This is my problem with every keyboard (FOSS or otherwise) since Swype finished. Gboard is the best of the bunch now but I’m loath to use it. I have tried Floris and Open (a fork of it which has swiping) and others, and they are all painful on this front.

He would have been better off not talking about harm directly but the ability to cause harm; he actually used that wording in an earlier comment in this chain. (Basically strawmanned himself lol.)

Because as a standalone argument for encryption, it’s fairly sound – hey, the ability of somebody to cause harm via encrypted messaging channels is the selfsame ability to do good [/prevent spying/protect privacy, whistleblowers/etc], and since the good outweighs the bad, we have to protect the ability to cause harm (sadly).

The problem is it’s still disanalogous – the ability to cause harm via LLM use is not the selfsame ability to do good (or to do otherwise what you want). My LLM’s refusing to tell me how to make a bomb has no impact on its ability to tell me how to make a pasta bake.

I’ve been learning French on there for awhile now and it’s been extremely effective por moi.

I wouldn’t normally comment on a spelling issue, however, in this case…

+1 for LT. The guy that runs it certainly has an open source ethos. The German one despite being a “Complete” series is frustratingly very incomplete, but that aside it was a useful way into the language. The word order explanations were particularly good. Everything is always free and the project as a whole is expanding with the help of volunteers and donations. It’s a good thing to be a part of.

Always wondered how good the Remarkable series is. Have been tempted but the hardware isn’t that cheap really. Since discovering the PDF reader of Zotero and running it with a night mode plugin, I’ve found myself mainly just wanting to use that. The annotations are stored separately as well, so you don’t get massively inflated PDF filesizes (though if you want the option to export with embedded annotations, you can do that; you can also import embedded annotations to Zotero and then clear the file of them). Very cool.

You’re right that it mustn’t be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn’t also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of “free as in freedom” either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it’s not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.

And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.

Oh really? That’s surprising. Always been smooth for me and I much prefer the UX

Teams

shudders

Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I’m saying NeoStore > F-Droid.

Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.

Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Thanks! Re switching - yeah, I agree. What do most people do in this situation – buy second hand or find older devices and just boot Linux off those? Use separate drives and boot off those? Like, what are the typical range of hardware decisions facing someone who thinks they wanna give Linux a real go?

Quick question: What’s the goto distro for newbies these days, is it still Ubuntu? Back in the day (like a decade ago I think) I played about with both Ubuntu and Mint. I’m curious to try again, but no idea where to start. Also, is it possible/feasible/okay to dualboot on MacOS?

That was actually a correct usage, fwiw (said as a native speaker with a penchant for caring about language – so that’s all but confirmed).

Does their gpodder sync thing work again yet? That’s the main reason I tried it out before, but it was inactive when I checked. NextCloud requires your own server, right?

This was gonna be my recommendation also.

Think it’s possible if you can install via KDE/Macports

I tried Floris recently. It looks really promising, but I found the swipe input to be maddeningly frustrating - obscure words chosen over common alternatives etc. That was the reason I most wanted to migrate from Gboard. Alas. There’s still nothing out there in this respect which beats the old Swype back in the day for me (though of course it wasn’t FOSS).