As an internal implementation detail, it’s fine and pretty standard. Exposing it to the end user so that they have to know whatever janky-ass domain and capitalization you picked to run your application is braindead.

Exactly. Everyone complains about ad tech and enshittification until you point them to the conveniently located button that lets them pay for the service…

I agree with you. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to do something. We all start basically every endeavor not knowing how to do it. My complaint is specifically with people who march into that thing they haven’t learned yet with an attitude of “and you’re all wrong and stupid for not fixing it for me”.

Well, we’re here on a web site discussing it, and the top two recommendations are “build one yourself from parts” and “buy a used one in cash”.

Seems to me that it’s the very definition of unrealistic if the real world has almost no examples that do it.

Or just use their built in sync and sign in one time, and all your addons will be installed and enabled for you.

If your argument boils down to “none of the browsers are exactly pre-configured for me, one of the 7 billion not special people on the planet”, I’m not sure there’s a productive conversation to be had here.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of “if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems”. The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

That’s a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company’s field sales operation, I’m not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That’s just how the world works.

For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can’t replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.

WoW still runs great under Wine.

I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

I’ve been saying for a while now that the actual test should be that you miss a couple. If you can look at a this 4 nanometer picture of what is either a bird, a sofa, or the titanic, and correctly tell me if it has part of one pedal from a bicycle in it, you’re a robot.

I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.

Sure, but I stand by the fact that the problem is that the changes are random and crazy, not that he didn’t bullshit his way through an apology we all know he didn’t mean.

Look at it this way, if Bud Light had responded to the big protest by just putting out a statement that said nothing but “we stand by our decision”, most of us would have considered that to be pretty great.

Basically I guess I think a bad decision accompanied by a slimy attempt to tell me how it’s actually good or that it was really hard for you is worse than just making a bad decision and saying, “this is what I’m doing”.

So your solution on Windows requires me to move all my files out of where they belong to process them? How do I get them all back when I’m done?

I knew how to write that find command. Didn’t need to search for anything. And because I know how to do that, I can also search for every pdf file modified since last month. I can spit out a list of the gps coordinates for every photo I’ve taken, ordered by latitude. I can find every Python script on my computer that uses Pandas. I can do a million things that boil down to “find every file that matches some complex filter and do something to it”, and I learned one tool. I don’t need to learn one point and click app that converts comics, one that messes with photo metadata, etc.

I can sympathize with the idea that there’s a high learning curve. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to provide ways for people to use their computer that require less knowledge. But recognize that you’re asking for a crutch here.

The apology letter is a bug, not a feature. I want more companies to just openly and unapologetically say, “this is what we’re doing, and not everyone is going to like it, but it’s what we believe is the right thing, and we’re doing it.” No one needs more bullshit in their lives. I don’t mind that he isn’t giving me a bullshit apology. I mind that he’s a lunatic and his ideas are stupid.

I don’t know anything about any of these people one way or the other, but if you believe her account and just think the timing is opportunistic, then do you not also believe the part of her account that’s in, you know, the bigger more noticeable font at the top that says, “To stop the speculation and DMs I’m receiving…”.

As in, “I quit two years ago and didn’t say anything about it, but now this is all over the news and a million people keep asking and/or assuming things, so I guess I should address it”.

You can set MAKEFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf to something like “-j8” (where “8” should be something like the number of cores you have or maybe number of cores minus one or two if you want to leave some CPU capacity available.

However, the build instructions for a specific package can override these defaults. You’d have to look at the resolve-davinci package files to see if it does that for some reason that might be important.

Mostly you’re paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else’s fault.

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I’ve found to pretend it’s 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they’ve all been busy trying to solve problems I don’t have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I’m just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is “well the compositor should do that” and the compositor doesn’t in fact do that yet, then I don’t want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively “why do you want to do that”, and well…I do want to do that, so I guess I don’t really want to use Flatpak yet.

That’s just me. Like I said…I’m a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I’m not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I’m too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I’m OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I’ll be just fine. But you can’t do it by just saying, “no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn’t work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you”.