I appreciate the thought but which would you choose:

Full time minimum wage US worker at $7¼/hr or $15,080/yr vs $20,000 one time purchase?

I agree with you that these things are likely underpaid labor (maybe including literal slavery, or job conditions close enough to count anyways), but I don’t think your argument is going to be convincing to anyone actually considering getting one.

Hard disagree - the point is a decade ago there wasn’t enough Linux market share for bad actors to target Linux. Proton is a compatibility layer, which while technically being a sandbox, it isn’t designed around security the way a browser sandbox is. It would not be hard for a virus embedded in a made-for-windows program to identify that it’s actually a proton sandbox, then deploy a Linux-specific payload (assuming the malware designer gave it some forethought for that situation). Heck - there’s plenty of viruses that do their work in scripting languages that don’t care what OS you’re running on.

It’s a lowest common denominator kinda issue, methinks. Gnome is chasing it’s own tail trying to create a single UI that will please everyone, plus have it simple to use and both similar enough yet distinct enough to/from Windows/Mac experiences. It’s a noble enough goal - but honestly strikes me as well impossible.

KDE gives you a barely updated Win95 era desktop and then becomes a tinkerer’s paradise - whenever there was two or more options, they focused on making each available, but neither becomes the default.

Not sure I follow - both the Xbox Ally X & Steam Deck have touchscreens.

Yeah, and if it weren’t for the techbro nonsense, it would be tossed onto the pile of mathematical curios that don’t have nontrivial uses.

The thing is - we often do find uses for those curiosities years later.

In the mean time, I wouldn’t mind if a decentralized video game came along where game assets were decentralized, distributed by bittorrent, and player assets were decentralized and tracked by blockchain.

Much the same as blockchain - it could have been exciting and fun, but it was immediately put to work to exploit people, and in the end that’s what the tools effectively were.

Working on it …

Succinctly said for a complex topic. Seconded

I’ll agree to that.

And I also think that there’s no way I trust Alphabet (holding company of Google) to be the sole arbiters of who gets to run code - neither in a philosophical sense nor as a gatekeeper to one top five compute platforms used by a substantial chunk of the world population.

It absolutely does not justify creating a policy that would wholesale obliterate F-Droid, arguably one of their larger competitors.

The whole value in searching is to get me to primary sources in a reasonably efficient way. Everything about AI is inserting extra middle men. I just don’t understand how anyone tolerates it.

It’s pretty much indisputably better for security.

I dispute this. While adding extra layers of security looks good on paper, flawed security can be worse than no security at all.

Android packages already have to be signed to be valid and those keys already are very effective in practice. In effect these new measures are reinventing the wheel as to what a layperson would think this new system does.

Adding this extra layer in fact has no actual security benefit beyond posturing/“deterrence”. Catching a perpetrator is not the same thing as preventing a crime. Worse - catching a thief in meatspace has the potential to recover stolen goods, but not so in digital spaces - either the crime is damage or destruction of data for which no punishment undoes the damage or the crime is sharing private data which in practice would almost certainly have been immediately fenced to multiple data brokers.

And were only getting started with this security theater:

• Nothing prevents an organization from hiring a developer for long enough to register before being flushed (or the same effect with a burner account on fiver)
• Nothing in this program does anything to get code libraries vetted - many of these developers may accidentally be publishing code from poisoned wells that they have no practical knowledge of.
• None of these measures make scams less profitable.
• None of this addresses greyware - software that could technically qualify as legal (because the user agreed to terms of service for a service of dubious value)
• All of this costs time and resources that will likely inevitably be shouldered on low paid engineers that could have put that effort to better uses.
• Metrics and statistics may likely be P-hacked to reflect that the new system as a success (because there’s internal pressure to make it look good) this turning-security-into-press-releases would have collateral of making accountability overall worse.

But you know what would be even better for security?

While we’re at it we could add the tropes of removing network connectivity, or switch to using clay tablets kept in a wooden box guarded by a vengeful god. Both of those would be more secure, too.

Users should be allowed to do insecure things with their devices

100% agree with you here - it’s fundamentally the principle of “Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins”. Users should be given the tools and freedom to do as they want with their property - up until it affects another person or their property in an unwanted way.

That was fundamentally F-Droid’s retort.

Any positive integer (or rational or real, technically) number is too many.

I’m both galled and exhausted by how modern companies wield ‘intellectual property’.

Fair point. I think my eyes glossed over the part where they said they where taking a second look at docker (but caught the rest about rebuilding the OS in general). My sincere apologies 😓😅

Good call! 100% (at least for now 😅)

It should. I agree, but speaking as someone in the industry - usually it doesn’t. Just lines some rich guy’s pockets.

Not gonna argue that Jellyfin is technically superior, but I switched to Plex to stop others from giving/selling my viewing habits. Stopped using Plex when it leaked they were doing the same.

I used Plex for privacy reasons. I stopped using Plex for privacy reasons.

👌 ok!

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. I want the newbs to feel accomplished when it only takes them 2 hours to figure it out. 😉

But seriously, you and I have it on reflex, but there’s merit to the notion that we also have our mise en place - we’ve read the manual, we’ve saved or memorized the script, already know our local equipment passwords, etc - all things we took the time to do before and now have at the ready.