced way to get away from this (their internal search doesn’t always work, but a search engine search for fandom name + breezewiki should do it)
You're an absolute hero. I'm easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I'm on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It's a wiki, for Christ's sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It's just static content most of the time!
edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.
I do, but certain Android browsers don't support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can't use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can't be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I'm home or VPNed home. I don't want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don't want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can't VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I'm sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.
It’s mainly funny, because all the women look bored out of their mind. It makes it look like they’re letting Greg blather on, even though none of his points are novel to them. And Greg has such a massive ego that he doesn’t notice no one is listening to him.
Obviously, yes, Greg probably is just a person without ego talking normally. But him being the only dude in the picture and the only one talking, the mansplaining interpretation is a little too close for comfort, which makes it funny.
Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.
As of December 31, 2023, [Wikimedia has] annual revenues of $180.2 million, […] net assets of $255 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021.
Wikipedia makes most of its money from donations, with some money coming from other sources like commercial API access. It consistently raises more money than it spends and has been building an endowment. However, that income mainly comes from the fundraising drives.
Wikipedia has an endowment, but it isn’t enough to run the website for more than a few years.
In terms of expenses, the largest expense is in having staff to run the various websites and foundation. Charity auditors rank the foundation highly on expenses, so the foundation is likely not overpaying staff.
Wikipedia needs donations to survive, but it isn’t struggling. If you feel like you have better things to donate to, it is probably ok for now.
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