The average user needs a web browser and maybe some office apps
BaumGeist
joined 2 years ago
"It's just a joke" is such a tired excuse for being called out on your shitty opinions
For RDP, I use Remmina. Multimon only works on X though, not wayland, so make sure that's the graphic server you're running. Idk if it'll work for 2x2 tho, I only have 2 monitors.
For the headaches, I use a magic pill that I'm not legally allowed to view the ingredients of and cry into my Tissues as a Service.
Y'all seriously overestimate thr average user:
Debian. It's simple, stable, minimal upkeep, rarely if ever has breaking changes, and all this out of the box.
Someone new doesn't need to be thrown in the deep end for their first foray into linux, they want an experience like windows or mac: simple interface, stable system, some potential for getting their hands dirty but not too much to worry about breaking
Most likely it works on others, you just need to spoof the agent.
I have both Mull and vanilla Firefox on Android, they use all the same headers (including User-Agent) according to DuckDuckGo's "what's my user agent" tool.
My guess is that the same defaults that makes Mull more private also disables either cookies or scripts that Duolingo expects to be able to use.
This bird's-eye view of the process really sells it short. "making a modern CPU is insanely complex" doesn't even scratch the surface of chip fab.
I mean, some guy did make his own lithography setup in his garage, and last we heard he had managed to fit 1,200 transistors on the same chip. This is just a few transistors shy of the 6,000,000,000 transistors in Intel's Rocket Lake die.
So if you want your PC to do much beyond blink an LED, you need an industrial photolithography machine. And of course, that entails a clean room, specialized HVAC and sanitation equipment (Intel's clean rooms have less tolerance for contaminants than hospital clean rooms). Then it's only a matter of getting the rest of the chip fabrication machines (because the process requires more precision than a human hand). And materials that have extremely specific proportions and purities.
And so it only costs a few hundred million dollars to just make a cpu. And even that was still just glossing over some of the most ridiculous, precise, specialized and esoteric marvels of science and engineering humanity has ever come up with.
Now it's just a matter of just making all the other parts.
Very cool. I was expecting like a Ben Eater style breadboard, but bigger. This is so much more.
Can't answer most of your questions, rhetorical or not, but don't have much to add or argue with either. One caveat I want to make is:
Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore.
Don't think that for a second. There are more now than there ever have been. The problem isn't simply that YouTube choked out all the others, it's that YouTube moved the goalposts so we wouldn't even consider the others. E.g. back in the day if you wanted videos about a very specific topic—say, you need a new phone and you want to find out if the PinePhone is right for you—you would have to go to all the video sharing sites and, if you were lucky, you would find a video or two somewhere. Nowadays you just check youtube. Youtube shifted the goalposts from "hosts videos" to "hosts videos about everything," and now people won't consider adopting alternatives unless their community just spontaneously exists, and is big enough to have everything, and also it doesn't show them people they hate, and also it has this ambiguous list of features that youtube mostly has, and also...
And who can blame them? Who wants to check 8 different websites with 8 different interfaces and 4 different apps and 2 without apps and 2 that don't work on mobile at all and partially overlapping communities and offerings and STILL risk not finding anything when checking one unified platform will guarantee you the video?
Do you know any replacements for these btw?
It depends on what you mean by "replacement," as I mention above. As far as I know, there are no exact replicas of "[website], but only the good parts."
Every Social Media alternative is either too small to be attractive to the people who expect a very full social experience (e.g. Lemmy instead of Reddit), or it's just recreating the same flaws again, but more subtle and insidious (e.g. Threads instead of Xitter). The problem there is that the will of the herd doesn't make smart choices, so you're either left with site that's just like the last one and doomed to recreate its downfall in a few years (because the average person likes what they already know and liked) or a site that is too forward thinking and will never have more than a few hundred thousand followers in your lifetime (assuming it can last)—a number that might seem large in a stadium or a BBS forum, but seems small on a site like facebook.
That being said, I like where the fediverse is going with services like Matrix, Mastodon and Lemmy. Maybe one day we'll see a more fb-like experience
As you said, DuckDuckGo is a fairly good search engine. Better than Google currently, sadly. I remember when it was definitely a harder choice and really required strong values. 'Nuff said.
For Amazon, I like using Ebay, Etsy and specialized online stores. Brick-and-mortar is only necessary if it's groceries or not a large chain (which all have websites anyway). The trade-off is the guarantees: some baseline of quality, and a definite refund when you get scammed. Hasn't been an issue for me yet, but I make it a point to not buy online if I can try in-store.
Yahoo and Youtube: not really. As aforementioned I don't use one, and I too am suckered into the pretty multicolored void of the other.
TV and streaming: cough !piracy@lemmy.ml cough (follow the checklists in the megathread first)
Finally! Now I can finally have a voice recorder spy on me!
That's what I was missing back in the 90s, playing with a portable tape recorder without any strangers eavesdropping on everything I said. Isn't tevhnology grand!
Oh yeah, re-reading my comment I didn't make it obvious enough, but I assumed this was something you found and didn't make yourself. When I said "they" and "them" I was talking to you about the creator, not talking about you (and past you) to the rest of the community.
I remember when all the named sites were good. Facebook was once the gold standard because they kept out the young'uns and boomers. Amazon not only had trustworthy reviews, but also only sold from trustworthy sellers—e.g. you didn't have to put up with shady sellers mixing in lower quality merch with the generic stuff that goes into big grab bins in the warehouses. Google searches were good for finding information beyond the most surface level of any topic without getting slammed by SEO procedurally generated blogs. Yahoo outperformed google in everything but search for a hot minute; I remember using it for email, news, and watching the latest music videos on their embedded RealPlayer java applet!
Youtube got monetized is what happened. The original owners sold off to Google because Google Video sucked, and the owners couldn't keep up with the growth of the site. Google decided that they should make money off of their shiny new toy. It stopped being about sharing videos, and became about keeping you engaged with "Content" so you could see more ads. YouTubers got incentivized by the algorithm to go with what appeals most to the broadest possible audiences, and the algorithm evolved in the direction of showing people whatever kept them watching ads. The front page, which used to be about highlighting odd, unique, and (most importantly) new ideas became about showing you whatever was most like whatever you had already sunk the most time into. It's like how once you buy a product, all the targeted ads change to selling you the same type of product. Their algorithms don't understand one-off purchases nor limited reserves of interest in a topic.
And on top of that mound of shit, they changed the community to enable their greed: once being a "Content Creator" was a sustainable source of income production values increased, which drove a need for a future guarantee of further income. This wave of videomakers attracted a userbase that, on average, cared more about quantity and style than substance. In turn, these types of users became instrumental in maintaining revenue for youtube-based businesses, so catering to their expectation of high-volume with ever-increasing production values became the most important factor to creators, which drove a need for increasing revenue streams. That's why even with an ad blocker, youtube is still mostly ads: sponsored segments, product reviews, and soooo much shallow pop culture engagement—references and reviews and critiques and thought pieces about media and people that won't matter in 5 years' time.
Ironically this is exactly what went wrong with analog TV and then cable, and it's what's going wrong with streaming services now. The iriny being that that is precisely why they had a large influx of users early on: it was all thevTV watchers who were tired of 1/3 of their valuable time being wasted with ads. They learned nothing and refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of the For-Profit model, electing to blame the ad-blockers, pirates, and "striminals" who make up a percentage of their viewers—instead of ever introspecting and considering that it's really their fault for pushing away the even larger subset that simply just stop watching entirely. Those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, just faster and in a more spectacular way.
Oh! That's also an experience I've had. Lessons learned and whatnot. Sorry I wasn't here earlier to chime in and save you some time. Glad you've got it working again and learned something along the way, though!
You're right, it didn't use to be beginner friendly. The installer has definitely gotten a lot better, and now they're offering non-free-firmware in it; that avoids that whole issue..
Nouveau comes packaged. Most people that ditch nouveau do so because it doesn't give them high performance metrics they expected out of their GPU, or it didn't support multimonitor, or played poorly with RDP or any other issue which goes outside of my "watch youtube on my laptop" use case. That is, once again, deviating outside of "average user" territory. If you had problems getting any display or DE to work, that's different, but you may find it sucks less now.
Once again overestimating beginners. Any OS installation is inherently not beginner friendly, and requires helping them, regardless of Debian/Arch/Nix/windows/Big Sierra Lion Yosemite III, Esq. Jr. MD or whatever Apple's calling it nowadays.
I find Debians defaults during installation very beginner friendly, set and forget type stuff. It won't use the hardware to full potential, but that's up to advanced users to decided after they're comfortable with the training wheels.