I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.
As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.
You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.
Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference
It definitely makes a difference, and putting money into Wikipedia is a great use of funds. The reason I asked the question is because I’m not well off, but I still like to donate to projects from time to time. This means I have a limited (and strict budget), and was wondering if they need my tenner badly enough to send marketing emails over it. Because I’d like to donate to people who actually really need the money, and Wikipedia will do just fine for some time without my money going to them.
Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.
Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.
If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got
Thanks man. I would much rather give my time than my money for OSS projects, but I have a lot to learn and do not match up the quality of contributions needed in said projects. I’ll do what I can.
You can contribute by doing code reviews on PRs. Even if your contribution is only to ask “What does this do?” it can help locate places where code isn’t easily readable.
Obviously use your judgment, but code review commenting is a nice way to get up to speed on a project, improve your own coding skills, and is valuable to the project too.
I had an apprenticeship once at a dev shop where everybody was leagues above me. As basically the lowest-level coder both in status and in skill, I was surprised to find out my “curriculum” included doing code reviews on very senior people’s code.
Now I swear by the practice. It’s kinda like anyone can be a therapist if they know how to listen. Anyone can provide value with code review if they keep their eyes open and communicate honestly.
I feel that keeping small streams of charity flowing have helped me see abundance in my life.
I’m not financially rich but I’m pretty happy. And I mean I struggle. Bills often late. But a couple bucks a month is worth it to me for the psychological benefit.
I fully agree with not limiting themselves financially whether it’s 1,10,100 etc. Their aim is to bring knowledge in all languages to even the poorest parts of the world. If some Lemmy user’s bank account is one of the poorest parts of the world right now, lol…I mean only “you” know how much money you can stand to give while still living comfortably and being entertained in life.
I have to take small disagreement with the money contribution not making a difference though. It’s the flip side of the same coin that tells people it’s find if they don’t vote cause their one vote won’t make a difference. The hole in the argument is that we don’t vote alone, and we don’t donate alone. The specific attitude “my vote won’t make a difference” actually costs millions of votes every year, just like “my $20 won’t make a difference” could cause millions of dollars of losses.
But anyway, separate argument from the situation here as our Lemmiford here sounds like they’re in saving mode till things look up.
Do NOT donate. Believe in yourself. Believe you will one day be well off. At that point in time feel free to pay your “backlog” of payments. Write down todays date somewhere and “start a tab”.
Wikipedia will not help you when you need it most. Take care of yourself first… then donate.
Never donate if you don’t have the money. You can put a imaginary bill in an imaginary jar and turn those imaginary bills in real ones once you get better off.
Honestly if you figured out lemmy you can figure out linux at least enough not to be a 95yo about it.
Use a distro that is both popular and good for beginners, like Fedora or it’s KDE spin, or Mint. There will be learning, there probably will be troubleshooting, you’re switching from something you’ve always been familiar with to a new thing, it is unavoidable. It’s like moving to Mexico, you’ll need to pick up at least a little Spanish. It’s really not as hard as people make it seem, most questions will be solved by searching the problem and pasting in a terminal command, but it’s good to learn what those commands do over time. It might benefit you to use the computer more often while learning if possible.
First person on my dad’s side of the family to get a master’s degree. I loved school, but I’m also very happy to be done with it haha.
Edit: maybe the first to get a bachelor’s as well, but I’m not 100% sure about that. In any case, I’m proud to have gone through all that. Learned a lot.
He was fun, but, uh, yeah. He definitely had a drinking problem. Drank on the job, at work, to fall asleep, to relax, when he was nervous, when he was happy. Not sure if he ever put this in to pratice but I wouldn’t doubt it at all.
There’s kind of a bell curve of users where their needs are so simple that Linux use is great for them. They’ll never do anything more complex than visit a webpage in Firefox, and that’s great.
Then as your needs get more and more complex, Linux isn’t quite a good fit – You’ll want to use a specific printer, or a specific software (looking at you solidworks!), or you’ll have some sort of organization that requires you use MS Office, etc. – There are ways around all of that stuff, but if you’re not already on the train, it can get frustrating.
Up until your needs get even more complex, where Linux starts becoming the best choice again - You want a tiling window manager, and ipv6 with firewall and ZFS on the network etc.
It’s the middle bell curve where your new user is already kind-of a power user, but not quite a technical-user yet that gets people.
If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.
If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)
I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.
My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.
I just got Android 14 the other day through lineage OS 21 and I’m enjoying the fact that when I pull down the notification shade now that it triggers a quick tap of the vibration motor
You can try Linux out without installing it to get a feel for it before you make the jump. Set a weekend aside (or at least a couple of hours) to test drive a Linux distro and check if it is your cup of tea.
This is one way of doing this:
Install Virtual Box on your (Widows) PC
head over to getaurora.dev and download the latest iso
In virtualbox create a new VM
set the OS Type to fedora (64 bit)
after that you can keep all the standard settings, just be aware that performance is not going to be representative of an actual install
Then select the newly created VM and open the settings panel
here you go to “Storage” and click on the slot under “Controler: IDE” labeled "empty"
click on the CD symbol on the right side of the window, in line with “optical drive” and select "choose a disk file"
pick the iso file you downloaded in step 2
close the settings window and start the VM
go through the installation wizard to install Aurora OS in your Virtual Machine
Profit
I know that these instructions can seem daunting but it is easier than it reads, I promise.
Why Aurora OS
Aurora OS is based on Fedora Silverblue meaning that it is what is known as a immutable distro. That in turn means that it’s harder to mess stuff up and break your install. It also means that some things are harder to achieve. But I also think that you are probably not interested in the hard stuff anyway.
Aurora uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, the same desktop used by Valve on the Steamdeck. It has a familiar Windows like layout by default but also allows you to customise it like crazy to fit your particular need (whatever that may be).
Aurora flatpak as it’s app format. To see what kind of software is available for this distro you can check flathub.org . It’s not going to be as much software as Linux Mint for example (Mint uses flatpak and deb), but everything the average user needs should be there.
Great write up, but OP stated they’re not computer savvy. I’m sure more ppl have used flash drives than used VMs. They are also building a new pc so gotta get those distros from somewhere/another machine.
Another option would be to grab a couple of 4GB or more flash drives and try each one by booting from the flash drive before committing to one.
•download something like balena etcher •download Mint, Ubuntu, PopOs, Aurora, whatever else •use etcher to burn distros to the flash drives • pop in the flash in new pc & have at it
I considered that. Unfortunately silverblue doesn’t do live systems and aurora therefore doesn’t either. So a VM is the only way of trying it out. OP stated that they have someone to help with the actual installation so I left the whole create install medium for bare metal install out intentionally since I assume this person will be capable of helping with that.
Also small Markdown help: If you use dashes lemmy will automatically format bulletpoints correctly. You can’t use •s for it. Doesn’t take anything away from your comment, etcher is still the best tool to create a bootable usb drive, but for the future consider using dashes.
There are some loud voices in the fediverse who don’t want it to be very welcoming. Here are a couple examples:
Threads defederation - what could onboard people to the fediverse faster than a giant platform run by Facebook joining? Yes, I hate Facebook as much as everyone else here, but they’re making an offramp for their users and half the fediverse wants to close that off?
Overbearing enforcement of norms - yes, it’s good if people put alt text on their images and content warnings on stuff lots of people find upsetting. It’s harmful to hassle people about it until they leave.
I think people who a small network with strong social norms are better off on servers that are selective about what they federate with to ensure stricter adherence to the preferences of their users. One of the great things about federated systems is that users can pick a place that’s run in a way that works for them.
I don’t think a Mastodon server attempting to attract a mainstream audience should block them though, at least not at this point. We have a chance to welcome millions of people who wouldn’t have even heard of the fediverse otherwise.
If threads is incorporated into the larger fediverse, sure you’ll get a bump in dau, but threads will eventually dominate the user base. Then if they devide to cut ties with Lemmy sites, the fediverse basically loses 90% of engagement overnight.
Threads users are much more likely to interact with other microblog software like Mastodon than with Lemmy. It might be possible to post from Threads to Lemmy now by tagging a community much like Mastodon, but I have never seen it done. Lemmy.world does not block threads.net.
kbin.life
Oldest