Vincent

@Vincent@feddit.nl

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Vincent ,

From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.

Vincent ,

It's technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.

Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that's independent of for-/non-profit status.

Vincent ,

That would be a terrible AI.

Vincent ,

I support anonymous telemetry collected by a non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.

Vincent ,

I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for weather there, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.

I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you're actually searching for.

Vincent ,

llamafile also builds on that work, I believe (she's the main contributor): https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

Vincent ,

Same. I don't see why people need to argue about it or make a conscious decision about it anyway.

(My distro determined it was ready to use a while ago, so I've been switched over for a long time now. Indeed it's working fine, and I think I hardly even notice the difference.)

Vincent ,

Like Kooha?

Also, GNOME comes with a pretty great simple screen recorder by default.

Vincent OP ,

It's open source, so theoretically, yes.

Vincent OP ,

They're showing the native file picker which using XDG desktop portals.

I'm also fairly sure that the "(but of course there are competing standards)" line referred to Flatpak vs. Snap (vs. AppImage).

Vincent OP ,

If they're using a CLA, that would only be used if you want them to merge your code into their codebase. If you're running a fork, that shouldn't be a problem.

Vincent OP ,

Well, you got me to give it a try. The process seemed simple enough, but unfortunately my laptop hangs when I run cargo run --release, so looks like no Zed for me for a while (until someone builds a Flatpak).

Vincent ,

Crossing my fingers that someone will step up to create a Flatpak 🤞

Vincent ,

Either that, or it's a joke.

Vincent ,

The sheer audacity and arrogance of giving me something for free and not caring* about me.

* "Not caring" presumably means "not doing something about my pet issue", but I'm not going to take the clickbait.

Vincent ,

Dealing with GNOME users problems all day in the forum, KDE is just better for usability?

It seems not unimaginable that whichever is more popular (/the default) will have more people reporting problems in the forum, regardless of how good it is?

Vincent ,

This is the post to upvote: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85

Vincent ,

If you want a clean install, go for a carefully curated set of packages, rather than trying to mix and match to create your own selection - that's bound to result in a Frankenstein installation.

I'm partial to Fedora Silverblue, which is essentially just a single package containing the things you need to have a usable desktop. You can install what you need separately on top of that, but on updates, the whole base gets replaced wholesale - including, which is most relevant to your concerns, removing stuff that is no longer used/needed, rather than having that clog up over time.

Vincent ,

I'm on Fedora Silverblue, which is great now, but when I installed it, I remember thinking that its installer was way less intuitive than Ubuntu's, and I think it also had fewer features (e.g. discovering existing operating systems and offering to install alongside it, IIRC?). I've seen screenshots of a new installer being in development, which looked like an improvement, but still not as smooth an experience as Ubuntu's.

Vincent ,

Adobe-free PDFs are pretty neat, though Firefox has a great PDF viewer/editor nowadays, which works well on Windows too.

Vincent ,

There's a convention to append a tilde to files/folders that are backups, so presumably some app at some point made a copy of /usr/local/share/applications, and then the original one got deleted?

Vincent ,

TypeScript sometimes is the testing ground for the future features of ECMAScript

They have an explicit policy to only include features that are stage 3 already (i.e. that are pretty much certain to land in the language as-is). The only times they've diverged from this is long in the past (I think enum is the main remnant of that, for which I'd recommend using unions of literal string types instead), and experimentalDecorators under pressure from Angular - which has always been behind a flag explicitly named experimental.

So I really wouldn't worry too much about that.

Vincent ,

If TypeScript still is a fad at this point, his definition of fad is far lengthier than mine is.

I'm fairly sure TypeScript will remain in popular use longer than whatever project you're working on 😅

Vincent ,

that will /should probably make their way into JS.

Not really, IMHO. The main advantage of TS is that it will help you catch errors without having to run a particular piece of code - i.e. you won't have to move to the third page of some multi-page form to discover a particular bug. In other words, it helps you catch bugs before your code even reaches your browser, so it doesn't bring you much to have them in the browser.

(There is a proposal to allow running TS in the browser, which would be nice, but you'd still run a type checker separately to actually catch the bugs.)

Vincent ,

I think the syntax explicitly won't get standardised - but the places where syntax can be put will be (e.g. after a : following a variable, before the =). With, yes, the goal of eliminating the build step, but the type checker (which really is just a linter at this point) would still be able to define their own specific syntax. I don't think it could work any other way either, anyway.

Vincent ,

Is it just because it's faster? Feels like I can wait a couple of months for that?

Vincent ,

Thanks yeah, I do get that - when something is a lot faster, it feels pretty great, and you kinda wish you had that forever. At the same time, when you didn't have it, you're blissfully ignorant and don't really miss it. So I'm going to keep myself in that state to avoid borking my system with a premature upgrade, haha.

Vincent ,

This is the main reason I don't generally rebase on anything except versions I intend to stay on if things work well. Yes, you'll keep your files and folders, but the updated software will write to them, and those will stay there too.

For example, new versions of Firefox might make modifications to your profile directory that might not work in earlier versions of Firefox. So if your rebase gives you a newer version, than reverting will break your Firefox profile.

(Now with Firefox specifically this isn't usually a problem, since even older OS releases will have the latest Firefox versions, and Firefox itself is pretty stable too, but the concept could also apply to other software.)

Vincent ,

It does, for the apps that are Flatpaks. But e.g. most of GNOME, and Firefox, are part of the immutable image at least for Fedora Silverblue.

Vincent ,

True; I'm mostly thinking about foundational pieces like GNOME Shell and settings, which could still wreak quite a bit of havoc. I don't actually know how often those introduce such breaking changes, but I'd rather not risk it.

Vincent ,

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

Vincent ,

Yes, Librewolf is basically a fork of Firefox that makes different trade-offs, where it accepts more breakage than Firefox does, to gain a bit more privacy.

Vincent ,

It's fantastic, for two reasons:

  • There's so much great software available through it, and I can always get the latest version regardless of my distro - or an older version if it hasn't kept up with its dependencies.
  • It's part of the tooling that allows me to update my operating system without risk of it breaking (i.e. I can use an atomic distro because of it).
Vincent ,

If we can't discuss systemd until 4% is reached, we can't discuss systemd ever. Which is fair, because the systemd horse has already been beaten to death at this point.

Exactly :)

Vincent ,

Lucky kids. I remember when I switched to Linux and encountered my first app store (Synaptic). That was already such a huge improvement over random .exes, and app stores today are way, way better.

Vincent , (edited )

Absolutely. Luckily there are plenty of non-walled garden solutions on Linux, e.g. Flatpak.

Vincent ,

I believe the explanation is "it's hard, it's being worked on, but it will take some time until all the pieces are in place", and they're not going to hold off releases until it is.

Vincent ,

That's the thing. It would be pretty much fine if they'd said that you're supporting the development of the mobile software ecosystem, and get a toy device to play with, but their marketing can be pretty misleading.

The question, of course, is whether it would work any other way. But it still leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

(Then again, they're expensive enough that I hope anyone buying them has done enough research beforehand to know what things are really like, or doesn't care about the money that much.)

Vincent ,

I kinda like the concept, but I'd feel bad about wasting energy rebuilding my custom image every day just so I can have that one extra package installed :/

Vincent ,

mozillavpn, in my case.

Vincent ,

Yeah that's what I'm doing now :)

Vincent ,

That one apparently is legit: https://floss.social/@sonny/111966204515001155

Vincent ,

A big benefit is writing the app once and it working everywhere. If it only works on Android, people will just default to the tools tailored to that platform anyway.

Vincent ,

That's theoretically true, but in practice, the desktop experience (screen size, interaction model, etc.) is sufficiently different that adapting it to mobile to get an app-like experience is not that different from building a separate app.

Vincent ,

Then why do you think most business are already writing a separate Android app rather than just optimising their mobile website?

But "make the mobile version not take up as much screen-space" is not as simple as simply zooming out and just hiding some icon labels. And just the fact that people interact by touch rather than with a mouse and keyboard is already a major adjustment.

Anyway, I'll leave it at this, since I feel like there's not much to gain here for me from the discussion anymore :) Cheers!

Vincent ,

Support it or you won’t know what you lost.

Note that the best way to support it is to actually use its products, Firefox in particular. That's what gives Mozilla the ability to influence the direction of the web and web standards.

Vincent ,

The only reason appears to be that it wasn't completed in time, since:

On the other hand, Mutter 46 beta adds more preparations for upcoming variable refresh rate support

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