namingthingsiseasy

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they're all at the mercy of Poettering's Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they're being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don't focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you're on the side of the street with too many people, you don't have any personal leverage on your own. It's in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it's legal.

But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it's easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It's much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they're consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don't think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they're inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can't really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don't see any particular use.

Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they'll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

(My guess is that there isn't because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

The biggest theft in history, even.

Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it's okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let's imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

It's great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

I agree, I don't think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they're still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don't care at all. They'll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there's no evidence to suggest that they'll ever stop.

One of the biggest "mistakes" Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there's a good chance that it's not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

And this is why I'm perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn't happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.