This is bizarre. Snap has improved a tiny bit over time, but it continues to not be that great. Meanwhile, flatpak is miles ahead. Things are generally just smoother and less annoying, even when Snap is working as intended.

Personal anecdote: I was having no end of trouble with Inkscape, it was just not working, very unreliable, all sorts of very odd issues. It got worse and worse over time to the point where it didn’t even seem to understand paths to open files anymore, if it even felt like opening that day. I tried reinstalling, clearing the config, all sorts of things. I suspected maybe the version of Inkscape Snap was giving me might have a bug in it so I was looking around for alternative ways to install an older version and then for some reason I tried Flatpak. It was like some kind of magic. Totally night and day. All of a sudden Inkscape had absolutely none of the issues that the Snap version had. It just worked. After that I realized that it hadn’t been a bug in that version of Inkscape at all, it was just Snap.

I haven’t had any issues with any other Snaps, but that incident really opened my eyes to just how bad things can get if a program isn’t packaged correctly.

It would make sense that eventually you could do both real-time and after-the-fact calculations depending on whether real-time communications is available. Presumably it will depend on the specific application

Indeed. It seems this wouldn’t be useful for applications where real-time position is needed. You would most likely do the calculation at a later time like in the Miikshi video. It’s a little confusing from the article, but the video actually does a good job of explaining this limitation.

I think the most amazing part about this is the video at the bottom of the article: Miikshi: Cosmic Rays (4K). The caption calls it a “charming fictional animated video to explain their muon-based systems”. But I cannot emphasize enough how much this undersells it.

It’s like a weird charming mashup between Thunderbirds, Muppets and a real muon science team. You really have to just watch it.

If you had trouble understanding what the muon positioning system from the article might be used for or how it works there is a short explanation from Professor Tanaka at the end of the video.

I’ve been using Jerboa so far. It’s pretty nice. At first I was a bit sceptical because it seemed a little half baked. But it’s growing on me. Also now that I’ve used it for a while I think it’s relatively well rounded feature wise. It is quite minimal, but I think a lot of people probably like that. I think long term if other apps come up that are more similar to the existing 3rd party Reddit apps I will probably switch though.

My main issue so far is not being able to follow links to communities inside the app. I imagine this will probably be more difficult to implement than on Reddit because of federation, but hopefully apps can get that working eventually.

Also it can be difficult to add new communities from other servers even via search. Which is also a federation issue.

I also miss the features from Reddit Is Fun which let you choose which content is displayed in-app vs in a web browser. But that’s only a minor annoyance so far.

I find I am getting used to the visual style of comments. I initially didn’t like it, but it’s growing on me.