I tried to give this video a real chance, but it’s just… really bad.

Their first main point, as best as I can tell through the fluff, is that choice is actually bad because choices have pros and cons - their example being desktop environments. I don’t think I need to explain why this is a bizarre take; that’s the whole point of choice. It’s like saying the whole concept of choosing an ice cream flavor is a joke because you don’t like chocolate ice cream.

Then they start talking about using outdated packages in Linux. Which, of course, isn’t an inherently bad thing in all situations, despite their anecdote about having to use an outdated version of software with a memory leak. Amusingly they say you should keep everything 100% updated all the time because breakage basically never happens (and that updates breaking things is a myth perpetuated by Microsoft) then say Arch Linux is prone to breakage. The real kicker is that this whole point of theirs not only has nothing to do with ‘choice on Linux being a joke’, choice is actually the solution to this problem - being able to choose stability vs cutting edge is a core part of Linux. What’s hilarious is that they actually say if you want stability you should choose a distro focused on stability.

Then they talk about how proprietary software often doesn’t support Linux. Which sucks to be sure, but has little to do with the central thesis of the video (as much as it has one) and is just a pointless snipe at low-hanging fruit.

The video is generic pop clickbait composed from a mix of criticisms everyone has heard and complete nonsense. It’s a meaningless collection of ideas and gripes that neither contribute to the larger conversation nor serve to educate people.

I love it. I think that should be the official title for our mini generation.

And after that he goes directly into a tedious story that does more to make me dislike him than actually build up the point he’s trying to make. I agree with the basic premise of the article, but the endless passive aggressive anecdotes really don’t help.

Hah, are we the same person? My family was poor too. I’m a bit younger (born 2000) but I grew up using a VCR, and my first console was a GBA where I played a lot of SNES ports. The internet has existed my entire life, but I still remember before smartphones were a thing. It’s a really weird place to be socially. I don’t connect with Gen Z culture in almost any way, but I’m also distinctly not a millennial.

Interestingly my older sister (1998) who has zero interest in anything tech is actually pretty tech savvy for how little she cares about it. I think she crossed that threshold of learning how to learn, where even when she comes across something she doesn’t understand she knows how to approach the problem.

Oh you’re right, no wonder this looked kinda weird but kinda normal.

ngl I actually really like that. the start button popping out over the taskbar is a nice touch. what’s the setup?

I believe it is, yeah. I hear kbin.social’s servers are absolutely swamped right now and having lots of issues, so I don’t want to contribute to that, but I’m probably going to make a kbin instance my home soon. Does anyone know where to find a list of instances kbin.social has defederated?

This is a cool idea! I’ve seen split keyboards, but never one with the content in the middle. I’m pretty sure the only way of implementing this would be in a custom text editor app as I don’t think it’s possible to have a system keyboard go to the sides of content and squish it like that (on both iOS and Android), but I’d be happy to be wrong.

My smaller-than-average hands combined with how large phones are nowadays makes me have little trouble with the size of typical phone keyboards - I actually use one that lets you ‘shrink’ the typing area a bit as I find it more comfortable - but the comfort factor of holding a phone horizontally is big. I don’t need to do much typing on my phone right now but if I did, I would definitely download an app like this.

You’re underrepresenting the complications of NixOS and overrepresenting the complications of Arch. For example, to install Steam I would run sudo pacman -Syu steam. On a typical Arch setup that’s all that’s needed.

Another example is how to install Steam. In Arch, the wiki must tell you all the manual steps required to enable multilib, install the steam package, install 32bit dependencies, yada yada.

And that’s why the Arch wiki is so great - it has details and links about everything that goes into making something work. If you want to learn more or if something goes wrong it’s all right there.

But yes, I think you hit the nail on the head at the end there - hackability is Arch’s strength, everything is exposed and flexible to tinkering. It’s easy to make almost anything work, and easy to learn how it works. That’s very different from NixOS’s core philosophy of stability and reproducibility.

There are inherent pros and cons to both approaches - it really comes down to a mix of personal preference and using the right tool for the right job. They’re apples and oranges, and the article framing NixOS as a superior successor to Arch is as silly as the reverse would be.

Send help, they keep multiplying…

• AdGuard Adblocker (has the most user friendly blacklist feature)
• automaticDark (since Firefox’s auto theme switching is iffy on Linux)
• AutoScrolling
• Bitwarden
• CodeCopy
• Dark Reader
• Font Finder
• Greasemonkey
• Middle Click on Page Closes Tab
• New Tab Tools
• Popup Bookmarks
• Ruffle
• Self-Destructing Cookies
• Simple Translate
• SponsorBlock
• Stylus

Misc:

• Don’t Accept image/webp
• enhanced-h264ify
• Google Direct
• Old Reddit Redirect
• Open in Steam
• Plasma Integration
• YouTube Control Fix

I’d like to replace some of them with Greasemonkey scripts, but that’s a lot of work for a little bit of performance. Also, I didn’t realize there was a Wayback Machine extension! Adding that right now, thanks :)

Well if it’s a machine that’s 100% correct in its predictions obviously I’d take box B since that’d be a guaranteed billion - but assuming it’s fallible, I’d go with A+B. A million dollars is plenty of money, I don’t even know what I’d do with a billion.

Yeah good point. I think these particular bot instances are being way too obvious to do any major damage - not when it’s as simple as it is to defederate them - but what’ll happen when it’s not 100k bots on one instance, but 1000 instances with 100 bots apiece?

Let’s hope Lemmy gets the tools needed to deal with this. I wonder how Mastodon does it? They’ve been around a while, I’m sure they’ve had similar issues.

That’s worrying. Though at least it seems they’re mostly confined to a few particular instances. Defederating is a great tool that will definitely mitigate the worst of it, but at the same time this is uncharted water - there’s no real way of knowing what exactly will happen in a large scale attack.

Just creating accounts isn’t an attack, but it’s going to suck when there actually is one. I wonder if they’ll try to be subtle and use AI or recycled content, or if they’ll just use the accounts for spam or DDoS?

‘Subscribed’ is called ‘Frontpage’ in the app, you can find it in the sidebar.

Some great resources have already been mentioned, but let’s not forget https://browse.feddit.de/