Evolution currently. Previously Thunderbird. I wouldn’t mind a newer client but I am only interested in native apps talking to my email server over open standards.

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.

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.

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.

I apologise for the language but I am fed up with this shit.

I don’t think promoting OpenAI/Microsoft services is very compatible with the open source/free software ethos.

OpenAI pretend to be a non-profit but are controlled by billionaires and Microsoft. I am not going to take up a subscription and have my personal data mined by a company so I can have the arch wiki and man pages developed with millions of hours of volunteer labour served back to me.

I used to attend Linux/free software conferences decades ago and there would always be that one person who thought Facebook or Google were brilliant and that adding everyone’s lives and personal data to gmail or facebook was totally fine because the APIs were cool and big companies are totally ethical, “Don’t be Evil” etc. I thought they were foolish then and I think time has shown they are even more foolish now.

Every news site and forum I go to, even very non-technical ones, has people appear out of nowhere exclaiming with enthusiasm how OpenAI/copilot solved all their problems in great detail. Whether they are genuine or are just on the hype train created by bots and paid influencers I am at my breaking point with this shit. It is worse than the crypto bros with their NFT monkeys and get rich schemes. It has nothing directly todo with Linux or open source software. I escaped reddit to avoid all the influencers and people peddling shit but it is here as well and people can’t see it for what it is.

Removed by mod

upstart, unity, mir, snap, ubuntu

Does it use safe development practices though? Or is mainstream Rust development npm leftpad all over again with developers dumpster diving for dependencies to make their lives easier and more productive.

There is potentially a price to pay for colour ansi graphics and emoji and it comes in the form of a large tree of often trivial third party crates of unknown quality which could potentially contain harmful code. Is it all audited? Do I want it on a company server with customer data or even on a desktop with my own data?

The various gnu and bsd core utils are maintained by their projects and are self contained without external dependencies and have history. There are projects rewriting unix core utils in Rust (uutils) that seem to be less frivolous which are more to my taste. Most traditional unix utils have very limited functionality and have been extensively analyzed over many years by both people and tools which offsets a lot of the deficiencies of the implementation language.

Disney announced the end of physical media in Australia and New Zealand. Blackmarkets arise naturally when supply does not meet demand. It is preferable, morally and for society if people share media for free rather than fund organised crime as happens with most other black markets. I try and support creative industries where I can but piracy is the lesser evil in some cases.

Most of us do live in bubbles (not exclusive to lemmy or tech nerds). I first picked up Ubuntu in 2004. It was a massive leap forward at the time as Gnome was moving a lot faster than Debian stable and I was running Sid to keep up. I am genuinely surprised everytime I learn Ubuntu is still “popular” as they have made so many NIH misteps over the years (mir,upstart,unity,snap) and frustrated their users. I moved back to Debian years ago for server/dev as Ubuntu re-packaging wasn’t adding any value and once I was on another distro for desktop I lost all interest.

Ubuntu started off with some amazing community building. It felt more like a peoples distro than Canonicals for a time. I felt more invested in it in those days so I can relate to Ubuntu users but I also understand some of the criticism aimed at Canonical and their choices.