Everyone has to balance how much pain they get on Windows from the restarts, slowness, updates, etc versus how much pain they get from occasionally having to run some command in terminal window. I get your points about there being rough edges - the good thing is that Linux is a very good system for fixing Linux issues. Everything is tailored for that :)
Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.
And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.
Why would you want to give the government such power? That always amazes me... when there is an issue, people jump on "let's vote for government to regulate this", but then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.
>Why would you want to give the government such power?
Because the government is the only body equipped to create and enforce consumer rights laws. Do you think we'd have refund policies if the government didn't regulate them?
>then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.
Okay. How is the act of forbidding platforms from banning alternative payment processors going to backfire?
I want them to use antitrust regulation against everyone, including me. That's what having values is like.
Markets without competition degenerate. Markets are also artificial and always rely on government enforcement to exist - Apple sues people who try to get around its market manipulation. You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.
> Markets are also artificial and always rely on government enforcement to exist - Apple sues people who try to get around its market manipulation.
Historically, markets are destroyed by government interference, not propped up by it. Your own example is a case in point: were it not for the government making laws in favor of entrenched companies, Apple couldn't sue the people trying to get around its market manipulation.
> You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.
This is a grossly unfair mischaracterization of the post you are replying to. Bad show, old chap.
My (user) solution would be to use Patreon on the web, or on Android. No one is forcing you to use specifically the native Apple app.
On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.
What is your solution to the government that you may not like using previously established "regulations" against people? My point is that you ask for regulation hoping that it will prevent this type of issue, but the regulation that you actually get will be barely having any effect and it will enforce ID + picture verification, it will enforce downloading specific government sanctioned keylogger app, it will enforce specific US state association, etc. New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print. It will just lead to excluding so many people from using the service and making the overall space so much worse. That's why I'm encouraging people to think twice before immediately asking the government to expand its overreach via new regulations.
> On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.
The problem here isn't that Patreon is centralized, but that the app store is. Apple could easily require a cut from any app using nostr and related protocols. Or simply ban them altogether.
Not saying government mandates are ideal, but I don't see any other way to force some sense into Apple (or Google). App stores should be some sort of independent institutions (non-profits) but companies have no incentive to cede that revenue. Until that happens, best not download from app stores unless absolutely necessary.
> My point is that you ask for regulation hoping that it will prevent this type of issue, but the regulation that you actually get will be barely having any effect and it will enforce ID + picture verification, it will enforce downloading specific government sanctioned keylogger app,
This is nonsense. Yes bad regulation is bad regulation, that's not an argument against regulation but an argument against bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad regulation - in fact most of it is good regulation. I enjoy not drinking feces for example but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how regulation against poopy drinking water is going to be turned against me.
> New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print.
Good regulation recognizes that small businesses don't have the same ability to comply with complex requirements, so it creates exceptions for small business or relaxes requirements.
By all means, please advocate for good regulation and call out bad regulation, but pretending that regulation is unnecessary or inherently harmful only serves the interest of capital at everyone else's expense.
> I enjoy not drinking feces for example but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how regulation against poopy drinking water is going to be turned against me.
you can't interfere or comment effectively on the policies or processes of your water treatment plant. on the Patreon case the user can simply stop using Apple hardware or move to the web
throwing every problem down to the goverment feels like: i believe in animal rights so instead of going vegan i'll protest to the goverment make it illegal to kill sentient animals for products.
i know we can do both but OP's anarchy solutions feels much more reasonable than expecting the goverment solve stuff. creating a culture that uses de-centralized approaches is times better than sticking to a centralized platform, regulated or not
> you can't interfere or comment effectively on the policies or processes of your water treatment plant
Of course you can! You can simply install a well, a water filtration/RO system to make poopy water drinkable, or move to a different town that better suits your water quality needs. You always have the option of taking matters into your own hands and the point of having a government is so that you don't have to, in the interest of boosting quality of life and productivity.
> throwing every problem down to the goverment feels like: i believe in animal rights so instead of going vegan i'll protest to the goverment make it illegal to kill sentient animals for products.
Yes - obviously? That's how "rights" work, what separates them from "personal beliefs" is existence of a law that prohibits (or stipulates) certain actions from other people.
If I say that murder is cruel and harmful to other people, is your suggestion that I simply abstain from murder instead of demanding legislation that prohibits it?
That is the user's solution. Patreon (the company having trouble with Apple) is not in the position to get ~50% of it's users to use a different phone.
Apple should not be allowed to be in the middle of business and half the users of the world.
And yes, that is very much something that governments have regulated for decades. In fact it's basically why anti-trust was invented. Train companies and deals with Standard Oil meant together they controlled the market since if you didn't go through them you couldn't ship your product.
Android is actively in the process of trying to kill off the ability to install your own software that is not Google-approved, so this is temporary solution at best.
That's only a solution until Google does the same. And then we're stuck. What do we do when the two largest phone platforms perform this stuff? Go off the grid instead of talking to our representatives?
I got used to the Mac keyboard layout and I think it makes more sense - I now remap all Linux (using keyd) to actually use the Mac layout. The main thing that I like is that it's more ergonomic for me to press command + something with my thumb, than it is to press control + something with my little finger. So command+c, command+v, command+Tab, command+`... are all easily reachable when my fingers are still in the writing letters position, just slightly moved to the left.
If you have older Mac (based on the Intel CPUs), then it may actually already work out of the box for you to run linux. I'm running Debian on Macbook Pro 2015, fully replaced the original system and I haven't looked back.
For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth, etc.
VCs are pretty good at extracting money from Gulf state oil funds (sometimes via Softbank as the intermediary) and subsidising below-cost services for customers like office space sharing or ride hailing.
Of course, the VCs take a cut, but overall the redistribution seems net positive to me.
A fairly common conversation starter for eastern europeans is "how are you doing?", "it sucks", "yeah it does, doesn't it?". The American style of being all flowers and butterflies can indeed be perceived as lying.
To be fair we Americans also poke fun at this. Here in the South I usually say, “Can’t complain,” and most people will finish the adage, “and it wouldn’t do any good if you did.”
It is fine if it is not lying but so often you ask how are you and get the flowers and butterflies response but when you sit 10 min more they start explaining how miserable they are: as a Dutchman, I do tend to ask why they said how great and excellent they were just minutes ago. And no, it is not just something you do out of politeness: if you just canned response to one thing, how do I know you don't have canned responses to many more things which are in fact lies at this point in time? I don't want to talk with Zendesk, I want to chat with someone I just met in the pub.
It isn’t lying, it is what we consider an appropriate level of sharing. We don’t tend to want to put our burdens on people who may not be interested in hearing it.
After talking to many folks from US I appreciate that. It's like going through the original `SYN ; SYN ACK ; ACK` flow. You are just establishing the conversation, but then the content can start flowing after if there's interest.
I'm a big fan of markdown, it's easy enough to remember the basic syntax and your files are portable across hundreds of different editors. If one day I decide to switch away from Obsidian, I can just plug the same files into another good editor.
This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.
I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all.
Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)
Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one.
Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.
SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.
Throughout using Linux here and there for like two decades or so, my only issues were Ubuntu forcing some very Microsoft-ish decisions on me, which I did not like. Plus, this very very stable very stable Debian breaking upon version upgrades (I have no idea why, I keep running mostly default Debian since forever). These days I mostly use Arch and Fedora (on those shared computers I don’t bother to config to my liking), and they were mostly flawless for like years. I have some things I don’t like, but they aren’t too many and minuscule. I used a MacBook Pro for like over a decade, but left macOS earlier than this LiquidAss fiasco, so I cannot relate really. But still reading all these complaints about Windows and macOS, it looks like your guys only issue with Linux is ‘I did not make any effort to understand the system, I’d use my weird pervert Windows baggage and expect it would just work the same way.’ Hey, it wouldn’t. Take a weekend to research, take a month to play with Linux on some non-critical hardware (buy a used ThinkPad or ThinkCentre). I’d say Linux is quite ready for most things these days. Yes, not all hardware may work well, but once you understand the reasons for that, you won’t blame the community, but rather those who intentionally do nothing to make their own hardware work. I’m looking at you Nvidia. And even them, it looks like, started doing something. Switching my desktops from almost a decade on macOS, I mostly feel like an upgrade. Even on a MacBook! I wish some software to be better, but it’s getting there slowly, even without my help.
> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.
Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.
Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
Annnd here they all come to prove my point! I said in my comment “watch people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue.” And here they are, insulting me just because I ran into issues… to prove my point wrong?
You just can’t make this shit up, it’s too hilarious.
Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.
And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.
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