Yep and that’s fair, but it’s still really critical that those of us that can migrate do so. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Developers won’t feel pressured to support Linux if there’s no sizable user base, but the user base won’t grow until developers provide support for Linux. He even mentions that in that video. There’s a reason I’m only this year planning on switching my primary desktop from Windows to Linux and it’s because of how good Proton has gotten. I’ve already checked every game in my Steam library and while it’s not 100% of the library that runs, everything that doesn’t is something I don’t care about.

Nah, Linux still only accounts for about 2% of all users on Steam (active per month) so it has a long way to go still, but at least it’s heading in the right direction. If you count only English speaking Steam users that number climbs to over 5%. If Linux can get to and reliably maintain 10% that’s probably good enough to make it a first class target for even AAA releases, but it’s not there yet. The fact that so many games run fine under Linux these days is almost entirely down to the effort Valve has sunk into Proton making it relatively easy for devs to check Steamdeck support off without needing to really put much work in at all.

Going to guess his pain points are the fingerprint reader and possibly wifi/blutooth chipset. There are some of those supported but that’s still the spottiest in terms of driver support under Linux. Maybe also webcam but generally those work fine these days.

We don’t need everyone to migrate, just enough that companies and developers feel obligated to support Linux. We’re slowly getting there. Valve throwing their weight behind Linux for gaming was a massive win for Linux. Another important factor is the rise of the mobile first generations and the fact that at its core Android is Linux based. It’s not completely trivial to port an Android app to Linux but it’s at least no worse than porting it to Windows.

Microsoft may still have a stranglehold on corporate desktops, but they’ve long since lost the battle for servers and their hold on the home desktop is slipping a little more each day. Losing a significant chunk of gamers to Linux would be a massive blow to MS because it has been one of the few really unassailable markets for them historically.

I’m hoping to make the switch next month. Building out a new gaming system and going to try going all in on Linux again. Long ago I was a full time Linux user, but with the rise of Steam and the spotty support of wine I couldn’t justify staying with it. Now that Proton is good enough to cover 90%+ of my games library I’m returning to where I started.

In the early days of the internet that was actually the correct way to do things. Websites were supposed to be hosted at the www subdomain, while other content was supposed to go to places like ftp.whatever.com. Technically they should redirect thisstupidcompany.com to www.thisstupidcompany.com not the other way around. All that said though that concept has kind of fallen by the wayside as it became increasingly apparent that most hosts exist primarily to host websites with other uses as secondary so it became the norm to just assume the www when navigating to the root domain.

supposedly simple enough for the average person to use

That is in fact the result every time that claim is made about any product. That was the pitch for COBOL, so simple your business analysts can write it, no need for expensive programmers. That was the pitch for business rules engines. That was the pitch for dozens of drag and drop GUI based programming “languages”. Lastly that’s the pitch for any number of specialized tools that let you “script” them like WordPress.

Not once in the hundreds of times those claims have been made have they ever been true. Every last time the only thing you end up with is a horrible programming language/framework that still requires programmer’s but makes the experience of working with it miserable for them.

Short answer is maybe. Long answer is it depends on which state you live in. So called At Will states effectively have no labor laws (well, there’s things like minimum wage, wage theft protections, worker safety, etc. but nothing around employment). In an At Will state you can be fired without notice and without any reason. In theory this is balanced by being able to quit at any time and without giving notice, but people aren’t exactly clamoring for the right to quit jobs without notice.

That’s because you don’t understand what business Google is actually in. They’re an ad company. They sell and serve ads. Everything else is just ways to better target and serve ads. All those “products”? Those aren’t revenue streams to them, they’re incidental costs of the ads that are their actual product.

Maybe they misread and thought they were posting to Mildly Interesting?

What’s hilarious to me is when friends visit and then always comment on how much nicer it is using their phones on my wifi.

I’ve used Pi-Hole for years now and it’s absolutely indispensable. It’s one of those things where you kind of forget about it then you’re over visiting someone’s house without it and it’s absolutely jarring to see ads cropping up all over the place where you’re not used to seeing them.

There’s no need for a service fee, just increase the prices of everything by 18% or whatever. It’s more honest that way instead of listing one price and then springing a hidden fee on people at checkout. Part of why this particular example is so dodgy is they seem to be fishing for a service fee and a tip, which just seems like double dipping on hidden fees.

This is different. This is something new google is rolling out. This isn’t SMS and it isn’t TOTP. Google is opting people into push based authentication based solely on them having an android phone associated with their account whether they’re still using that phone or not. Anyone not already using TOTP or WebAuthN should really add those to their accounts before Google decides to “help” you by opting you into their new proprietary 2FA.

I didn’t even realize it’s a thing that could be changed.

To be fair, while Lemmy is a step in the right direction, I don’t think it’s aimed quite right. It solves one problem while introducing a host of others. I’ve talked about this previously in various places, but ultimately I think it’s a mistake to bundle communities, user accounts, and moderation all into the same package. It’s easy from the standpoint of “Lemmy is just a mini Reddit” mental model, but then you run into problems like exactly what’s being discussed in this thread, where you have instance administrators making decisions about what federated content their users are allowed to access.

A better design would be to decouple users from communities. Communities should be hosted on super targeted instances with similar communities who all can agree on content rules with each other. That in combination with some kind of central registry of communities and a mechanism to repost content between communities that wish to be partnered with each other would take care of that part of the equation. I would also invert the relationship between user registries and communities. The community should be where the user goes to view content in that community, just with an account provided by a 3rd party, similar to how OpenID worked. The only tricky part is working on how to do a unified front page with content from many communities, as that would imply that all that content would live in one location, and then you run into the legal issues of nobody wanting to allow arbitrary federated content to be rehosted on their server.

It’s cold war era propaganda, it’s not even that old. There was a belief at the time among certain circles that since the USSR outlawed organized religion that the US needed to embrace organized religion even harder and to drive that point home we should put “In god we trust” on all our money. A lot of the US’s current issues can be traced back to cold war propaganda surprisingly. Boomers have been stewing in that garbage their entire lives and it rotted their brains to the point where you can reduce them to frothing incoherent rage by just saying “socialism” around them.

Having instances focused on one specific thing is the best solution, but it requires a couple other problems to be solved first.

The biggest one is discovery. Lets take your example of a fashion instance, hypothetically we’ll call it fashion.world. Lets assume I’m a user interested in fashion setting here on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to a fashion community. Currently the lowest resistance method is to hop over to the local community list and scroll through looking for any fashion related communities. If I’m a little more savvy maybe I hop over to the search option and take a crack at some plausible sounding community names starting with just fashion. That might work, but it relies on lemmy.world already being federated with fashion.world, which in turn relies on another user having already found and subscribed to one of their communities. On a very large instance like this one that’s probably a decent chance of having occurred, but on small or obscure instances it’s very unlikely. So we have a massive discoverability problem now. There needs to be some kind of centralized registry where you can type a term and see all the communities across all the instances that might be related to that term.

Another related problem is that instances, communities, and users, are closely bound to each other. I think it was a mistake to put everything together. It simplified things in the early days, it makes it possible to treat a lemmy instance as a mini-reddit, but it causes problems in the long run. Instead you should have a service for users to authenticate with and federate user messages and such, and an instance for communities to be hosted out of and federated. This would also simplify some aspects of moderation as user instances could setup a consistent set of rules they expect their users to follow. If you get caught not following those rules you get banned from the instance. Communities then could have their own rules they setup and via de-federation with different user registries you’d have a quick way of deciding the kinds of users you want in your community. Seeing a lot of hate speech coming out of the user registry run like a 4chan board? Sorry fellas, ban hammer time, that’s why you can’t have nice things. Not to mention breaking users and communities apart lets things scale in a more natural fashion, where the load the community server is under is directly proportional to the interest in those communities rather than if that instance happened to be the most well known one when someone went to register their account.