True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.
The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.
Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.
You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist “tweak” apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.
A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don’t understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn’t exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.
GUI config isn’t practical for hardcore linux users. It isn’t scriptable, we can’t store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.
Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.
If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.
Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.
Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.
However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
I purchased in December 2022. I have not needed to buy any replacement parts but availability appears good.
At the same time I bought one of my kids the cheapest MSI laptop I could find for school. I just learned some of the keys on the MSI have been working intermittently. I have no idea what to do with it. We didn’t value a laptop for running Microsoft Word very highly and spent the savings on linux desktop upgrades. I can’t say it was the wrong choice. With the Framework it is trivial to check the connector or order a replacement but there was a substantial price difference.
Out of selfishness I would like people to keep buying Framework so they keep their replacement parts stocked but blind brand loyalty is stupid. People don’t need remuneration to engage in a hobby but if they are working for a company then unpaid labour is generally an abuse.
I have a Framework 13" DIY running Linux. It is functional. I am reasonably confident I will be able to buy replacements for anything that breaks which is important to me. It is well designed for repair and upgrade but other devices offer better price/performance/features. If you are on a tight budget and care about the environment buy used.
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They run Windows and all this third party software because they would rather pay subscriptions and give up control of their business than retain skilled staff. It has nothing todo with Linux vs Windows. Linux won’t stop doors falling off Boeing planes. It is the myopia of modern business culture.
Windows usage isn’t the cause of dysfunction in corporate IT but a symptom of it. All you would get is badly managed Linux systems compromised by bloated insecure commercial security/management software.
I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.
I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.
Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn’t obsolete.
Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.
Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.
Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.
A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.
Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.
Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.
The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.
Adding rust to a massive mature C project that targets lots of architectures and has many contributors is a difficult process. If it succeeds it is going to take a lot more time and patience.