A bunch of websites operating as web apps would help explain the bloat. Great idea if somebody is navigating a good chunk of your website. Horrible idea if 99% of your traffic is people being linked to a news article and then leaving afterwards.
The main issue I run into is that even when I use a standard format like ODF, sending a document to someone using a different office suite often leads to various formatting breaking. It's to the point that if I know the person I'm sending the document to, isn't going to be editing it, I send it as a PDF.
I felt deceived when Microsoft added ODF file support, only for formatting to still break when exporting/importing from another suite. What was the point if I'd get the same results as loading a DOCX in Libre Office?
Distro agnostic packages like flatpaks and appimages have become extremely popular over the past few years, yet they seem to get a lot of dirt thrown on them because they are super bloated (since they bring all their dependencies with them)....
Yeah, if it wasn't for my niche needs and desires of using my SteamDeck without touching the system partition, I probably wouldn't have messed with Nix because of how much of a confusing mess of modes and switches there are, and I've used terminal based package managers for years. It's very far from the simple "it just works" of Flatpaks.
They added the Nix directory in SteamOS 3.5 and linked it to the User partition, so now Nix survives SteamOS updates without any workarounds, which is part of why I tried using it.
You can probably just disable auto updates for Android Auto and the apps you use with it, but inevitably things will start breaking, like Play Services APIs that Android Auto relies on, or the APIs those older third-party apps you use rely on.
It sucks, but it was kinda inevitable for a system that has so many moving parts.
You can copyright software code, just like any other written work, to protect you from people literally copy and pasting your work, but the idea that you could patent things like “slide left to unlock” is just stupid, as it’s a fundamental concept and software is full of fundamental concepts.
Compression algorithms being patentable is even more stupid, as it would be like somebody claiming they own Pi, just because they figured it out first. Imagine not being able to compute the circumference of a circle without paying somebody for the privilege.
Without arguing the benefits/drawbacks of software patents, isn’t slide to unlock only a fundamental concept because Apple invented and popularized it? To me, it only seems trivial because it’s ubiquitous, whereas that might not have been the case before the iPhone.
Software patents that boil down to “real life action, but we did it on a computer” are just obnoxious. Sliding a bolt to unlock something is something we’ve been doing for centuries, but suddenly Apple put it on a screen and gets to prevent anybody else from doing it? That makes no sense.
I don’t see why this is unique to software. As long as the proof is convoluted enough, how would it differ from making a physical D-pad? Both are made from already discovered axioms/materials, and both are transformed via known ways in a unique order into new tools to accomplish a particular task. If a D-pad patent should be allowed, why not a compression algorithm?
Hardware patents make sense, as it’s actually possible to come up with multiple solutions to the same problem. You can create a D-pad multiple different ways, as proven by the many different D-pad patents, as the goal is just to create an interface between electronic inputs and a logical physical shape. How you do it doesn’t matter as long as the result is reliable and satisfying for the end-user. The 4-directional shape of the d-pad wasn’t the patent, it was how the d-pad worked. Sure some people have preferences to one design or another, but that’s where they made the innovation.
But there isn’t multiple ways to create Pi. Pi is Pi. Just because you discovered a math equation to define it first doesn’t mean you get to claim dibs on it. You could claim that you wrote code that calculates Pi more quickly on a specific computer chip or something, but that’s copyright, not a patent. Patents shouldn’t be used for things that can be copyrighted, and vice versa.
There’s a reason why we have separate systems for copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Copyrights protect creative authorship, ways to express things. Trademarks protect identification, how people recognize you and your creations. Patents protect invention, novel processes to accomplish an action.
Patents are for protecting the processes you develop, not the resulting actions. You can’t patent boiling water to create steam, but you can patent the steps you took that led to water boiling and becoming steam.
To bring it back, what process did Apple develop for slide to unlock? Slide to unlock itself is an action, not a unique method of solving a problem. Like patenting the mere action of putting a key into a hole, instead of how the mechanics of the key itself actually opens the lock. They wrote code that interpreted “Box moving from position A to Position B allows access”, but that’s a copyright. Nobody would argue that they should be able to copy what Apple wrote to make that happen. But why does Apple get to claim that the action of moving a box is something they invented? Because the user can use a human finger on a screen now? Apple didn’t invent the capacitive touchscreen, somebody else did, and Apple paid them or a licensor of the tech for using their patent, they didn’t invent anything there. So all you’re left with is the action, moving a box with a finger, which shouldn’t be patentable. And the code that interprets the action, which should be a copyright not a patent.
Hi people, since we see more and more complaints regarding old movies being not politically correct anymore, I am getting more and more concerned about some purchases I made some years ago. Specifically, there is a set of local movies in my mother tongue which I bought and therefore want to download them in case they are...
I’ve given up on any direct download methods. It’s a game of wack-a-mole and the players often don’t share their tricks anymore, or charge a pretty penny.
Try OBS screen recording if you want a free option.
For anything that doesn’t work with, I’ve just gone the extra mile and now have a Streaming Stick plugged into an HDMI Splitter and then piped into an HDMI capture card, which then pipes into OBS. My setup can only do 1080p SDR, but that’s enough for me.
So I’ve been wanting to try to move to linux for the past few months but have been waiting to be done school, so I could the MS office suite behind me. I’m mostly writing this to share my experience for people who are considering switching....
The reason for Android's Notification system being better than iOS, is solely due to the ability to turn off individual aspects of an application's notifications.
Google, the poor multi-billion dollar scrappy startup that maintains Android, made a payment app that has one notification setting, "Google Pay". So all the ads, promotions, everything.
3rd party apps like PhonePe & Paytm have a better system.
The one annoying thing about Lemmy over Reddit, is that you’ll open a link from somewhere on the web and the Lemmy Instance’s site loads instead of your preferred client app. Sync already supports around a hundred instances but there’s way more out there than that. However, there is a solution! Fediverse Redirect acts as a...
C:UsersUsernameSaved Games is a thing. Not a lot of games use it though.
There’s also C:UsersUsernameDocumentsMy Games which seems more popular with some devs. Though some devs inexplicably use the base Documents folder, which is just obnoxious.
But yeah, a lot of devs still use AppData. I read a post from a dev once that explained the advantages and disadvantages to each Directory, though I can’t remember the specifics, there is at least logic to why saves get stored in so many odd locations.
For me, it’s not as memory efficient as something like Edge, but it handles having a lot of tabs open much better. It also has a lot of powerful features under the hood, and some really good power user addons, like Tab Groups.
Any progress on WebM support? Not sure about other instances, but mine converts GIFs to WebM by default when I upload from Sync. But posts with WebM just act like still images in Sync, and tapping on them just leads to a button to open the WebM in a browser.
Recently I’ve gave up Windows for Linux and installed Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop on my pc and laptop from 2007. It’s an i7 Intel processor with 8gb ddr ram so I thought it would be fine, but it seems quite sluggish. What distro could I use that would be faster and still fully functional? Thanks for your help in advance.
Seriously, I put an SSD in a Netbook(remember those?) for a friend and the performance increased noticeably, even with it running Windows 10. I bet it would’ve been even better if it was using something less bloated than Windows, but that’s what my friend wanted.
I don’t know what it’s like in Canada, but in the US tons of people use MVNOs instead of straight subscribing to one of the big 3 carriers, so guessing what the domain name for each one, or getting everybody to text your email so you can find out, is just tedious.
Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn’t support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don’t trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
Yep. Google Voice is the forgotten step-child that Google only remembers exists once every few years, randomly pushing a wave of updates, and then nothing(don’t let the bi-weekly bug fix updates fool you).
Though in a way I don’t mind, since they’re still providing the service for free, with zero ads, for over a decade. I’m convinced at this point that it’s the pet project of some higher up that likes the service and manages to sweep any maintenance costs under the rug so the bean counters never try to kill it.
It’s not stupidity. You need to invent the tools that are needed to make the tools that make the tools that make the tools that make the thing. China still hasn’t independently invented most of those tools yet, so they’ve been relying on finished tools from other countries. Being smart doesn’t wipe away the decades of research needed to make something. We all expect China to eventually be able to make an equivalent tool, but they’re working with a handicap of inexperience which was expected to take years of dedication to overcome. Which is why everybody is skeptical that China made this independently without outside help or knowledge.
It’s gonna be funny if people start dual-booting Linux on Mac in the future because they get better game support with the reverse engineered Linux GPU drivers.
I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT....
At this point I just let Android copy whatever, as long as it contains what I want, and then I use the clipboard edit tool that pops up to delete everything I don’t want. Extra steps, but way less fiddly.
Saw the post here regarding CentOS’s off-springs and a couple of people brought up the excellent point of: why play with fire? Let’s just stick to Debian....
Another alternative could be Distrobox. Added benefit of the apps being sandboxed, and easily removed in case of issues. Downside is that you are eating up some space with some extra OS images.
For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
Steam Deck runs Steam OS, which is a heavily customized version of Arch Linux by Valve. But unlike normal Arch installs, Valve has locked the System partition(/) to read-only.
The reasons they’ve done this is two fold. First, there’s actually two copies of the system partition. The reason for this is that when an update is downloaded it’s actually written to the other partition, not the one you’re currently using. This way the update happens in the background, and then you just need to reboot for it to switch partitions and do some house cleaning. What this means though, is that any changes you might’ve normally made to the system partition, disappear, as they are now on the other partition you aren’t using. So if any changes you make won’t matter, not much point in letting people make them in the first place. Using Flatpaks, any applications users install would instead be stored in the user partition, and never touch the OS itself.
The second major reason for doing this, is consistency. If people are discouraged or blocked from modifying the system partition, then any bugs or issues that crop up are, 99% of the time, Valve’s fault. And because of that, Valve can more easily diagnose and try to reproduce any reported issues, because theoretically, the user’s Steam Deck should be configured exactly the same as one at Valve HQ. All that’s needed is for a user to report what they were doing when they encountered the issue, and Valve can follow those same steps and hopefully encounter the same issue, get detailed logs, and hopefully quickly push out a patch as needed.
And that’s one version of Immutability. Valve doesn’t go the full nine-yards here, just enough for their use case. In other Immutable Distros, versioning is taken even further, where you can control multiple versions and reset the OS state on the fly as needed, keeping any changes to a minimum and in controlled sand boxes. There’s a ton of use cases for these, but the most obvious benefits are for enterprise and mass-market solutions, where a single configuration is multiplied across a large amount of servers, or end-user devices, allowing for easier diagnoses of issues and pushing of patches. For end-user clients especially, if they aren’t expected to be customizing the OS to begin with, it makes support much easier for IT.
For your average Linux user, the benefits aren’t as large, as you’ll often want to be able to tweak things to your liking. But your Average Joe that just wants a computer that can surf the web and install some apps that can be found as Flatpaks, an immutable OS that they can’t easily screw up is a plus.
If you’re using UEFI in VB, definitely update to the latest version. UEFI support in older VB was pretty bad. Works a lot better now, though I haven’t had time to test this new version of Vanilla OS, so YMMV.
This is a good example, why not all devices should be connected to foreign servers. Errors can happen everywhere. But it could end badly, if some Corporations make errors and creating trouble, which would otherwise not happen....
Recently at work they replaced the AEDs with new models that support Children, and have a Spanish guide mode, super nice. But they also are now connected to the Internet so that they report any usage and order a new set of pads automatically, plus it has a bright screen constantly cycling through advertisement of what the device is. Also for some reason the power button isn’t actually a power button, and just triggers the start-up process while calling back to base, just like touching the on-screen buttons or pulling out the pads will do.
HDMI came from the TV manufacturers and was earlier than DP. While DP came from VESA and Computer OEMs.
HDMI being in TVs gave it a far wider penetration in the consumer market, and so when people wanted to hookup their laptops and other devices to TVs, they’d need HDMI.
Ironically, as ports have been simplified to almost just USB-C on many devices, DP’s market share actually grows as it’s cheaper and easier to include for OEMs, and if the consumer has to buy an adapter anyway, it might as well be on their dime to pay for HDMI, rather than the phone or laptop maker.
Not if I want to use a photo in a folder the image picker doesn’t default to.
For example, tons of apps save photos to /storage/emulated/0/Pictures/, which is a proper shared folder location on Android(any app can access it), but which doesn’t appear in the new Photo Picker as an Album. The picture might show up in the general “Photos” list, but that’s only useful if it was recently taken. If I’m trying to find an older photo it’s near impossible.
Not to mention the pure lack of sub-folder support in the “Album” section means everything in my Downloads, Camera, and Screenshot folders is just jumbled together in those three groups, completely ignoring any organization I might have in them.
I have thousands of photos. This new image picker is almost unusable for me.
Fairphone Fairbuds launch with replaceable batteries, titanium drivers and ANC ( www.notebookcheck.net )
Modern web bloat means some pages load 21MB of data - entry-level phones can't run some simple web pages, and some sites are harder to render than PUBG ( www.tomshardware.com )
Pirates of the world we need your help to fight back for the sake of Yuzu and emulation freedom!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12810167...
LibreOffice 24.2.1 Office Suite Is Out with More Than 100 Bug Fixes ( 9to5linux.com )
Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
Distro agnostic packages like flatpaks and appimages have become extremely popular over the past few years, yet they seem to get a lot of dirt thrown on them because they are super bloated (since they bring all their dependencies with them)....
TachiyomiSY is continuing, forking Mihon ( lemmy.world )
Tachiyomi replacement is out ( github.com )
Android Auto will soon stop working on older devices ( 9to5google.com )
I absolutely love VideoLAN's stance regarding patents ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )
LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA ( stgraber.org )
Blog post from LXC’s project lead
Ripping Amazon movies
Hi people, since we see more and more complaints regarding old movies being not politically correct anymore, I am getting more and more concerned about some purchases I made some years ago. Specifically, there is a set of local movies in my mother tongue which I bought and therefore want to download them in case they are...
Just moved to linux
So I’ve been wanting to try to move to linux for the past few months but have been waiting to be done school, so I could the MS office suite behind me. I’m mostly writing this to share my experience for people who are considering switching....
Based KDE 🗿 ( lemmy.ml )
Google's Manifest V3 changes will soon disable uBlock Origin on Chrome ( www.androidauthority.com )
Old Manifest V2 Chrome extensions will be disabled in 2024 ( 9to5google.com )
Unremoval of Piracy Communities @ lemmy.world
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/6018317...
Fediverse Redirect - Have ANY Lemmy link open in Sync ( github.com )
The one annoying thing about Lemmy over Reddit, is that you’ll open a link from somewhere on the web and the Lemmy Instance’s site loads instead of your preferred client app. Sync already supports around a hundred instances but there’s way more out there than that. However, there is a solution! Fediverse Redirect acts as a...
Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories. ( dotfiles-matter.click )
Reddit is removing ability to opt out of ad personalization based on your activity on the platform ( techcrunch.com )
Why do you use firefox? ( upload.wikimedia.org )
cross-posted from: feddit.uk/post/2514293
Carrying on an old tradition. What features / issues should I work on next?
These threads used to be really useful back on Reddit....
older laptop distro recommendarion
Recently I’ve gave up Windows for Linux and installed Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop on my pc and laptop from 2007. It’s an i7 Intel processor with 8gb ddr ram so I thought it would be fine, but it seems quite sluggish. What distro could I use that would be faster and still fully functional? Thanks for your help in advance.
Excluding KDEConnect, how do you send and receive SMS on your system?
What do you use to send and receive SMS on your computer? I’ve tried KDE Connect but found it too buggy to use daily.
Is Direct Connect still 'a thing'?
I remember using it a lot a few years ago in the early 2000s and I wonder if that’s still used…?...
Huawei's New Mystery 7nm Chip from Chinese Fab Defies US Sanctions ( www.tomshardware.com )
Linux user share remains above macOS in the latest Steam Survey ( www.gamingonlinux.com )
No web browser offers a good out of the box experience.
I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT....
Why is text selection such a broken mess on so many websites? Why does this have to be such a hassle??
Using Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Samsungs ‘Internet’ app, and every other browser I’ve used/tried on Android:...
Thoughts on makedeb, Debian's unofficial makepkg clone that comes with its own version of the AUR as well? ( docs.makedeb.org )
Saw the post here regarding CentOS’s off-springs and a couple of people brought up the excellent point of: why play with fire? Let’s just stick to Debian....
What's up with all these immutable distributions? What are the benefits and disadvantages of them?
For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
Vanilla OS 2.0 Orchid (based on Debian Sid) Developer Preview released to public ( fosstodon.org )
Asus only cut the PC department in July, and now the commercial department is also going to be cut (Asus Zenfone 10 is their last phone) ( finance.technews.tw )
Here is the English translation...
IP address blocking banned in Austria after court ordered ISP to block Cloudflare IP's ( torrentfreak.com )
Linux 6.6 To Support Rumble / Force Feedback On Google Stadia Controllers ( www.phoronix.com )
Not everything should be connected to the Internet ( www.theverge.com )
This is a good example, why not all devices should be connected to foreign servers. Errors can happen everywhere. But it could end badly, if some Corporations make errors and creating trouble, which would otherwise not happen....
Why DisplayPort Is Still Better Than HDMI ( www.youtube.com )
Sync for Lemmy Beta 29 release notes ( play.google.com )
Beta 29New...