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sab

@sab@kbin.social

Quite possibly a luddite.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sab,
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Honestly, I think this might be on to something. RFK jr was not always a lunatic - before he went insane he did some truly great things in his career. He then gradually made a turn for the worse, ending up as the mentally insane candidate we know today. It honestly explains his political platform pretty well.

It also reminds me of that great infowars interview with a Sanders supporter (correctly?) observing that they have worms in their brains.

sab,
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Is Linux Mint well adapted for touch screens?

I think I would go for GNOME if I were to use Linux with a touch screen. Then again, I'm using it anyway, so I'm probably biased.

sab,
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The Simpsons gig is of course beautifully referenced to in Banksy's couch gag.

sab,
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The world is full of surprises!

What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?

It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?

sab,
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Not happy with OrganicMaps? It's my personal favourite at least, and completely open source. Probably depends what your needs are. :)

sab,
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It's just an app, yeah.

OpenStreetMaps is amazing, but it is a map, not a whole ecosystem like Google Maps is. As a map I find it's often better than Google Maps, but what is still lacking are good front-ends implementing a wide range of functionality in a user friendly way.

On desktop I often use GNOME Maps, but it leaves a lot to be desired still and is obviously intended for Linux users running GNOME.

sab,
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Let's see if Loops can fill the gap. Not sure if an open source alternative could generate enough hype to be viable - maybe if TikTok is banned in the US or something.

sab, (edited )
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It should certainly spice up performances of John Cage's As Slow as (legally) Possible.

sab,
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Now I'm imagining "In the Hall of the Mountain King" playing increasingly fast and loud as the car sneaks up on a half deaf person.

sab,
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Well, the ones that federate with Meta will still be federated with those who don't. So it's really no different from what the Fediverse is already: Fragmented by design.

sab, (edited )
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In addition to what's already mentioned in the comments, shout out to Inkscape. I guess it's similar to LibreOffice Draw, but I prefer the user experience of Inkscape. Probably more for single-page PDFs.

sab,
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I appreciate kbin a lot and I hope Ernest will get back to development when he's ready, but I don't think it makes sense for him also to be responsible for administrating a major instance. That's a huge job.

I'm not entirely sure where I'd move to yet, but if kbin.social is not properly moderated it makes sense to go elsewhere. At some point other instances might have no choice but to defederate.

That's different from giving up on the software - I do still appreciate Kbin a lot. :)

sab,
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I guess the beautiful thing of being federated is that the content is separate from the software. If people enjoy the software but find kbin.social to be too unstable, they might very well jump ship to https://fedia.io/ or something (or even start their own instance), and we will still get to enjoy their content. :)

I don't have much patience for people complaining about how their instances are being run considering how easy it is to move somewhere else. Discussions and constructive criticism is of course a different matter, but the beauty of the fediverse as far as I'm concerned is that you can take the "if you don't like it, go somewhere else" attitude to the extreme without really being a jerk. :)

Is it worth buying the Mac keyboard for a dedicated Linux PC instead of the windows one?

What is your personal preference based on experience? I Assume because Mac is Unix and Linux is Unix based, it would be more suited, but I have no personal experience with the layout. I am willing to try something new if i hear enough merits for it, and I also find the windows layout somewhat inadequate(The grass is greener on...

sab,
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If you want to crazy with the keyboard, consider switching to Dvorak instead! It's an investment of course, but you get used to it surprisingly quick and the typing experience is a lot better. As for the function button you can always just remap them to your preference, I don't see the point in making a fuzz. Most distros are also made with a PC keyboard in mind, not that I know if that matters.

As for GNOME vs KDE, it's up to personal preference. I enjoy my GNOME setup a lot, running just a couple extensions to get it just the way I like it. I enjoy that there are very few options and distractions around that I am not interested in. And I of course understand that other people prefer KDE. It's great that there are two dominant DEs with such completely different design philosophies.

sab,
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It makes perfect sense the second one stops believing in the lie that America is a meritocratic society.

sab,
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You are completely right, and I think everyone in power realizes that. They also realize that they can buy a spot for their kids in a good university, but there is no way in hell their kids would make it to the top any other way. So they have no interest in changing it.

Changing the way universities work in the US would require a freaking revolution. It's not about giving opportunities to those from worse-off backgrounds; it's about taking away opportunities from the rich and tearing down structures of inherited power. So naturally the resistance to doing so is going to be immense, and whoever sets out to do it need to know what they're up against.

Probably why the republicans are so angry about forgiving student loan debts.

sab,
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For sure. There's a lot of talk about forgiving student loans, but there's a reason why they are more quiet about fixing the broken system.

sab,
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It's a friendly community, and Lomiri is a great DE that people have also gotten up and running on [other distros].

For the time being it runs better on Android devices than on "pure" linux phones such as the PinePhone, but I have great experiences with it. If you don't depend on other IM services than Signal you could probably use it as a daily driver on several phones already.

sab,
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I think the Fairphone 4 is also worth checking out. It works great with Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS seems to be doing well on the device, and there's developments towards PostmarketOS. :)

sab,
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Why do you think Ubuntu Touch is almost dead? The development community is pretty active. They recently finished the huge task of upgrading to 20.04, and are hard at work getting up to speed with 24.04, at which point they will have paid back a lot of technical debt.

Ubuntu Touch on a supported device is probably the most usable experience you can have with Linux phones as a daily driver at the moment, especially as Waydroid runs quite well on many devices to fill the gaps.

sab,
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In the end, nothing is better than second hand!

sab,
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I figured there are interesting people out there who don't really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I'd like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.

It's not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.

sab,
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I think the key here is that it's a feed managed by the user. There's not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you're doing it in their best interest so they don't notice how you're making money by subtly feeding them ads.

RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.

sab,
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Unfortunately I'm not so sure they're missing the point. I'm afraid there's quite a few people who are just excited to see their scheduled genocide put into motion.

sab,
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Hell - the fediverse has more than 20 000 registered servers.

sab,
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Wouldn't even need to open source - they could have joined the fediverse as closed source, offering a platform to those people who are apparently scared away by anything with a permissive license.

Then again, these people are probably more eager to be on bluesky.

sab,
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Speaking from experience with open source, there's literally no way in hell the average consumer is going to make even minimal effort in order to improve anything at all, even if you manage to make them understand the problem. Ask any idiot still on Twitter.

sab,
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I keep the vault in Nextcloud, and use Nextcloud notes for any other platform than desktop. For the most part it's working pretty great.

sab,
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While Gecko should absolutely be made available for iPhone, it's worth noting there's nothing wrong with WebKit per se. It's open source (forked from KHTML), servers as the base for among others the GNOME Web browser, and is not a monopoly player (outside of iPhones).

In some messed up way, Apple's WebKit insistance has helped competition in the browser market by making sure there's at least one popular platform where Blink is not dominating...

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    sab,
    @sab@kbin.social avatar

    I think some of the issue also has to do with art style more than graphics. Realism is by far the hardest style to achieve, and it seems to be the preferred one for a lot of gamers probably because it makes them feel more adult or something. But I think a lot of games could gain a lot from striving to look good rather than realistic, settling for an art style and committing to it.

    From what I've seen around it seems like Baldurs Gate is doing just that, and it seems to have shook up the entire industry.

    sab,
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    It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.

    sab,
    @sab@kbin.social avatar

    I think the days of the Windows monopoly are already gone - in my (academic) circles at least, I see more OS X/Mac than Windows users.

    The OS X dominance is probably less sustainable than the Windows monopoly was, as it depends on one (already abusive) company for both hardware and software. In addition, mobile devices are increasingly taking over, shaking up the entire industry.

    To me at least, it seems to be turbulent times where there is absolutely room for changes to happen. Not saying it's going up be the year of the Linux desktop though, that one is getting a bit old.

    sab,
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    I'm getting older and feeling the same way about a lot of things, but I still can't wait to have time to check out the new Zelda game, and I have no doubt it's going to blow my mind. :)

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