- Ephera to
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- lemmy.ml
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Video mirror on Peertube: https://tube.fede.re/w/taPpVmnxZbxj1os5fP1Xd6
This is also the reason “unused RAM is wasted RAM” makes little sense in an application context. OS designers realized that wisdom a long time ago, so they already made sure to utilize that unused RAM via disk caching.
Now, if Chrome or Chrome VSCode or Chrome Discord or Chrome MS Teams requests tons of RAM, it most likely gets this used-but-available RAM, which your OS was using for disk caching.
In the case of Chrome itself, this will make Chrome faster at the expense of your other applications’ performance.
In the case of non-browser applications based on Chrome, your system’s performance is sacrificed, so that Microsoft can rake in its profit without actually investing money into proper application development. 🙂
I mean, for what it’s worth, I’ve seen a techy user (i.e. non-dev) just customizing their Firefox with a Vim-shortcuts-extension and a userChrome.css-file and they liked that basically just as much as qutebrowser.
Not really any reason why that couldn’t be set up a bit more professionally and compiled into a binary etc…
Hmm, did they fork TrackerControl? It looks a lot like that…
I just saw that it’s simultaneously promising a “billion dollar idea”, that you can earn money a made-up currency by doing nothing of value and to build a “community”. That usually means it’s a pyramid scheme.
It also uses Google Recaptcha on the login page and they have a Discord community etc., so whatever their promises of privacy are, they probably only promise it for marketing purposes.
It’s also an, uh, interesting approach to “decentralization”: Please run your decentralized node and then register it in our centralized search interface at presearch.org.
I was gonna say that I only have a superficial opinion and you should inform yourself, but that’s a few too many red flags from just looking at it again for five minutes…
On Android, there’s Nunti for RSS feeds.
You can give each article a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and then it will try to sort and filter your aggregated feed according to your interests.
Use Firefox Profiles! You can type “about:profiles” into the URL bar, then you’ll get a dialog for managing profiles. Create a new one and that will be like a factory-reset Firefox, so bookmarks, extensions etc. are also separate. It’s basically like copy-pasting the configuration folder.
You can also launch a similar profile dialog from the command-line with firefox -P, or launch a specific profile with firefox -P myProfile.
I wrote code for that before, for generating file names in a utility application, and I don’t know about you, but it surprised me how easy that was / how perfectly fine the results were.
I always thought the big webpages with such name generators had sophisticated algorithms to make the adjectives reasonably sensible with the nouns and then huge word lists to ensure randomness and such.
And then I did it with like 20 animal names and 30 adjectives, and all I ended up fine-tuning was to swap out a few of the words for more interesting ones (e.g. dog -> chihuahua, good -> fabulous).
I think, a big reason why techy people don’t value these algorithms as much, is because we can achieve a lot of the same (sometimes better, sometimes it just feels better) by manually setting up filter rules.
And a big reason for that, is that many of these algorithms are just hot garbage. Even Google’s supposedly unmatched algorithm knowledge and intimate knowledge of their users regularly fails to deliver anything of value.
I guess, they do have those corporate interests, and in particular don’t want to be transparent to avoid people gaming their algorithms, but then even the bloody algorithm in my IDE trying to guess what I want auto-completed feels disappointingly much like a broken clock being right twice a day.
These are all anecdotes. I’m not aware of a non-commercial social media content algorithm, so maybe this is the one field where they’re amazing.
Yeah, a few years ago, I went on a journey from KDE -> AwesomeWM -> [some more tiling WMs] -> BSPWM.
I found both the tiling and BSPWM’s no-minimizing / use-lots-of-desktops workflow very nice, but thought that having a desktop overview in the panel would be extremely helpful with that.
And well, you guessed it, after trying a bunch more things, I landed back on KDE. Been using Krohnkite and now its spiritual successor Bismuth (mainly because those support KDE’s Activities, which work really well for grouping those many desktops) and to me, that has just been a massive upgrade to BSPWM in every way, even in the disciplines that BSPWM was built for.
Obviously, BSPWM certainly still has its place for minimalism and if you want to Bash-script your environment, but yeah, massive props to the KDE community.
You may be interested in this video: https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/175b8058-ebf8-4765-8f2b-75a00500b20a
It’s a KDE dev explaining the bug and how work on it is progressing (although it’s not themselves that’s working on it).
TL;DW: There’s still a number of open points and it will likely require themes to be updated.
The theme that you’re using looks opaque, i.e. doesn’t need blur, so maybe the theme author would just need to turn off blur (however that works)…
For me, it’s that everything feels just slightly smoother, applications open somewhat quicker and typing feels more ‘direct’ (less latency).
Certainly nothing revolutionary for now, so if you actually have to jump through many hoops, I wouldn’t bother.
My distro pre-installs a Wayland session for my DE, so to switch, I just have to log out, select the other session and log back in.
I do tend to explain DEs when someone asks for a distro recommendation, because yeah, I also think that it does make the biggest difference for desktop usage.
However:
- You can’t download an ISO for a DE. Noobs want to know what to download.
- Given that you can switch DEs relatively easily, the choice of distro can carry more weight.
- Depending on what kind of user they are, I do think the distro makes a difference. For example, generally I wouldn’t recommend Debian-based distros to a programmer. Or plain Arch to someone uninterested in technology.
Hmm, interesting. I can definitely go along with their reasoning, but I do wonder how much the aesthetic will change.
I feel like those silly little corners do rather much to differentiate it from Xfce and MATE.
I also wonder what those corners will look like when a window is maximized. Does the window fill out the corners, or do they turn those corners black in another way, or does it simply show the wallpaper in those few pixels?
Yeah, Funkwhale is rather built for public display of your music library. The backend is also written in Python, so presumably eats resources like no one’s business and, somewhat of a programmer prejudice, is probably also just not very stable / resilient to misconfiguration.
That’s why I didn’t really even mention it for self-hosting. I find it primarily useful, if you’re hooking into an existing instance like https://open.audio.
I’m guessing, it’s rather an issue of scale, wanting to maximize profits and dumb update policies.
So, scale is an issue, because they do need to serve a lot of update downloads.
Maximizing profits is an issue, because they could certainly set up more update mirrors to reduce download times. (Or offer a piece of software that people volunteer to mirror updates for.)
And dumb update policies are a problem, because fucking Patch Tuesday™.
They don’t roll out security updates as soon as they’re available, but rather just once a month. So, on the second Tuesday in a month, all of the Windows devices start to download updates from Microsoft’s servers.
Honestly, I marvel at this working at all. They must have truly crippled the update downloading on each client to prevent a self-inflicted DDoS.
I mean, I don’t know from who or how serious that request was, but yeah, they have no interest in hosting things that may be illegal in Germany.
Codeberg is a state-registered, tax-exempt club with funding coming from its members. They can’t hide from the government or invest money into massive legal battles. You want a different hosting service, if that doesn’t work for you.
There sure is, but what kind of music streaming are we talking about?
For the “mainstream” streaming services, like Spotify, Deezer and SoundCloud, there seems to be Blade Player available from IzzyOnDroid’s repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/v.blade
IzzyOnDroid is on the F-Droid team. His own repository just has somewhat laxer acceptance criteria. Do mind that if you add that repo to your F-Droid, it may become hard to tell which app comes from which repository.
If you want an open-source streaming service, you can use the Funkwhale app with e.g. the Funkwhale instance https://open.audio .
However, do mind that these are largely Creative Commons songs, so you probably won’t find your favorite band on there. The songs can also be rather interesting and/or crap, because there’s no music label filtering out the obscure stuff.
Finally, if you want to completely self-host your music streaming, there’s for example M.A.L.P. as an MPD client. Then you would also need to setup an MPD server somewhere.
Hmm, so a bit of terminology to get you started: On Linux, there’s the concept of “desktop environments”, which is basically each a collection of programs to show you a graphical desktop UI. Basically, you can transform a server OS (which has only a terminal interface) into a desktop OS by installing a DE.
And there’s various DEs available, which provide different user experiences. Among the most popular are:
- GNOME Shell (this is what Fedora and Tails ship with)
- KDE Plasma
- Xfce (this is what Whonix ships with)
- Cinnamon (this is what Linux Mint ships with)
- MATE
- Budgie
- LXQt
Now, GNOME has the best touchscreen support. KDE is in second place. The others don’t really support touch input to my knowledge.
However, GNOME is also among the most heavyweight. KDE is definitely lighter, but also not the lightest.
I still think GNOME is lighter than Windows 8, so migrating will probably improve things, but if you’ve been told that Linux can revive old hardware, then yeah, your touchscreen requirement kind of torpedoes that…
Yeah, that’s kind of the thing. The more expert-focused / niche the distro is, the less hand-holding you can expect.
But if you do show that you’re not just being a dumbass and have put in some effort, then you’ll usually find a number of those experts (and potentially even distro maintainers) willing to help you, which can resolve pretty much any issue you could imagine.
And them using their expert time to walk you through hell and back is extremely nice, too. But whether you get to experience that niceness depends on your own level of expertise, because they do not have infinite time.
Yeah, I kind of expected it would have that. 🙃
I didn’t want to confuse @a_Ha@lemmy.ml even more, since I doubt they would dive in that deeply. Especially doesn’t make sense when DWM comes pre-installed with the distro, as you need to install it yourself to be able to patch it.
Ah, now I gotta nitpick you on your Firefox facts.
Firefox mostly uses the XUL/XPCOM toolkit, which was written by Mozilla. It only references the GTK theme for how it should theme itself, and it makes use of the GTK file picker.
XUL code is rather similar to HTML, so one can also use CSS to style it, which is what this theme does to make it look more like a GNOME application.
When you install it, you choose between different window managers. Depending on which window manager you choose, it will behave differently.
I think, most of the available window managers have a shortcut for switching between windows (which might be a different shortcut than Alt+Tab).
And I think, most have a mode for resizable+pannable windows (usually called “floating windows”).
One window manager which does not have those, is DWM.
(I have not used Axyl, but I have used some of those window managers on other distributions.)
I don’t know what you’re referring to in regards of Amazon, but as for Google Analytics, they have a contract with Google that prohibits them from processing the data for anything but providing insights to Mozilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
Is there anything that makes Firefox more opensource than Chromium?
Well, that’s why I didn’t name Firefox as a particularly good example of open-source, just a reference for the manpower needed.
I do think, they work more in the open than Chromium. And because the Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit (of which the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary), they don’t really have that profit-motive behind their decisions (they can only use money to pay their employees or to develop their projects further), so they tend to make decisions more in line with the open-source expectation. But yeah, I would still certainly prefer, if more of the development was done by the wider community.
In fact, is your point that it would be better if there were no professional developers and only projects run by communities of hobbyists?
Nah, I would just like it, if companies wouldn’t tout their projects being open-source, when that’s basically just misleading many users. Which is most definitely a lost cause, so that’s why I’m in favor of just letting the “open-source” term die and finding a better word.
I mean, I don’t have deep insights into Brave’s development either, but they only have around 150 employees (according to https://craft.co/brave-software ).
I doubt there’s numbers out there for how many Google employees work on Chrome, but the Mozilla Corporation has around 750, which they only just cut down from 1000 (https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus).
As far as I’m aware, Brave doesn’t really tweak much about the rendering engine (Blink) either, which is probably the biggest chunk of code in Chromium. So, they would need to build up a lot of expertise.
And finally, well, long-term security may also require feature development. Chrome and Firefox both have developed forms of sandboxing. Mozilla published a new way of doing sandboxing via WASM not too long ago. So, yeah, you kind of need to continue innovating, which requires manpower.
As for forking Chromium versus a piece of KDE software, the difference is that with Chromium most of the development work comes from one entity, Google. You would pretty much need to poach these employees, or build up a huge team of your own, to be able to move the project in a different direction.
With a piece of KDE software, there’s usually multiple entities involved, i.e. multiple independent people. So, the core maintainers are not the only people who do development, or you may even win over some of the core maintainers for a fork.
And even if that is not the case, a handful of frustrated community members can probably outperform the current maintainers.
You just have a lot less development manpower tied to the maintainers.
LibreOffice might again be a better example. OpenOffice was maintained by Sun Microsystems and they provided a bunch of infrastructure and held the brand name, but most of the development work came from the wider open-source community.
So, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, those developers organized, created The Document Foundation, and set up their own infrastructure. So, the maintainer changed, but the developers largely stayed the same.
Hmm, I don’t really agree with that article. The thing is, publishing something as open-source is trivial.
But, despite the opposite being written into basically all open-source license (“is provided as-is”), we expect every published piece of software to come with updates ad infinitum.
And you can’t really plan for it. You can release many pieces of open-source software that no one will ever use. And then one of them happens to become popular by chance and suddenly you’ve volunteered for the role of Benevolent Dictator For Life.
I guess, you could leave the software published and as-is, i.e. stop releasing new versions, but I’m honestly not sure that’s truly better for the users. By breaking their builds, they’ll know they have to migrate to something else. If you just leave it unmaintained, security problems will creep in and bugs will remain forever unfixed.
There is a popular framework for using JavaScript to write backend applications, which is called Node.js.
And then for that framework, they created a package manager, the Node Package Manager – NPM.
Nowadays, NPM is used even for frontend code and independent of Node.js, because there is no real other package manager for JavaScript.
I don’t understand the implication, what is it that makes a hard-fork impossible? In fact, isn’t Brave a hard fork of Chromium?
Well, my definition of a hard fork is that you take the state of a project at a certain point in time and then you largely carry on development on your own. For example, LibreOffice was a successful hard fork from OpenOffice.
So, I don’t see Brave as a hard fork. They are very much dependent on Google continuing to open-source the Chromium code. And they don’t really have the capacity to make larger changes to the code base, or even just maintain the status quo, if Google decides to make changes that go against Brave’s interests.
In my understanding, while the freedom of forking the project is certainly determinant in the question of whether it is open source, I don’t see any relevance in the one of creating a fork that can get popular enough to strip the original project of its users.
Yeah, that’s why I wrote that they are technically open-source. They fulfill the official open-source definition, but they don’t match up with the subjective expectations that people often have for open-source.
So, for example, if you think of VLC, GIMP, KDE or other community-driven projects, they may be shit in one way or another, but they would never make a change with which the majority of the user base disagrees.
That’s what I personally think of when I hear “open-source” (although I have started calling it “community-driven”, to disambiguate it from those shitty open-source projects).
Yeah, admittedly there is alot of nuance here.
The thing with VSCodium or Chromium is that the bulk of the development work comes from Microsoft/Google, and they provide additional infrastructure around these projects, built up a brand etc…
This means that these projects practically cannot be hard-forked (taking them into a different direction), you can at best soft-fork them to remove the worst of the worst (like e.g. ungoogled-chromium does), and such a fork would likely not gather many users either, even if it’s objectively better.
That gives quite a lot of power to Microsoft/Google. For example, Chromium with its extension API ManifestV3, that wouldn’t even be up for discussion, if that was a community-lead project. The repo of the maintainer would get abandoned and everyone would contribute to a fork instead. With actual Chromium, though, not a chance of that happening.
I take advantage of it by having tried and failed to make a miniscule change in two separate programs. AMA. 😎