kirk781

joined 2 years ago
[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago

Reminds me of the quote Political Satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. But over the years, there have seriously been multiple controversial candidates who got the prize.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago

And what is your proposal they run? iOS is Apple only; Linux phones are still in their infancy and away from mass adoption. And before you mention Graphene or Lineage OS, both are just forks of Android.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 weeks ago

Reminds me when Quora was very popular and subs were dedicated to filtering weird/funny posts from there. There was one called r/Indianpeoplequora and it was quite active back in the day (Quora got a lot of user base here in India at its peak though honestly that site looks eerily empty now).

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Listenbrainz is good. I scrobble to both there and Last.fm, there was librefm as well but it is in maintenance mode now practically with no new sign ups.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 weeks ago

Indian newspapers have launched partially automated YouTube channels, some with AI avatar presenters. Nearly a fifth of Indian readers said they use chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini (including AI Overviews) weekly to access news. In the U.K., that number was only 3%.

I knew YouTube channels were popular as a news source in my country (with their over the top hysterical style) but didn't knew that Gemini/GPT was also getting big here.

I still read a digital version of a proper newspaper. I find it slightly more informative and factual. In the good old days, I used to get a physical newspaper because nothing beats the touch of paper.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Whatsapp is popular a lot in many parts of the world. In India, WhatsApp is almost the defacto standard messaging app with Telegram probably flying in a far second. I doubt I know anyone who even uses stuff like Signal or Threema or any of the alternatives.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 weeks ago

Is there support for blocking individual elements of a page in v3 version of uBlock Origin? (I won't be surprised if it lacked it). I usually block various other elements of page like useless headers/footers/comment sections on some sites I routinely visit on Firefox.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 weeks ago

I have Prime too for shopping mainly. I also can't use Prime Video because it refuses to go beyond 480p on Firefox for Linux (Atleast last time I tried).

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yes, Mint does not have any Snap stuff. It was Canonical's idea to put in Snap and I think Ubuntu Is one of the only mainstream distros to use snap instead of flatpak.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I mean I guess there are more noob friendly distros than Debian [ there was a time when all I saw was Ubuntu around me and it's ubiquitous Unity DE was instantly recognizable to my eye] but chances are many of them are ultimately based on Debian itself. Mint's main ISO is based on Ubuntu [and indirectly Debian] whilst they also release a LMDE [Linux Mint Debian Edition] as a fallback variant directly based on Debian. I guess Zorin OS or elementary OS are also decent but they also seem more like heavy reskins to me than anything else.[Zorin has a Windows like feel to it].

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Void is rolling release IIRC. The package manager is quite fast and gets the job done. The pain point is that Void has a lower selection of package in its repos compared to say, Arch. Some good stuff is there (for example I was looking for a third party Spotify client ncspot? Back in the day and it was packaged in Void's repos) but if someone uses niche stuff a lot, there can be issues.

Of course there is Flatpak support. And the system itself is comparatively lean and fast. I don't think my installation of Void came with plenty of pre-installed apps.

It ships in two builds : glibc or musl. The latter one is less favored because it only makes life tougher honestly. Runit support is a strong point of it though personally I don't have any anti systemd qualms.

The documentation is basic and okayish. I still often go to Arch Wiki since that's honestly the most detailed. Also, I just found that it's the highest rated distro on Distro Watch. I have distro hopped a long time and Void is decent. I still hold Debian in higher regard since it's slightly easier for a novice to get used to (though it's repos can be hold often old versions of software) and also because it was my main entry point to the Linux world.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

Yes, Trisquel can be a pain to be used as a daily driver. Whilst I admire the philosophy behind it's concept, it definitely leaves a lot of end work to be done by the user.

I have used Fedora for quite some time in the past . I think Fedora and now discontinued Cent OS were two RPM based distros (I think Fedora now uses Dnf as well) I have used. Cent OS I liked decently, it wasn't as bleeding edge as Fedora and for a long time I dual booted Cent OS and Debian.

Void is decent independent distro. Ironically I don't have any anti systemd feelings and just gave it a try for heck of it and stuck to it. I think there is a musl version of Void as well but that makes things only complicated.

 

Even simple apps nowadays have become subscription only. Whilst I used to pirate most stuff in the past, but if the app in question is a small one time purchase, it's not bad considering you don't need to sideload updated apk's from Mobilism each time a new version is released (looks at some great cheap apps like Pano Scrobbler).

However, the trend has shifted towards the other side with everything from video recording apps(AZ Recorder), Weather apps(Today Weather) and Battery monitoring apps(Battery guru) offering subscriptions. Some have a high one time purchase option but some like the latter don't.

Battery Guru is an example of enshittification. If phones still came with removable batteries and companies supported them, then for the price of say, a 4 year subscription to the app, I could have just gotten a new replaceable battery. It's not like the app will magically stop my battery from degrading.

Whilst I have done piracy ( and still pirate stuff like films because no alternative, screw you Netflix), I tried to go the legal route for some apps since then updation and management of them becomes easier. But with the subscription scourge, I doubt devs are going in the right direction.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 

Some companies, most notably Google, have regional specific pricing for their products. So for example, YouTube will be significantly cheaper in India, let's say, than in the US because former's purchasing power is much lower.

However, not all companies do so and that is a prime motivator towards piracy, even for customers who want to go the legal route. There are many examples from niche ones like the streaming app History Hit to mainstream newspapers like New York Times.

I would like to focus on the latter. It's no secret that it's news app in moddable form is easily available though the games section is still off limits, I think. Still, I went to see how much their legit variant cost in my country, India. For first year, it was INR 1000, not bad, considering that rival newspapers in my country have a similar structure. The small thing is that after first year, it will jump eight fold. So, a subscription to a newspaper will cost annually more than any streaming service I can think of(and Atleast streaming services have to offload the Full HD streams from servers, news articles have a much lower bandwidth cost) and almost the price of an entry level smartphone per year.

It's almost as if NYT deserves to be pirated. It is almost as if they don't wish to take users money, even for those willing to pay. For a subscription, that is Twice more than Play Pass, YouTube Premium, Disney combined, it is almost laughable.

 

A Snapdragon Elite phone with giant 7000 mAh Silicon Carbon battery, 100 W charging, 144 Hz refresh rate and even a 3.5 mm jack. All of it is let down by the fact that it's promised only one major OS upgrade.

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