MacOS has more than sandboxed… they are basically removing the ability of a user to do anything to their computers. I can’t fix my dad’s imac (I used to fix my own macs), they are impenetrable… They’ve more than “sandboxed” apps, they’re forcing all but previously established powerusers to take their dying overpriced lumps to the Apple store. This, they say, is “good for you.” I loved Apple for 8 or so years. Hate them to death now.

My 9-year-old quad-core running Mint MATE 22 boots up faster than both my dad’s 2-year old iMac and my 6-core PC running Win11. And I can tell you what every process running is doing… bonus.

again, if you think osx is free you are deeply, cripplingly ignorant of how Apple makes money.

What? No. Your “payment” to Apple continues as you use OSX.

You don’t need to pay “Linux” anything (though you can donate to distros and app devs if you’re a sweetie).

You don’t even need to pay for a computer. You can steal one or find one in the garbage. Apple hates recycling hardware, that’s why they sue 3rd party Apple repair and maintenance shops. I used OSX for a decade. They were cool for a little while, being somewhat novel for adopting a UNIX-like as their backbone, but that goodwill and logic is long dead.

I hate them as much as I hate Microsoft, perhaps even more, because not only have they abandoned the ideals they marketed in the 00’s, they are draconian in their enforcement of their control. Their planned obsolescence is absolutely criminal. They embezzle tens of billions of dollars overseas to avoid taxation. And Tim Cook now blows Donald Trump for breakfast.

To hell with Apple and their whole shitty thing.

One thing you might notice is that flatpak defaults to “system” installs. Is your root system directory filling up? You probably want to start installing onto --user, as this will put things in /home where they belong and, by default, sandbox permissions away from root (that, too, can be easily changed).

Also, don’t fear mixing different ways of installing. I use AppImage, Flatpak, the default app-get install method, and .deb. FlatPak at this point is the best, because it offers the ease of use of AppImage, but the flexibility and auto-maintenance of apt-get/Software Update. The only problems I’ve encountered were due to me not understanding that it was filling up my root partition by default…

I’ve been running Mint MATE for about 9 years. Love it to death.

A sidestory to this is that Flatpak and AppImage have been miraculous boosts to Linux OS machines. After I figured out that ya gotta throw the --user flag into your flatpak installs so they don’t jam up your / tree, and also throwing flatpak override --user xyz.app onto a few apps that benefit from universal access, things have been fine and dandy.

I continue to be happy with how awesome Linux has gotten just over the past 5 years.

That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.

How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily “gone reddit.” It isn’t so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental “social protocols” like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.

A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There’s many reasons why they too over the world.

A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.

You have your own definitions of joke, best, and sad. That’s fine.

Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.

Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the “best” or “easiest” are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn’t handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.

Why were they using it? It wasn’t because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren’t using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn’t involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck’s shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.

Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?

The short answer is that I’m not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?

The only solid vector graphics app I’ve used in open source is Inkscape. I agree, it’s very difficult to get to know, even moreso if you’re coming from old school raster imaging and don’t get all the mathiness. I had to learn Inkscape though, because I needed to make fantasy maps with textual titles that didn’t look like crap when rescaled.

I’m no expert, but it does pay off to learn. It’s a very powerful set of tools.

I have tried lots of text editors, tons. None of them quite do what I want. I installed CudaText. It’s now my favorite. I love it so much. The settings… Oh, the delicious settings…

I know it’s a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.

The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it’s pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn’t leave out blender, jeesus.

I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less “You’re weird” and more “I need Cloud for my job/it’s all I know,” which is a positive change.

If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don’t expect market forces to change things.

That doesn’t mean the technology didn’t/doesn’t exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).

“It’s janky. It’s charming. It works. It’s Copyparty.” ®

My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.

I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit’s content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn’t quite “training data” yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.

So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it’s called. Why’d people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Mint.

There’s a small army of Linux “snobs” that look down on it for recondite and mostly silly reasons. Mint is a great and user-friendly OS. The only thing I can say against it is that many of the binaries in the distro app manager are very out of date, but this hardly matters now because AppImage and Flatpaks are so on top of it and great.

it’s sad, pathetic, and stupid that one has to download a potentially dangerous hack to do something so basic.

yo compiz is the shit. You can do ANYTHING with it. It took me a while to figure out because where the hell is the manual, but I have my own custom thing going on and it’s brilliant.

I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.

I don’t think the answer to any of society’s ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.