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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • pixelscript@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlKrita FTW
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    3 months ago

    I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.



  • pixelscript@lemmy.mltoArch Linux@lemmy.mlHow often do you update your system?
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    3 months ago

    I just click the litte nag icon in my taskbar whenever I notice it.

    Since I’m on Debian Testing that is often daily. But it varies. If I don’t look at that part of my screen that day, w/e.

    I thought I turned on auto update so it would just do it on its own. But it didn’t work for whatever reason. Sigh… Linux moment. There is an answer, surely, but the cost of debugging it outweighs my patience. Typing in my password an extra once(ish) a day is fine, I guess.

    Edit: Just realized this is the Arch community. D’oh.


  • pixelscript@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlBut this... does put a smile on my face
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    4 months ago

    I replied to that thread.

    OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

    Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.







  • It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

    I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

    But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

    It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.


  • Maybe you do know, but in case you don’t, the “convenience fee” is (usually) just the price the vendor has to pay to process a credit card transaction. Because in order to accept credit cards as payment in the first place, they have to pay the credit card network for the privilege.

    Providing the exact same service to you is more expensive for them based entirely on the method you use to pay. You bet they’re going to pass that extra expense onto you. The alternative is raising their service charge to eat the cost and screwing over people who pay with check or cash. Which is what most retail stores tend to do.

    Though, I agree, I’d rather they just do the fucking math and charge a rate that covers their operating expenses. It’s shouldn’t be my problem to pay their itemized expenses. Just know that if they did so, we’ll be charged the same total either way.

    It’s a similar argument with tipping culture. “Oh, you have to tip, employees rely on it to make ends meet!” Sure, but why is that my problem? If the business can’t create a business model that properly pays for the expenses it needs to function, they should go out of business. Raise prices. I’ll pay the same as the tip, fine, just stop playing these frivilous smoke and mirror games with my bill.



  • pixelscript@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlApple
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    4 months ago

    In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

    Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

    The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.



  • You’d certainly think so. But never underestimate a user’s ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn’t designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.

    I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a “just ask around on the Discord” link serving the role.

    Discord probably isn’t used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it’s a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn’t outright disabled, it’s a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.

    Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don’t update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.

    Fwiw I’ve also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.


  • I don’t mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.

    Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.

    Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don’t care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that’s fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.

    Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.

    It can also better integrate into the dev’s personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I’ve had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I’ve held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I’m terminally online on Discord. So if I’m gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I’ll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.

    Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it’s the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I’m hanging out.



  • Too many experts who value the deeper teaching potential angle seem to never want to acknowledge the bounce rate it will also have.

    No, not everyone asking about how to get into the Linux ecosystem is doing so specifically because the knowledge itself is its own reward. Those who are will tighten their belts, whiten their knuckles, and figure it out just like you hoped they would. Those who aren’t will collapse under the sheer weight of all the bullshit and bail out. Frankly I’d consider the bulk of curious new users to be the latter and I default assume it for everyone who appears unless they indicate otherwise.

    Some people think this kind of filtering based on willingness to learn is a good and healthy thing. I call it elitism and gatekeeping.



  • I use KDE on Debian and did not encounter this problem when I did the reverse action (migrated /home from a second drive back to the system drive).

    This may be an insulting question, but are your files in the new home partition inside a /home directory on that partition? Because if they are, that would definitely mess it up. If you mounted that to /home in your fstab file, then the path to your home dir would be /home/home/user instead of /home/user. Your user directory needs to be at the root of the filesystem on that partition.

    I expect you did not make this mistake, but a sanity check never hurts…

    Oh, and check the files on the new partition with ls -l as well. See who owns them. If you did the copy with the root account or with sudo, the owner of the files might be root. They should be owned by the user you are trying to log in as.