Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 5 Posts
  • 344 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

    The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

    We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

    With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

    Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

    PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️



  • I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.

    Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.

    Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.

    Edit -

    I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.


  • Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

    If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

    Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

    And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

    Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

    Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

    To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️






  • A new Steam Deck OLED is $650 right now. Y’all are absolutely delusional if you think Valve is gunna sell the new Steam Machine with 6x the power of a Deck for $600.

    Personally, I think $800 is the absolute lowest these things will go for, and that is a stretch. Unless they are planning on cutting the price on Decks by 20-30% which would be ludicrous considering they are already selling them at a loss and making up the difference on the game sales.

    Valve has already said they are pricing the Steam Machines as entry level gaming PCs. And Idk what world some people are living in, but this ain’t 2010 anymore. Entry level PCs are $750+ nowadays, unless you are buying some parts used.

    I’m not happy about this. I remember back in highschool building some nice entry level gaming rigs for $500, but those days are long past. I probs won’t be getting a Steam Machine, but that’s because I am a tinkerer and I’ll just jank one together for my own use, but for somebody who wants a solid entry-level gaming PC that has a really great ecosystem around it and is no muss no fuss, the Steam Machine is a pretty good option.

    My prediction: 512GB Steam Machine will be $800-$900, the 2TB one will be $1,000-$1,200.






  • The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.

    You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.

    Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.



  • Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”

    All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.

    When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

    So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.

    I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.



  • well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.

    Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don’t encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.

    As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.

    Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City’s bus/metro app, and my city’s parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.

    I’ve decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.

    I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS’s special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google’s trash.

    I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I’ve seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it’s just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I’ll have to see.


  • Discord for me. A bunch of my family and friends are avid gamers. Discord is the universal standard app they all use for general communication.

    Not only do they use it for all their gaming related stuff, they have additional servers and channels for just chilling, chatting, off topic stuff, memes, politics, etc etc.

    It’s the network effect. Even if there was an open source app that perfectly replicated all the functionality of Discord and was just as simple to install and run as Discord, most of them still wouldn’t switch to it, because all of their friends and family are still on Discord.

    So they would have to have two completely separate apps with totally separate social groups to maintain, and nobody but hardcore advocates for FOSS and privacy are willing to do that.

    Sure, I have Discord, Matrix, IRC, Signal, XMPP clients, and a Private Mumble server, all on my systems, but I’m hardcore about FOSS. None of my friends and family are willing to do that. It took all my energy to convince two of my most techie friends just to get Signal on their phones. And only One has been willing to install a Matrix client to chat just with me.