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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Possible, but better not make it. When an algorithm has to promote something, there’s bias behind it, whether it’s a good intent or not. Even if it’s all good content, some other, also good content might be missed, because the algorithm or the authority behind the algorithm misses it.

    In my opinion, Mastodon is perfect as it is. You see what you’re following. Or on the home page you see everything.

    People should really really really learn to seek for quality content and develop a sense for quality and also to exercise critical thinking while trying to separate quality content from garbage. Pick what you wanna see and don’t let yourself be influenced by a stupid algorithm.

    Just consuming whatever an app pushes into your face makes you a brainless zombie in the long term.


  • I got the joke right away, I don’t think there’s any problem with it.

    The thing is, no matter how obvious a contradiction is, far-right folks won’t understand any of it, because they’re so dumb. You cannot give them even the most basic, easily digestible facts and explanations, because even that requires a brain, which they don’t have.

    So I think, these kind of jokes are perfectly fine for our entertainment, and no amount of facts and information will ever convince the dumbest of the people.




  • I find Gnome smoother than macOS.

    This wasn’t the case many years ago, but now I find Gnome pretty good, the amount of bugs are surprisingly low.

    On the other hand, I experience glitches on macOS regularly on the UI, especially on a multi-monitor setup (I use both Gnome and macOS with multiple monitors).

    And generally feature-wise I find Gnome a lot more convenient to use in terms of window or workspace management.


  • I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.

    Things I like:

    • Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
    • Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.

    Things I (we) don’t like:

    • As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
    • My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.

  • I’ve used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.

    KDE:

    • Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
    • Lately I’ve encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don’t have the capacity for this.
    • Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
    • There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would’ve been much smoother. Here’s an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you’re typing, but it still does what you’d expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.

    Gnome:

    • It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it’s easy to accomplish when it’s so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
    • Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It’s still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn’t even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
    • Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it’s not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
    • Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there’s way to improve here too.

    To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.


  • No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

    Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

    1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
    2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
    3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
    4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

  • Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

    I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

    That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

    Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.