You just know he thought this sounded so fucking cool in his heads before he typed it out.

It’s basically a seedbox, people have been using those for piracy for years. It’s a convenient way to have access to an Internet connection that has several times more throughput than your home connection. You can configure Stremio to just grab torrents directly if you don’t want to use a debrid service.

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I would argue that being able to rent a house is necessary. That doesn’t mean we have to rent them from private landlords.

Yeah this post is about you.

I’ve owned a Steam Deck for a while now, it’s pretty much as fussy as you want it to be. You can boot it up, download your games and be off to the races in minutes as easily as with any other console and you never have to see the Linux desktop. At the other end of the spectrum you can really get into the weeds with customisation and tinkering if that’s what you want, and the OS won’t get in your way. You can even replace it entirely.

IMO Valve have nailed usability while still treating their customers like adults with the Steam Deck and its an attitude that I hope we see more going forward.

Everyone wants change, no one wants to change. It’s a tale as old as time.

Daily reminder that these same corporations pump obscene amounts of money into funding what is essentially highly sophisticated, precisely targeted and near constant psychological warfare to deliberately induce feelings of insecurity, fear, addiction, isolation, inadequacy and emptiness in billions of people and then convince them that buying their product is what will relieve these feelings. Simultaneously, they set wages so low that junk that breaks easily and can’t be repaired is all that many people can afford. They create the junk, the desire for it and ultimately the necessity for purchasing it. There are entire industries built around sparking and maximising that desire and necessity.

You aren’t wrong, but it also isn’t the whole picture.

I kind of feel like you just ignored everything I wrote.

I’m not really sure what assumptions you can reasonably make about me or my generation given that you have no idea who I am or how old I am, but I’ve been working with FOSS in my personal life for about 20 years give or take, a bit less than that in my professional life. I actually used to work in the music industry professionally before changing careers to tech with a FOSS slant during the pandemic, so I’ve seen both sides of this coin.

I’m genuinely not trying to shit on FOSS tools or say that they’re not suitable for creative professionals (my gripes with Darktable are very much personal to me), I love FOSS and the philosophy strongly aligns with my personal values but it’s not just about how “good” these tools are on an objective level. This is a cultural problem as much as it is an engineering problem, as you seem to have correctly identified.

You have to understand how ubiquitous something like Pro Tools suite is in the music industry and for how long that has been the case - the Pro Tools session format truly is a global industry standard by anyone’s measure. You can walk into just about any professional recording studio on the planet with your session files and the recording engineer will know exactly what to do with them, and so will mastering engineers and record producers. If you go to school for audio engineering, they’re teaching you Pro Tools. There are entire companies that produce outboard gear and control surfaces just for use with Pro Tools. You get the idea. The reason for that ubiquity is that Pro Tools, like many other creative software solutions, captured the market in the 90s when every other solution was an utter joke in comparison and they built on it from there. Sure, there’s fantastic alternatives now, but when you know Pro Tools like the back of your hand and so do all of your colleagues and collaborators, when all of your hardware and software works with it seamlessly… how likely are you to change?

I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a problem by the way - vendor lock-in is a serious bugbear of mine - but it’s a very real barrier to getting creative professionals to switch to FOSS alternatives, and in turn to getting software vendors to take FOSS platforms seriously. It’s a reality that cannot be hand-waved away by saying that x or y tool works great and that people just need to learn it and switch so that they can use Linux. If you can’t run Pro Tools on Linux, that’s a whole industry that won’t use it. It’s that simple.

The problem is that if widespread desktop Linux adoption is the goal, then the tools for amateurs aren’t going to cut it. Not even close. Tools that professionals use need to be available and they need to work like they do on macOS and Windows, it’s pretty much that simple. I think Darktable is fine for me tinkering around with my amateur photos. If I were a professional using it daily I’d probably hate it.

As much as we wish it wasn’t true, most people don’t really give a shit about their OS. It’s the logo that appears when they boot up their computers to work. What they do care about is having their tools available to them, if they can’t use the Adobe Suite, Pro Tools etc (and no, WINE is not a practical solution for most of these people) then Linux of any flavour is functionally useless to them. It’s for this reason that smug people saying “just switch to linux lol” as if it’s an actual solution whenever a Windows user complains about some rabidly anti-consumer bullshit that Microsoft is forcing onto them annoys the hell out of me.

It’s changing somewhat now, but it’s why you’ll find that a lot of people in the creative industries traditionally stick with macOS, because for a long time the options for those professionals were just better on that platform and people tend to stick with what they know.

On the other side of that coin, you have software vendors looking at the single-digit market share that Linux on the desktop “enjoys” and coming to the fairly reasonable conclusion that building packages, fixing bugs and providing support for myriad different distros just isn’t worth the headaches it will inevitably cause for them.

Classic chicken and egg problem.

Complaining about online petitions.

If the idea of a public library was proposed today this would pretty much be the response.

Can’t even give little Timmy childhood lead poisoning anymore because of woke smh

I will never understand how sitting next to each other in silence for a couple of hours staring at a screen became something we commonly do with friends in the first place. It’s probably the most antisocial group activity I could think of.

They probably do use Chinese made parts though.

Terror Packets by Backxwash if you like heavy, angry, shouty hip hop. Pretty much any given song by her is incredible.

Definitely not a dictator

I’m not sure how accurate that’s going to be compared to carbon dating but I’ll give it a go I guess.

No meaningful relationship I’ve ever had has come from an app, they’ve all been through connections I’ve made IRL. As frowned upon as it seems to be, I met my fiancée at an old job. I’m not what you would call conventionally attractive and find the whole online dating thing a bit awkward so IRL seems to be where I shine in that regard because my other qualities come through and not just my looks. At the other end of the spectrum, one of my sisters met her fiancée through an app and seems to have found several meaningful relationships before him through apps too.

I think that fighting the apps is a losing battle - as third spaces continue to disappear people have to meet somewhere. I think there’s room for them in the dating space. However I agree that as a society we need to tackle the toxic expectations they create, and we also need to remember that just like every other big tech platform, they make money from your engagement.