Hello, tone-policing genocide-defender and/or carnist 👋

Instead of being mad about words, maybe you should think about why the words bother you more than the injustice they describe.

Have a day!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yes, because private property is theft. But unequal enforcement of copyright law is worse. Right now, LLMs are just lying machines trained on pirated data and the companies that run them are acting with impunity for doing something a normal person would get put in jail for.

    Copyright is immoral, but as long as it exists, the laws should be extra strict on companies that steal others’ works.



  • I don’t disagree with most of that, but none of what you said actually addresses the problem. The problem is that there are functionally two (notable) flatpak repositories, but one of those is going against the will of the upstream software devs and shipping broken software that they have asked them to stop packaging. And Fedora users are getting the broken flathub repository as the default, without really having reason to suspect that their “flathub store” would ever trick them into installing from a different source. The “verified” badge, especially the lack thereof, does not address that.

    As for users feeling “tricked”? That’s a difficult thing to say. I would like to say that users should at least know something about the distro they are choosing (ie Ubuntu users should know about snap; Fedora/Debian users should know about their stances on FOSS, security, and patents; Arch users should know its a DIY distro).

    You can RTFM someone all day, but if you actually want Linux to be adopted by more people, you need to reduce the anti-patterns. Snaps are generally known about because they are infamous for also breaking packages. And they’re still major footguns when people are recommending Ubuntu to people that are new to Linux, who are the least likely to know that their apt package installations are going to be installing differently-packaged software that has its own set of problems. If we get to a point where Flatpaks have a similar problem to Snaps, we’ve taken a wrong turn, and it will only hurt Linux adoption.




  • They work on other distros… if they work at all. If those “strict guidelines” are resulting in flatpaks like OBS and Bottles, which are broken and the devs have tried to get them to stop shipping, then I’ll pass on Fedora flatpaks.

    I dont criticize Flatpaks for allowing alternative packaging sources. I criticize Fedora for sneakily (whether intentionally sneaky or not) setting their broken flatpak repo as the default, leading to a bunch of confusion by Fedora users that don’t know they’re actually using different, sometimes broken, packages from everyone else.

    The uBlue downstreams of Fedora know this, and they have the decency to present the user with that information upon installation. So thankfully, their users don’t end up wasting their time with problems that Fedora introduced.



  • can they simply fork?

    Forking the Linux kernel will effectively guarantee that no one will run their software. None, but the most niche distros would ship it. If the Rust people are forced to fork, their time may be better spent contributing to Redox.

    Why do people love Rust so much?

    Rust makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to write dangerous code, whereas C pretty much guarantees you’ll write something dangerous (and therefore insecure or buggy) at some point, especially in larger codebases, like the Linux kernel. Arrogant devs will defend keeping Rust out of the kernel by saying things like “write better code”, but if the people writing kernel code for 20 years are still writing dangerously flawed code, it’s safe to say that at a certain point, we need a better tool. That tool is Rust.

    Rust also has very high-quality libraries that produce nicer finished products. I learned Rust because of clap and ratatui, which make superior CLIs and TUIs to anything else. Seriously, go use a CLI or TUI that was made in Rust. Try bat, a cat clone. You’ll get easy, great command-line completions, easy-to-read help output, optional, beautiful syntax-highlighting, theming, etc. It’s hard for me to go back to vanilla cat.

    And I say all of that as someone that likes C. C is really fun, and it’s a very powerful language, but it was not designed to be memory-safe. If it was, the people complaining about Rust would just complain about C too.





  • I know everyone knows the claim that it’s a bug is bullshit, but here’s a personal anecdote to further demonstrate it:

    I have two identical MacBooks: one for work, one is personal. My personal MacBook has my EU Apple account signed in. The other has a US Apple account.

    I updated to macOS 15.3 at the same time. Guess what? The one with the US account had Apple “Intelligence” surreptitiously enabled. The one with the EU account didn’t.

    Doesn’t sound like a bug to me 🙄 Sounds like they’re enabling their bullshit where they can get away with it, and they don’t want to risk it with people protected by EU regulations.


  • I think people in the Linux community have a predisposition to call Apple products “low quality”, but as someone with an M2 Pro MacBook and a Framework 16, the Framework feels like cheap, mushy garbage in comparison. The Framework is still really cool for other reasons, but build quality is not one of them.

    The speakers on MacBooks are actually really good (the Framework speakers sound like absolute shit), and the OLED screen + keyboard & trackpad can’t be beat. I would run Asahi on it if it supported more than 60Hz on the built-in display and the mic worked. If those two things don’t matter to you, you might really enjoy Asahi on a Mac.