You start to use it because you care about privacy and your data. But now it's just to avoid all the crap Google and OEMs put into the phone. Same story is with PC and Windows. To quote one smart guy: "I'm not in the mood to be treated as a chimp." And that's it.

That’s fair! Doesn’t sound like something that’s likely to get the majority of users interested though unfortunately

I decided there won't be Windows device in my home anymore. If it turns out I can't do some stuff on Linux or Windows VM, I'm willing to give my money to Apple, Nintendo or Sony, even though I consider(ed) them worse then MS, and I hate their UI and policies. But at least they've been doing the same (bad) things for decades, while MS has no idea what they want and what users want from them. Or worse - they know but still insist on giving us all this cr*p

There are good people making good software all over the world. We just need to start using it more instead of this crap being thrown at us by big tech

Sure, I'd love to use an open source model locally that's trained on fully ethically-sourced data... once it's on par with ChatGPT or Sonnet.

For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".

I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.

It worked for China, when they banned or restricted what Google, MS, Apple, Facebook can do there

And clearly some people believe it will work for America, given the TikTok ban.

A ban that is not being enforced or complied with is not a ban.

China did it early and made growing their domestic industry a priority. Europe has not. This is like trying to close the gate after the horse has already escaped.

So not just EU, but any other region in the world, like Africa, South America, Central Asia should just give up and not try to make a business that could disrupt existing giants?

They should try fostering more competence and competitiveness, rather than trying to regulate themselves to success.

Most US industries are owned by 1/2/3 oligopolies. The only way to compete is to create your own monopolies.

They can, but OP's point is that a ban on US tech on its own will do nothing to produce a local Silicon Valley. It needs to go hand in hand with a massive push toward local entrepreneurial support, especially in places like Europe where the government exercises more control through legislation

I don’t think you really need to incentivize businesses. If people want to start a business, they’re going to start one, regardless of whatever carrot you throw in front of them. “I’d love to start a business and make a profit, but the government just isn’t giving me enough incentive!” - said nobody ever.

And "every government software contract owned by a US company is about to be up for grabs" isn't an incentive on its own?

Europe is regularly growing new tech startups, even online tech. The main problem is US vulture capital swooping in and buying it up as soon as it outgrows the local market, followed by everyone pretending it was developed in the US.

It worked for China because they were in position of power. The US wasn't established in China and they needed Chinese users to grow their global user base and influence. Meanwhile, China had the wealth and power to say no and instead fund and develop their own homegrown tech equivalents.

Europe doesn't have that same level of power. If tomorrow morning you banned Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce in Europe, you'd destroy their economy.

What Europe needs to do is create the conditions for tech companies to emerge that could truly compete against US big tech. As long as European will prefer working for US corporation, there's no chance for Europe to compete. Simple as that.

I don't get your argument. Those companies provide overpriced crap to go along with domain specific code that is either open source or written by a more specialized company. If companies suddenly had to make intelligent choices and people would get fired for buying IBM, a bunch if companies would show up with better integrations than these since worse just isn't possible.

If a rush to get anything non-US were the priority the market of converting Chinese solutions would already deliver better solutions.. US tech (of this office sort) looks a lot like US steel plants a couple decades after other nations built replacements, that's why it is comical that Europe is not only using it but often using the very worst of it.

It can also happen for Flatpak not to work on some distros.

Pdfsam and Masterpdf have native linux versions. Both are quite good. Though I use(d) Flexipdf via wine

Great work

Or you could make a OS/DE for normal people, with an option to change audio output per program with 2 clicks, like KDE Plasma does.

Agreed. Web apps have no business knowing what my audio config is. Instead of the OS or browser implementing a working sound picker, every single website will have to do it and all but the big ones will do it slightly wrong. Google is positioning the web for them to take over the desktop.

It's more easily explained as always wanting your web conference call to use your headset even if normally you want the browser to use something else than as a replacement for changing your OS settings.

The web is constantly positioned to takeover the desktop though, has been for many years at this point.

IOW, it would be meet and proper for the browser to be able to remember sound settings per site, and bad to offer web pages that ability.

I haven't read all, but Attack no. 6 requires access to unlocked phone. IMO, if that is the case, I wouldn't consider this as an attack, at least not as something that would stop me using the service

From the paper, my reading is that it's meant to highlight a larger weakness in Threema's design (the decision to rely heavily on a long-lived private key, which then needs to be exported with a potentially attacker-controllable password in order to transfer identity).

Edit: notably, this wouldn't be a problem if (1) Threema required a preconfigured password to encrypt the private key with, or (2) used an identity transfer scheme that was detectable on the target device. But since they're just copying a key, it's entirely undetectable.

I've been using various CAD programs, and IMO, FreeCAD UI/UX is quite ok. If you are Inventor or Solidworks user and try to switch to SolidEdge for example, it won't be easy. Not to mention some others like VariCAD (~30 years old professional MCAD)

There are many issues with FreeCAD being OSS alternative to professional MCAD software, but UI/UX is not one of them