Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who'd invest in making Firefox's Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Well we wouldn’t want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
When people ask me why I like Linux, my go-to reason is my main personal machine. I use it for everything I do outside of work, including running my Emby server.
I built it from $500 worth of parts 13 years ago. I’ve kept updating the os and applications. It’s starting to slow down a bit after the last os upgrade, but it’s still plenty usable.
I am getting concerned about the spinning platters. As far as I am aware, Linux won’t prevent an ancient hard disk drive from reaching the natural end of is life.
It’s probably time to move on to a new machine. Well, new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and disks at least.
I spun down my 486 DX 33 home linux server in 2006 simply because by then it was ridiculous to spend the electricity on something less powerful than a five year old entry level laptop. It never failed. I bet that if I powered it up today, it would still work as a power loud and power hungry PiHole server.
i have a ibm laptop with a really old ssd running and the health of everything looks very good. i never wrote a whole lot to the ssd, i feel like this computer could last 30 years or more without going fully obsolete. its just a basic laptop with not very good hardware that i use for looking up information during a tabletop game, read a pdf, or to browse the internet. sometimes i message people on it. perfect for my use case, and probably will never need anything more than this. it always has to be plugged in because the battery sucks now, but its lightweight and portable so its not a big deal.
I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.
There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).
The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.
For one, AI datasets often break copyright law, frequently appropriating from artists. Executives are also trying to use it to eliminate the jobs of artists, and I feel it’s wrong to try and obsolete something people love doing.
In addition, they take a lot of power, not helping in the way of the needed changes to follow climate goals.
I do break copyright law every single day of my life. And so far the only harm I’ve done is avoiding Disney a free pass to kill my wife.
Copyright law is bad. Sharing is caring.
Also I’ve make AI images with Stable Diffusion self hosted on my N100 server that takes way less energy than a normal computer being turned on for hours using Photoshop, so I saved the world by doing AI images instead of manually painting them.
For many small project is AI images or no images at all.
When you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist to do imagery for your website. You go online to copy something or nowadays you can use AI to wrap it up. It’s a tool at people’s disposition like anyother.
And before anyone comes talking about copyright laws… shall I present them my 10 TB hard drive of pirated media? Human culture is to be shared, not gatekeeped.
So you agree with the idea that submitting a “minor nitpick” PR suggesting that the software doesn’t refer to all users as male is “personal politics” and deserves an angry response for even suggesting it?
You sure do sound like someone who would agree with Lunduke…
Being a woman or being transgender isn’t “political”. Vocally opposing inclusiveness is asshole behavior.
Not even mad that he’s not accepting a low-effort PR. It’s trivializing people’s existence as “political” that makes him shitty.
Making a low effort argument against a straw man that was never stated. You sure you aren’t a conservative?
No, I disagree with the idea of digging into years of history to drag up the one thing to be mad at and bandwagon over with a loud mob with surface level care that move onto the next bandwagon in a week. Typical to Twitter behavior. Doesn’t actually help anyone, typically hurts the movements they claim to support among everyone else.
I’m about the farthest from Lunduke you can get, he’s just not wrong in this specific instance. You don’t know me, “you sure do sound” is a silly attempt at internet games. Yawn.
It wasn’t right for people to bandwagon and harass the project, but that doesn’t mean he was right for closing this PR in the way he did. Him closing this PR is what caused the project to be attacked, not part of the attacks.
i don’t even want to click your link because it says “unhinged dishonest activists”. i have literally only ever heard the worst people with the worst opinions ever say shit like that.
From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say “oops, that makes sense”, click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.
Upgrading to gender neutral language is important.
Having a reflex to avoid politics, especially when you live in an environment where concepts like gender aren’t discussed, is understandable. It’s an attempt to do no harm that doesn’t have the expected impact. It still causes harm because simple problems like gendered language are treated with an allergic response. This is what happens when conservatives hyper-sensitize well-meaning people on social topics. Considering the world we live in, you can’t expect everyone to know how to flawlessly navigate these issues on the first try.
Their policy of “no politics” was misguided, but understandable. Everything is political. It was fashionable for decades to pretend otherwise. Many people grow up in an environment that ignores social topics. They need to be accepted into spaces where social topics are discussed, not immediately ostracized for not knowing the rules to a game they are new to.
I would like them to neutralize gendered assumptions in their documentation and learn from the experience, but that can only happen if they aren’t ostracized from the community. I want to give them a chance to learn and improve to disrupt Google’s unhealthy monopoly in the browser space.
The PR in question is also in error. It claims that the documentation assumed the gender of the user or the developer. A close reading of the requested commit reveals that the documentation instead assumes the gender of an example user named “anon” whose permissions are being altered. The documentation’s use of gender is in using a male as an example user needing their privileges deescalated. Still problematic, of course: not only men need their privilege checked from time to time.
It’s a one-time error the maintainer made 3 years ago (at a time when much of the US-influenced west was going crazy with polarization over the use of pronouns), not a consistent behavior of intolerance as one would expect given the level of hostility towards the project seen here. I personally find it weirder to hold such a long-standing grudge for a one-off error, and over a project one is not even personally involved with.
Like i said earlier, it was changed to they later, to the lead dev, in german they/them is a neopronoun, and “he” is gender neutral is those situations, i assume he thought it was the same in english
Maybe you’re unaffected so you don’t give a shit. Or maybe you view gay people as scum undeserving of equal rights.
But donating money to try to reverse gay marriage is disgusting. As is donating money to a politician who said AIDS was a good thing and gay people should be cleansed of the earth by it.
They used “they” when referring to a person, and “it” when referring to a process (the author used “he” when referring to a process calling another process, when he should have used “it.”)
Jumping to transphobic and misogynistic for not wanting to use inclusive language in some repo documentation is a big jump. He didn’t ever dead named anyone or refuse to use some person preferred pronoums. Its just not wanting to use inclusive language on documentation. Most, if not all, documentation I have ever read in my life don’t use the newest trend of inclusive language.
By they way accusations were written it seemed like devs were actually exposing hate speech or something like that.
Let’s not be like that, ok? At least I choose not be like that. You can destroy people lives with such accusations over basically nothing, be better.
I know that we are near Americans elections as it always makes the whole internet jumping, and throwing knives to find “the enemy”. But it could be as simple as inclusive language might be confusing for non english speakers, or might the trend change over time and it’s just a bother to keep updating with the lastest trend. Do you know how many versions of inclusive language did we have in my language? We started using ell@s, then ellxs, then ellos y ellas, then elles, then ellos, ellas y elles. It’s too volatile and little to be that mad over it. Specially when there’s people out there who truly hate anyone who is not a cis str male and is doing true hate speech over that.
If there’s more evidence of devs being evil, I will aknowledge it. But for such a little inconsequential thing (again it’s not even being against someone chosen pronoums, it’s just general documentation) I refuse to spread hate towards other human being.
I also try to use the feminine as neutral instead of masculine. -Note: I’m Spanish so our language is heavily gendered- Mostly because I think that sounds better than the trend of using a newly introduced neutral gender that sounds terrible because Spanish language never had neutral.
Also if someone gets angry for that I have always the reply “now you know a little on how women fell during all story”
But still, neutral and inclusive language is still too new and far away from normalization to get mad at people on how they use it or not use. And if you are not deadnaming or deadgendering (is that a word?) you are not really hurting anyone.
Is this because they used “he” instead of “they” in the build instructions? … They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that’s enough. It’s the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.
[edit] Just in case people think I’m joking. I’m not. As far as I’m aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote ‘he’ instead of ‘they’ in the build instructions. That’s what caused the original outrage. And as far as I’m aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I’m not aware of, post about it here.
To be clear, nobody was outraged by the devs using gendered language. The outrage was because they rejected multiple PRs to correct it under the guise of it being “political”.
It was changed to they later, to the lead dev, in german they/them is a neopronoun, and “he” is gender neutral is those situations, i assume he thought it was the same in english
Debian still supports Pentium IIs. They axed support for the i586 architecture (original Pentium) a few years back, but Debian 12 (current stable, AKA Bookworm) still supports i686 chips like the P2.
Not sure how the rest of the hardware in that Compaq will work.
I feel like this is a dumb question but why do web engines need constant development? I thought we had an established standard for HTML. Once a web engine matches that standard isn’t that sufficient?
There are features that constantly get added. It’s not only HTML (maybe the html part is stable, I don’t know), but there’s CSS and most importantly JavaScript.
Also, browsers don’t always follow the standard exactly. Some features get added that aren’t in the standard.
Some of the new features most people aren’t aware of us that I used recently :
WebXR, make a Web page immersive and work in the browser of VR/AR headsets, e.g Meta Quest, Lynx XR1, Apple Vision Pro, etc
WebBlueTooth, connect to a BT device, e.g a Lego controller in order to move actuator, data from sensors, etc
WebUSB, connect a device and update its firmware, e.g SmartWatch, mechanical keyboard, etc
GamePad API, use a gamepad or joystick to play from a browser window
Realms in JavaScript for “better” sandboxing, it’s a relatively new feature of the language so the engine must be updated
So… sure none of that really helps to read a 2D Web page (like this one on Lemmy) but they pretty much all help to achieve better cross-platform support. By using the Web rather than native to connect to hardware then it is instantly delivered without having any OS specific driver to build and install. Practically speaking it does make the browser increasingly complex but IMHO it is worth it.
PS: I probably also used some modern CSS so there also the engine (which is ridiculously complex by the way) has to be updated too.
AFAICT that’s correct for WebBluetooth indeed, as it’s only implemented by Chromium (and thus all browsers relying on it) but for but for WebUSB wicg.github.io/webusb/ it’s still being discussed at the W3C level so even though not standards (which I don’t think W3C even produce, only API specifications, e.g HTML isn’t a standard whereas Bluetooth is) thus allowing others to possibly implement it.
To clarify Firefox is my main browser, but (sadly) for those very specific cases I’m relying on Chromium (WebXR on standalone XR devices, even now Wolvic switching to Chromium as a backend).
It’s an important point as by doing this Google is pushing for it’s own set of technologies and is pushing for it’s own engine which comes with a lot of business (namely ads) related “feature” e.g Manifest v3 that aren’t good for privacy.
That is also interesting to consider on “why” a browser keeps on evolving, i.e having the most “advanced” browsers does give an edge and pushes competition away.
HTML used to be a pretty set standard, maintained by the W3C. HTML5 was retired in 2018 (5.2 in 2021). Now it is a Living Standard that changes often and is maintained by a consortium of browser vendors.
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
I haven’t tried with a drawing tablet but I like excalidraw a lot for planning things out like my homelab layout or bases in games. I installed the excalidraw container on my server just so I have my own instance always available
Have you looked at Mate Desktop? It’s based off of an earlier version of Gnome but I find it much more familiar to the way things used to be managed on Windows.
That’s going to come down to the specific hardware. A lot of vendors build their devices to only work under Windows but there are a lot of smart Linux techs who have been able to reverse-engineer working drives. Your best bet is to find a hardware compatibility list and see how much support your particular laptop has.
If you look at Debian, you can get the “net-install” image. This doesn’t even install a desktop environment, it simply boots you to a command line and you can install whatever you want to use. Many other distributions probably have a similar installed available, it’s just a matter of deciphering what the names mean.
If you install something as root, or if it’s installed by the system during the initial installation, then yes you’ll need root, but more likely you will use “sudo” which gives your user account the temporary access needed (if it was set up with that access). Again, going back to something like Debian’s net-install, everything except the core OS would be installed by you anyway.
“Rooting” sounds like a term you brought from an Android phone. In desktop terms, think of the root user as being like the admin on Windows. You only use it when needed, like when you’re performing a system update, otherwise you do everything under your regular user account.
When you install a DE like Gnome, it also adds a login to your graphical interface. If you install a second DE, then on the login screen you are presented a choice as to which one you want to use this time. If you want to switch, you just log out and select another one from the login screen. You can have as many as you want, just remember that this loads a ton of extra stuff on your system. It’s ok to play with, but then I would suggest uninstalling the ones you don’t like.
Wayland is the core of the DE. The previous system was Xorg, but both are still in common use. Docker is a container system, so like if you wanted to install a web server then Docker would contain all of the modules for that software independently of anything else you have installed. This means that a system update is less likely to break something (although that’s already pretty unlikely), but it does require more storage space.
Sure. You install your DE first, and then start installing software like browsers, email, etc. The net install disk is just a barebones system to get you up and running and then you install whatever you need from there. If you’re building a desktop them you might want a DE. If you’re building a server then you might want web or email services. The basic installation can be expended to include everything you want for that particular machine.
The advantage of using a pre-configured full setup is that you don’t need to know the name of all the packages you want to install, and typically you can still remove the ones you don’t like. Even with the DE you will probably find that the package also installs a number of common tools like task bar widgets or file managers. So in making a truly custom system you will have to hit google quite a bit to find the things you want to install, but then you learn what all those various packages actually do. Even the GUI login screen has multiple choices to select from which give you different ways of managing the logins. That’s one of the things most people really enjoy about linux – almost every type of software has multiple choices (like Firefox vs Chrome) so it’s easy to build up a desktop that suits your particular needs.
Yes , I tested it on Ubuntu mate and Mint mate , but I didn’t like it and honestly don’t want something Windows-like , one of the reasons why I’m thinking about moving to Linux - when it’s possible - is to try something new and far from windows , I don’t mind some similarities, of course, but Mate is more similar than I want
My answer for #2 is I have never personally had a problem with Linux on a laptop. Everything works as intended. The only funny thing was when I switched to Arch Linux took a little bit of work to get games to use my Nvidia GPU instead of the integrated one in my CPU. But that was maybe 30 minutes of googling and installing stuff off the AUR. When I ran pop_os it worked right out of the box. I believe pop has all of the Nvidia stuff installed and on Arch I just had to figure out what I needed. That problem was just from lack of experience.
My answer for #3 is I don’t know but I’ve had fun testing different software out to find something that suits me. I want to say way back in the day Ubuntu had a bunch of stuff pre installed. But that was probably 2007 when I last used Ubuntu. On Arch you can just use the discover store to find stuff. If you can’t find it there it’s in the AUR.
#4 rooting on Linux isn’t like rooting on Android. Android is built off Linux so to have “root” access is just like having administrator access or whatever on Windows. Android phones are more locked down so it’s usually a pain to root (the manufacturer don’t really want you to do it). On your own Linux computer you just use root access. For example on Arch in the terminal to do a full system update you have to use root access so you type “sudo pacman -Syu” in the terminal then it asks you for the sudo password or root password that you yourself setup on install. Sudo is the command that says hey I want to do this no questions asked.
#5 it’s Linux you can do whatever you want. You can go through and destroy the entire os if you want.
I’m coming on a year being full time on Linux so that’s about the best I can do answering your questions. I’m sure other people will explain stuff better. Good luck!
Arch is about as minimal as you can get. You won’t even have a text editor if you don’t specifically install one. You won’t be able to connect to the internet to install that text editor if you don’t install the software to configure the network connection either. I made that mistake the first time I installed Arch.
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