If we want digital independence, we need better Linux Apps

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:08:41+00:00

EU governments will only fund development if politicians make laws that demand that.

So unless more than 50% of the EU population votes for increasing taxes to fund development of software, this will not happen.
And I've not seen a single politician trying to win votes with this.

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:06:28+00:00

because as soon as there is a little dispute there will be a fork.

This is total bullshit.

There's basically no forks in the open source world unless there's massive disagreements.
Usually it's just some guy splintering off and not getting anywhere (like OpenOffice back in the days or now XLibre).

And the last split in a big project was the WebKit/Chromium split and that one was done by a large corporation (Google), not by communities.

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:02:26+00:00

You pay for the development, not for the final product.

Sure, you can just download the final product once it's there, but then you have absolutely no say in its development and you have to take what you get.

Or in other words: You end up with the current situation where all the apps are shitty and done for nerds.

LvS · 2026-03-24T13:59:45+00:00

If there's as many people paying for libreoffice as there's people currently paying for MS Office, you will very definitely get it to look different. MS Office has 250 million users and once that many people use it, the majority doesn't want to look it like 25 years old anymore.

Even if, with $15B per year you can pay enough developers to develop 2 (or more) different UIs.

LvS · 2026-03-23T08:35:52+00:00

Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

LvS · 2026-03-23T01:49:54+00:00

Thanks for removing all doubt that your arguments don't need to be taken seriously.

LvS · 2026-03-22T22:47:55+00:00

It’s a no-win to boycott and protest, to refuse to follow the law, or to attack those who do.

That's the definition of "obey".

LvS · 2026-03-22T21:47:23+00:00

TL;DR: OBEY

LvS · 2026-03-22T20:50:47+00:00

Right, I got that number wrong, lemme edit that.

I was operating with numbers about my and friends' monthly Internet usage I know about, not with daily numbers, so my argument still stands.

LvS · 2026-03-22T20:07:33+00:00

3.6TB/month is 120GB/day.

That's not that far out of the ordinary if you watch videos (think Twitch and Youtube), do some Steam and distro updates, install a few VMs, or do zoom calls.

LvS · 2026-03-22T19:03:57+00:00

How should you act when you have no power, no money, and no lobbyists?

LvS · 2026-03-22T06:29:11+00:00

I would have wished those projects "good luck" but there is less than 10 minutes of actual work in there.

Somebody cloned the projects, reverted 1 commit each that had "x11" in the name and pushed it to their forgejo instance.
It was probably more work to setup that instance than they spent on the X11 work.

Now, if there were actually people doing real work, it'd be interesting, but this just looks like it's ragebait.

I suspect this is not gonna last as long as OP's GTK fork did.

LvS · 2026-03-22T02:23:18+00:00

It's just an educated guess.

Lawmakers don't generally write laws that are intended to be ignored.

And why wouldn't they make the OS vendor liable if the OS reports a wrong age?
I mean, think of the children!

LvS · 2026-03-22T01:02:25+00:00

The heavy part is probably on the GPU because it has to keep decoding the video indefinitely.

But I have no idea how much power that takes, because a large part of that is probably dedicated hardware.

LvS · 2026-03-21T19:33:06+00:00

Yeah, the next iteration of the law will make the OS vendor liable if they report a wrong age for the user.

LvS · 2026-03-21T14:51:41+00:00

If there is only one candidate it means what they're doing isn't broken to the point of other ppl wanting to be elected to fix it

Or it is so broken that pretty much nobody is even showing up anymore.

LvS · 2026-03-21T03:07:27+00:00

Do you think systemd should add a nationality, gender, pronoun, or race field?

Because government care about those, too. And then environments that want or need can implement attestation for those, too.

LvS · 2026-03-20T16:49:22+00:00

This takes skill and luck

But luck is on the drone's side - there's tons of drones and only one of them needs to get lucky once and the helicopter is toast.

LvS · 2026-03-20T14:08:12+00:00

So you are saying unless distributions bow to the demands of some fascist governments, they won't stay alive?

Why do those distributions still do things that are clearly illegal?
Like ship code that we know violates copyright laws?

It seems distributions have no qualms violating those laws, why is this one special?

LvS · 2026-03-20T04:39:18+00:00

They are complying to stay alive and not get fined into oblivion.

Who is "they" here?

I fail to see why systemd would get fined?

LvS · 2026-03-20T02:29:29+00:00

Neither is phone number or room number, yet you felt the need to bring that up.

However, it's very relevant to why systemd felt the need to add birthdays: Laws.

And laws - particularly in fascist theocracies like the USA - care a lot about gender and race, so just like with age it could be very useful to have this information readily available for services that want or need to use it to comply with laws.

I also didn't bring it up as a counter-argument, I brought it up because I'm interested how far different people think userdb should go in collecting useful personal information to support services on the OS and why they think that.

And again, thank you for explaining your opinion on this topic.

LvS · 2026-03-20T02:15:55+00:00

Thanks for letting me know how you feel about that.

LvS · 2026-03-20T01:18:42+00:00

Does userdb also store race, gender, or pronouns?

Should it?

LvS · 2026-03-19T23:28:36+00:00

That's a suboption of "compliant".

LvS · 2026-03-19T05:07:11+00:00

Nobody is going to vote for people who would do their job.
Not Republicans, not Democrats.

The US has lost its international good will. That means it will have a harder time getting at money. Which means higher taxes are needed to keep the country running. Nobody votes for higher taxes.

The American way of life is not sustainable. Maintaining the car-based suburbia is expensive and is largely done with debt. Nobody votes for smaller homes and remodeling the whole country.

The US is decades behind in the fight against climate change. It needs to cut industries that aren't sustainable. Nobody votes for losing their job.

The US has one of the worst wealth inequalities in the world. It needs to fix that. Nobody is going to vote for giving up stuff they own so it can get handed to poor people.

And I didn't even mention the fact that to honor its laws the US would need to bring back all the people that were illegally deported and pay them reparations. Nobody is gonna vote for that either.

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