I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.
He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.
In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.
It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.
What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.
Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?
You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.
See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.
I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.
I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.
It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.
But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.
Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.
I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.
EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.
I once had a guy walk into the subway, sit down, loudly declare he’d sneak into a military base, steal a tank and kill us all, then rant for a while about specific ways to kill his fellow passengers, including some very specific grenade action.
Then he sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, quietly turned towards the too-horrified-to-change-seats nerdy guy to his left and politely ask him if he had a lighter for his cigarrette.
It was a morning train, most people just kept trying to nap.
I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.
I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.
Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”
I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?
Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.
If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.
In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!
I know a few. Xerox is used for photocopying in other languages. Kleenex is the accepted term for “paper tissue” in Spain. Zodiac and Vespa are used for specific types of ship and motorcycle in multiple places, even when not manufactured by those brands. Thermos is a brand name, used in multiple countries as well. Sellotape is used in the UK for transparent sticky tape.
I don’t speak every regional variant of every language, but the short answer is this is definitely not a US thing. At all.
“Jello” is a brand name, which I think may be the example most people in the US specifically don’t realize. There are tons of others.
I think “googling” counts because a) it kinda makes sense even without the branding, b) I hear it all the time, and c) I say it myself even though I haven’t used Google as my default search engine for ages.
I am cringing pretty hard, doesn that count as “emotional”?
I sincerely don’t care enough about the fate of F-Droid to spend too long litigating the parts of this strategy that seem ill-conceived. If you think that implies hostility… well, it doesn’t. Hell, I hope I’m wrong, it’d be great to have a good indie storefront on Android to use as a default. I just don’t think as described this is it at all.
Otherwise, cope as you need. I have explained the bits I think you’re misunderstanding, I just don’t want to repeat that over and over because man, I need to have an online interaction that doesn’t devolve into that at some point. And I don’t want to explain why not wanting to talk to you any longer is not conceding the point, so this is the last time I’ll express that, too. Cool? Cool.
That’s a weird take, man. By that metric no online conversation can ever end.
I’ve made my point, I’ve said my piece. I’m not super emotionally invested on F-Droid’s success, either. This seems like a bad move in a few different ways, and it’s one that interferes with how I use the platform for the reasons I’ve stated. You don’t want that to be the case, I get that, but I don’t need your permission to feel that what’s being proposed here is going to mess with how I use it.
I also don’t need your permission to make the case that a store of monetized apps is a store of monetized apps and is competing with huge, polished, integrated alternatives in a way that F-Droid currently doesn’t. You’re mostly arguing with the kind of just-use-GIMP wishful thinking where it’s feasible for people to step out of their comfort zone or make morality-driven consumption choices en masse. I don’t feel I need to argue with you about it, though. It’s gonna go the way it’s going to go. The part that bums me out the most, as I said, is as an illustration for how self-reinforcing the niche position of FOSS can be sometimes. Otherwise, you do you.
I genuinely have nothing new to add to this conversation. All my previous points stand and they either address those objections already or the caveats are self-evident.
If anything I’ll say that seeing the defensiveness come together in real time is really helping me understand many recurring narratives happening around this space. I suggest we call this process “the GIMP effect”.
My point is I don’t care about the intentions of the project, I care about the piece of software that comes out the other end, regardless of whether that’s intended or not. A store with a mix of commercial and noncommercial software is just an Android store, like all the other Play alternatives. A repository of non commercial software where you know all the stuff you find fits a specific set of properties is a different thing, and I don’t need to read what the developers say online to feel that difference in the software.
It´s fundamentally harder to see the difference between Play and F-Droid if both have free, monetized and ad-based applications than if Play is mostly monetized and F-Droid is all noncommercial. If F-Droid steps away from that then it has a lot of homework to do and it enters a direct competition that is easy to understand: there are many stores, Play is the best one and the default, so why would I be using another one? If it was up to me, I’d even consider doing this as a separate app and keeping F-Droid as a dedicated version to remain in the position it already has, even if for developers they´re all uploading their software to the same back-end.
F-Droid now has a good answer to that. The version they´re proposing, regardless of their intentions, does not.
Does that help clarify where I´m coming from?
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don’t own this, I don’t have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don’t use. We’ll see where it goes.
To clarify, I’m making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don’t get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it’s the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you’re saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it’s no longer going to be that, then it’s picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it’s just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn’t doing that at the moment isn’t its moral high ground, it’s that it has a clear position that doesn’t overlap with Play’s: noncommercial software.
Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that’s the point of case insensitive names, it doesn’t matter. However you want to call them will work.