Flaky

Probably meant that Linux wouldn't be appropriate for whoever's needs. That can be true for some cases, not really for casual browsing use cases when pretty much 99% of all the major players in the browsing industry maintain a Linux port.

Worth pointing out that Gentoo also maintains a live USB that runs KDE Plasma.

If they want a full-fledged system running Arch, then EndeavourOS might be the best bet. Archinstall is great for quickly installing Arch but there's still quite a lot of set-up required after that, and for some people, they don't really want to do that. EndeavourOS is essentially a ready-made Arch set up (or as another person said here, a very opinionated Arch install), and is based on Arch's repos but has its own extra repo for its own software while Manjaro holds the packages back for two weeks (which creates sync problems with, say, the AUR)

It's probably to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, which I believe requires services that act as gatekeepers to have some form of interoperability, more than anything really.

Yeah the selective part I think is new. I believe Akkoma's authorised fetch is similar to Mastodon, though I've also heard it came at the cost of breaking MRFs (essentially policies to handle incoming messages, that can be custom-written if needed)

Agreed. I think Lemmy is more public than Mastodon and co. which do have some privacy settings for posts and account follows, but ActivityPub is inherently a public protocol. Appreciate everything you've done for Poptalk btw!

I'm talking about the installation process for VMware itself.

I had to help someone non-techy install VMware on Pop!_OS (the OS preinstalled by System76 on their hardware), and it required messing with the kernel modules which fails on Pop!_OS. It seems like VMware builds for a very specific version of Ubuntu which of course, means the kernel module building process fails when you use a kernel version that's different to what Ubuntu has (which Pop!_OS does and maybe some other Ubuntu-based distros). Thankfully someone on GitHub maintains up-to-date patches for the VMware modules so I was able to guide him through there but this isn't something someone new to Linux would want to do.

It's not like simply installing it from a package manager, well unless you use Arch but I'm not putting this person who's new to Linux on Arch when he just started using CLI.

Authorised fetch has been a thing on Mastodon and I believe Akkoma too. I don't know if Pleroma, Soapbox or Misskey have it though.

Essentially, Facebook's Twitter competitor Threads is gearing up to join the fediverse by integrating ActivityPub into their platform. Don't take my word too much on this but I believe this is due to the European Commission's Digital Markets Act which requires interoperability (similar to how iOS now requires sideloading in the EU). This is essentially their cheap way of complying.

The fediverse has a strong hatred of Facebook, for various reasons (from petty things like "embrace, extend, extinguish" to much more serious things like Facebook's compliance in the Myanmar genocide) and a "pact" was enacted of fediverse instances that are simply outright blocking Threads. Part of it is the fear that Facebook will federate its moderation problem and cause a headache (which, in my opinion, would be better dealt with by limiting Threads to followers only - Mastodon and Pleroma allow this).

Opponents of the Fedipact are optimistic this will help a more mainstream audience warm up to the fediverse. The fediverse has a reputation of being unwieldy and complicated to newcomers, and having a major platform like Threads integrating ActivityPub might help bring them in and see what it's like. Toxicity is cited as a reason for defederating Threads, but IMO I see more toxicity towards newcomers and outsiders coming from the people already on the fediverse, so I've been quite apathetic to the Threads thing.

Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn't great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don't use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that'd help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.

I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?

Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.

On Lemmy, it's shown. On Mastodon, instances are given the ability to hide their blocked instances which IMO hinders people's ability to join. A lot of the drama on the fediverse with regards to blocking is from Mastodon and similar instances.

People claim the instance you join doesn't matter because "everything is federated!" but it kind of does. It strongly affects the people who will see your posts and even who you can follow, and if you don't know what an instance is blocking it creates an air of uncertainty. I've seen instances get blocked for stupid at best and downright malicious at worst reasons, so the 4chan post isn't inherently wrong.

XMPP was never killed the way Netscape was by Microsoft lmao