I can only imagine “tights” was supposed to be “thoughts”? Still, clearly exhibits a deep misunderstanding of what she’s talking about

Right, because proprietary software is never abandoned. At least foss leaves you with the source code so you or other folk can carry on the torch in the original dev’s absence.

Bluesky will be in the same boat given enough time. Mastodon (or other actually federated options) is the only proper stand-in for twitter.

Call it fewer options, I call it curated options. Yeah, I don’t get to install every piece of software I could on windows (though that list is shrinking really fucking fast), but i also don’t want to. I don’t need to put energy into cracking adobe software so they can steal my licensing and farm my data to sell or train their AI on.

I don’t want to use a drill that only works with screws that are officially approved for DeWalt drills, and I don’t want to hack a DeWalt drill to make it work with other screws. I want a drill that fits whatever screw I want. People aren’t switching to Linux because of the vast amount of software available for it, it’s because it’s the option that actually respects us as consumers.

Seconded. Its a great experience, my only complains is that photo synchronization with my phone isn’t stellar. Best solution I’ve found thus far is a proprietary app called FolderSync

Im not even gonna try to learn music creation again, just assuming ableton and flstudio would both be issues.

I understand that more conventional software is proprietary and not released natively for Linux, but it seems unfortunate yo me to let proprietary software stop you from making art. Ive got friends who produce music exclusively on Linux machines using qtractor, which is free and open source, so there’s no need to crack it. I can’t speak for the rest of the tools you mentioned but maybe it would just be worth exploring some of the Foss options to see what you can do with them? I haven’t bothered cracking software since I made the move over to Linux because I just haven’t found any piece of my workflows that actually depends on non-foss software. Turns out tools developed by the communities that use them rather than corporate entities typically turn out to be pretty good.

As I understand, an adtech company bought a majority stake in StartPage in 2019, and though they apparently can’t use that stake to force privacy-threatening changes, I personally find that acquisition disconcerting. Probably not enough to say it’s unsafe to use, but enough that I prefer some of the other options out there.

Yeah spotify is fucking vile. I hear my peers praise it for its alleged ability to perfect tailor playlists and recommendations for music discovery- because I guess we can’t be bothered to figure out what music we like anymore. And them of course, it behinds spoonfeeding its users their own ai-generated slop that they don’t have to pay licensing fees for.

dissatisfied with this formerly-popular social media platform that experienced a hostile fascist takeover and enshittification? Join us on this currently-popular social media platform that will undergo the same event in seven years! Because how are we supposed to make profits by learning from our mistakes?

And FOSS is just cool.

It’s such an underrated feature of desktop Linux. The fact that if I experience an issue with a piece of software, I could find the program’s source code and browse issues to see if anyone had a shared experience. And if not, I could publicly submit an issue which the developers and other users/contributors could help resolve. And if you’re brave/experienced enough, you can take a crack at fixing it yourself and potentially resolving the issue for other users!

On windows/macos which both fail to foster robust foss communities remotely comparable to Linux, the best option more often than not was sending an email to some support address that either never gets checked, or only replies with canned messages. After which you’ll never know whatnif anything happened to your report.

Lots of the most best tools for desktop Linux are free and open source, so you really don’t need to pirate desktop software. As far as multimedia goes, I generally find it much easier to sail the seas on Linux as opposed to Windows where everything felt hacky and difficult to isolate.

I mean compared to some elements of windows, yeah Linux is more similar to macos. But compared to other elements of macos, Linux is more similar to windows. But to say it’s super similar to either one in particular is kind of missing what makes each of them what they are.

Macos and Linux skills and fluency aren’t significantly more transferable than between Linux and Windows. They’re three pieces of software that ultimately try to do the same thing, but go about it in drastically different ways. There are only so many ways from your house to the grocery store, so some of them are bound to cross.

If Microsoft keeps fucking up at every turn, it seems like at some point the only thing that’ll keep them afloat is workplace/education investments in their environment. Seems like they’re even losing their grip on being the default OS preinstalled on non-apple PC hardware and the advantage that provided.

I mean, that’s kind of a whole separate thing. An account in a mobile food ordering app is significantly less invasive than an account on your whole entire operating system- like, laughably so.

Never mind that one is on your mobile device, which is an incredibly invasive surveillance device as-is for all except those with enough dedication and paranoia. Conversely, a desktop is at least conceptually much more practical to harden for privacy.

For what it’s worth I guess, I do not use mobile food ordering applications or accounts.

You don’t have to host a website. Just make software that works like the website and runs locally.

No offense, but you were told about handbrake, a tool that goes out of its way to offer a cross-platform GUI and complained about it not immediately working- with no elaboration.

We learn to write before we learn to navigate computer systems- the command line is only scary because digital illiteracy is taught to us the second we are presented with the windows/macos login screen. It truly does not get simpler than telling a computer convert image.pdf image.jpg.

These tools are daunting, yes, and it’s not your fault that everyone is taught that computers are magic boxes we have no real control over, but the hours you spend in a command line are just like the hours you spend learning to sew, or play an instrument. Nobody starts with every manpage seared into their brain, but if you’re able to look up a sketchy website that may well give you malware, you have the tools needed to learn this valuable skill.

Nobody ask this person their thoughts on federal marriage law conventions in the us in the year 2015

Last I used it, it didn’t have nearly the functionality that ubo does

I mean, the phrase ‘sane defaults’ comes to mind

I mean, yeah like another user said, ideally it would be in the interest of groups which allege to have am interest in some form of democracy. But additionally, the ability to set up browsable partial mirrors which could be hosted by miscellaneous nonprofits and individuals both within and outside of the US would be a massive first step to preserving the information that IA stores. The fact that attacks on their servers can eradicate all access to the information they store is troubling given how many enemies they’ve made simply through the work they do.

That’s cool but I’ll check back in to see which fascist technocrat is running bluesky in 8 years