I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

Unfortunately there isn’t one easy source that I’ve found. This is based on reading the stuff you linked to, as well as discourse/matrix discussions linked to from those sources. I compare it mentally to Guido van Rossum as BDFL of Python (though not any longer). He did a much better job of communicating expectations, like here

It made some people unhappy that there was no Python 2.8, but everybody knew what was happening. The core Python team also wasn’t surprised by that announcement, unlike with stuff like Anduril or flakes for the nix devs.

There was also a failure to communicate with stuff like the PR that would switch to Meson. The PR author should have known if Eelco broadly agreed with it before opening it. If there was a process that the PR author just ignored, the PR should have been closed with “Follow this process and try again”. That process can be as simple as “See if Eelco likes it”, since he was BDFL, but the process needs to be very clear to everyone.

Exactly, thanks. “politicking” != US political issues

My take on it is that the creator of Nix was very good technically but was not a good BDFL, and that was the root of the problem. He didn’t do a good job of politicking, stepped down, and now Nix is going through a bit of interregnum. I don’t think it’s likely to fail overall though, nixpkgs is too valuable of a resource to just get abandoned. I expect the board seats will be filled by people that know how to politick, and things will continue on after that.

Lessons learned is being a BDFL is hard. IMO Eelco Dolstra failed because he had opinions about things like Anduril sponsorship and flakes, and didn’t just declare “This is the way things are going to be, take it or leave it”. People got really pissed off because there wasn’t a clear message or transparency, which resulted in lots of guessing.

They won’t open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO

That’s an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:

https://github.com/popey/unsnap

Thanks for the list. It’d be interesting to see something like the Are We X Yet sites for Mozilla/Rust projects that tracks this sort of thing

I couldn’t view this with Firefox or Gnome. ImageMagick to the rescue, though:

convert https://pub-be81109990da4727bc7cd35aa531e6b2.r2.dev/weofihweiof.jpg meme.jpg

You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it’s like tmux with nice defaults

There’s some even older UI bits buried around in there:

Do you have more info or a link? I don’t use hearing aids. Is this using hearing aids with your computer via Bluetooth?

It is decentralized. None of the issues you bring up are proof of centralization. If you get banned from one instance or don’t like email verification or whatever your beef is, find an instance with whatever policies you like. If you can’t find such an instance, start your own.

If nobody federates with you because your instance is full of people that got banned from everywhere else, that’s decentralization in action and maybe you should stop to consider if there’s a reason nobody wants to interact with you?

I’m sure Google has their own shitty reasons, but also get bent, shitheads 🖕

I know it won’t happen, but it’d be nice if Linux switched to GPLv3. That would at least help somewhat here

VLC is the sort of software where if it can’t play it, I don’t know what else could. I guess I’d also try the ffmpeg command line tool to see if it can figure out what the video file even is, and maybe it could convert it to a regular format.

Also TBH such a video file would be interesting enough that you could probably post it here (if possible, or any metadata you can extract from it) and see if anyone knows how to play it.

Since Word documents are one of your bigger concerns, you can download LibreOffice on one of your current machines and try them out. That’s the same program you’d be using on Linux.

It’d have to be a pretty unusual video format to have issues. Similar to above, you can try VLC on Windows and see if there’s any issues.

Based on your description, I’d be surprised if you encountered any major issues. I’d recommend trying either Pop! OS if you’re OK with a slightly different UI from Windows, or Mint if you want something more comfortable. Note that you can create a LiveUSB stick of either of those, or any other distro. You can then boot your computer from it and take it for a spin to see if there’s any obvious issues.

Oh neat. Development had died down, but looks like it’s picking back up again and the creator is finding more maintainers. It’s what I use on my phone.

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 4244.39 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 12.05 bits of identifying information.

Firefox mobile with various addons, most important of which is probably NoScript

Linus wrote git before anything like github existed, and the best way to do it was email. They just haven’t switched away from using email