Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

Honestly, this sounds great!

Funding.json is a good idea for a standard proposal and seems to solve most problems I‘d personally recognize with FOSS funding :)

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

It does (via the dock and probably directly as well), so that would absolutely work!

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

Honestly, I’d be more than happy if they just invented regular trains (even if their version would probably worse in ways not even imaginable as of now), because that would mean more money in train infrastructure.

So… yeah, you did it! You built something really cool and completely new! And don’t look over there, that’s just… copycats?

I, too, don’t love the use of AWS/Cloudflare, while I get that you can simply replace AWS S3 with something else for backups, this server setup is innately based on using Cloudflare.

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

(In reply to the post) Actually, I’ve found my immutable distro of choice (Silverblue) to be a lot of fun to tinker in (not with), but you just have to accept that tinkering does work a bit different here, with toolbox/containers instead of your actual host system to install most stuff you want to try etc. on

Cool application, thanks for sharing

Have you tried OnlyOffice? Their main selling point is compatibility with all of the Microsoft Office formats, so maybe that would suit your use case.

I’m with you with (distribution) choice (that’s definitely stressful, especially when you aren’t used to actually having to choose what kind of computing experience you want) but driver/program distribution on Linux is less painful/easier than on Windows on average. If your hardware happens to be supported, everything should work out of the box without the need to install drivers; the biggest problem for more or less average users would be having to install Nvidia drivers if they have a Nvidia GPU. Installing software is generally as easy as opening your distribution’s software store, searching what you need and hitting the install button.

Logseq, it’s a lot like Obsidian as it also has knowledge graphs, tags, is markdown-based and self-hostable but, in contrast to Obsidian, it’s fully open source

1940, as there are crazy things that will be going on in the world of computer science (and science in general) over the course of the next few decades and that would be really cool to experience. Kind of sad though to not be alive once we achieve human-level artificial intelligence, would be interested in seeing how that will turn out. I would probably chose America, as I wouldn’t want to spend WW2 in Germany where I live in the present.

Alternatively I think I would very much enjoy visiting Ancient Greek, although I’m not too sure when would be the best time for that; maybe at the peak of Athen.