itsraining

That's why you should build your own media center from an old machine. Much safer and more private.

Like it wouldn't.

Please, it's 2023. Corporarions have totally embraced the "you are the product" model. They offer you a service on their infrastructure ("the cloud") on their terms, which they can modify and terminate on will. Then they make money by selling your data, showing you ads and using your data to personalize those ads so that you are more likely to click on them.

Shame or ethics? Please, it's money that makes the world go round. Ads in every app! Ads on the web! Ads in every corner of the city! Ads on public transport! More ads! Even more ads! No square centimeter of physical and virtual space left unused!

It's really pathetic.

Not per se, but Thunderbird is supposedly collaborating with the K-9 team to make K-9 the mobile version of Thunderbird.

I partly expected that this particular movie would come up in such a thread, as most people seem to be quite disappointed by it. Sure it was different from what everyone expected, and it could have been much better. I still appreciate it though because, like all adaptations/versions of H2G2, it tells a slightly different story, with the same humour and satire that is characteristic of Douglas Adams. And the effects were quite nifty IMO. Too bad DNA did not live to see the completed film...

Luckily there's the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)

Don't forget the BBC TV series, it was not bad either ;-)

I say we boycott Windows

I don't support Linux fanatics who insist that Linux is for everyone and anyone. It is vastly different (IMO in a good way) than your typical Windows OS but once you spend some time figuring it out, following "cumbersome" installation instructions might take no more than 5 minutes.

This article is on the other side of the spectrum. Presenting the Linux desktop as a "collective delusion" is, at least, disrespect to all the people who struggle to make it real.

I know people who switched to Linux as their main OS and claim to be more productive than they were on Windows because they can adapt the desktop experience to their workflow and there are no unnecessary distractions like popups and ads that Microsoft likes to overuse in their latest OS versions.

LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).

Of course there are drawbacks, but most of what the article mentions are purely over-generalisations, distribution-specific quirks or "I can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes to learn something new" type of arguments. In Linux, the time you spend learning something new is a good investment.

Finally, I myself am a computer geek who likes to meddle in programming. For me, using anything else than a *nix-based POSIX-compatible system (except, perhaps, for Haiku) would be a nightmare.

Linux is not a religion. It's a tool, and you should always pick a tool based on whether it can perform the needed tasks and whether you are comfortable with it, without fanaticism. And Linux is objectively better than Windows in some respects, and vice versa. So, if I were to follow the author's logic, the Windows desktop would be as much a collective delusion in my eyes.

Love the contrast. Great pic! ✨

So my home media center is not real world enough? I only expressed an opinion; you are free to ignore it. Also, there is nothing that keeps you here. Please kindly keep in mind that most Lemmy users right now are interested in technology, you can't take that away from them and there is nothing wrong with it. If you want to stay away from "shit like this", then, with all respect, you probably should not be in a technology sub in the first place.

Technically I don't think any Greek layout uses a different Unicode codepoint for the question mark. In fact, the ordinary semicolon symbol is used, so what the meme describes would probably not happen IRL.

Does all this make it any less funnier? No. It's still brilliant.

If I may ask, how do you deal with updates? Have you enabled unattended upgrades or do you update the machines yourself?

That would be true if:

1. A GUI software center is used (or if the said dad is comfortable with an interactive console application)
2. The said dad actually realizes the importance behind updates. From my experience, many people don't.

So, unless both of above are true, the dad will never (want to) update his system because "it works as is", sticking to old versions of software, never receiving bugfixes and neglecting security.

Amarok 1.4 from TDE

Since when does Mozilla review cars?

Wow, thank you, didn't know of that.

HP – Hell-Powered

HP printers are just bad. Their Linux drivers (HPLIP) are flimsy and sometimes break on updates. They come with GUI tools still stuck on Qt 4. Their hardware's quality is also pitiful and the marketing approarch is outirght evil. I got an Envy printer recently (not my choice). It came with instructions to set it up via cloud with an HP account. Why shouldn't I be able to use a damn printer without creating yet another useless account and giving out personal information is beyond me. At last I discovered the USB port (covered by a sticker which had the word USB crossed out) and managed to set up the printer after the fifth attempt or so, because CUPS didn't recognize it and so didn't the HPLIP setup tool. And then the next time I tried to use the printer it just refused... Then I gave it away because my patience had finally run out. Don't mess with HP if you value your time and nerves.

I say we

Yes, but Chromium is very easy to embed in applications. Mozilla has a history of creating and then abandoning embedding APIs every few years or so (and right now I think they have none).

I hope more manufacturers would adopt the Blackberry style of phones. Titan Pocket has proved that you can have Android running decently on such a device. So why not bring back QWERTY keyboards?

Reminds me of this: http://toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html

NewPipe is really good once you get the hang of it.

You have to keep in mind that its development has temporarily slowed down a bit, so you won't have many new features, such as being able to view Shorts and Livestreams tabs in a profile (can be overcome by browsing the profile via Invidious and sharing the page to NewPipe) but bugfixes are usually quick. AFAIK the slowdown is due to a rewrite/refactoring which will make NewPipe easier to develop and maintain and improve its UI.

Sorry, my bad :-)

Have you tried Kodi?

Thank you for answering. I can relate to manually updating my parents' systems once in a while but at this point I'm seriously considering unattended upgrades (updating over SSH is also a good idea).

What do you mean, automatically? Arch is a rolling release and I have to explicitly run pacman with the correct flags to update. At the same time Debian, which is not a rolling release, has the unattended upgrades feature which installs updates automatically.

But indeed, many things depend on the distro. For example, user-centric distros such as Elementary and others provide an easy to use GUI for updating the system.

And yes, Windows Updates was (is still? not a Win user) a nightmare.

OnlyOffice is indeed a good choice for the best MS compatibility. Also Google Docs is amazing for collaboration in teams (yes, I know it's not FOSS, but hey, it works). NextCloud is nice but it doesn't offer collaborative editing of Office documents AFAIK.

For presentations I have been lately preferring Inkscape. It has multi-page support since some versions ago and can export to PDF, clickable links and everything. I don't use animations or anything too fancy in my presentation and I like the flexibility that a vector editor can offer me, so Inkscape works well for my case.

Yes, probably because I stick with Arch and Slackware plus a lightweight environment. The only time I saw such a GUI was when I tried out Elementary just for fun.

What I consider a problem is that the user can simply dismiss or disregard the updates notification indefinitely. I know many non-tech-savvy people who do not understand the importance of updates, so they would be inclined to do exactly that. That is why unattended upgrades are probably a better option in such cases.

I don't know about apps like F1 and Chromecast, but I can see that it could be a problem. But YouTube has worked fine for me with the MPV player. Maybe you could try Android-x86? (is that thing still alive? 😅)