Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.

The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Occasionally when I’m searching for something, I’ll check out some Reddit links and honestly it’s a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.

Yeah, it’s really weird that people keep acting like Reddit hasn’t been astroturfed to shit for years at this point. I wouldn’t trust the product reviews I see there.

Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn’t very much, but if they’re paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.

That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.

It’s because they’d have to install it to use it. I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME over a year ago and there hasn’t been a single Linux-related issue since. Most people use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines and Linux doesn’t make that any harder than Windows/MacOS. It’s not like it’s 2010 where you’d need to install some desktop app that doesn’t have a Linux version and you’d have to fuck around with WINE, which was a massive pain in the ass and often buggy even if it did work. Now in 2024, those apps are in the browser (barring more niche use-cases) and we have access to Firefox and Chrome like everyone else. If Linux shipped on most pre-builts, then I think the average person would be fine.

Did you manually set the icon theme in qt5ct/qt6ct? I recall having to do that on a fresh install.

You just download and put the theme files where it tells you to (and in the qt6ct folder too) and set the theme (and icon theme) in the app. Icons breaking is interesting; I just installed Dolphin and it had no problem using my icon theme. Does PCManFM-Qt also have this issue for you?

Did qt5ct/qt6ct not work for you? There’s also Kvantum support.

I always forget that they added a graphical installer, but IMO it kinda defeats the point of having a declarative config file setup your system.

What issues are you having with Qt themes?

You should give the wiki instructions a read if you haven’t already.

Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.

Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.

Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?

I’m currently rebuilding my math foundation and part of that process was tracking down high quality educational resources with passionate instructors, rigor, and entertainment factor (because I want stuff to recommend to parents). I did eventually find something that was better than what I got in grade school, but I have to say that the Pythagorean Theorem just isn’t going to be as interesting as social media feeds and entertainment products custom tailored to my preferences. No teacher is realistically going to be able to compete with the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry for attention and tech companies are abusing psychology research to make their shit as addictive as possible. It’s not the biggest problem with the US educational system, but it is one of many, so I’m down with restricting smartphone access at schools.

Based on my interactions with teachers, the administrative class that runs these schools are cowards who don’t want to deal with angry parents, nor the liability if the phones get confiscated and then stolen/damaged. There’s also a lot of parents who want to text their kids during the school day and get mad when they can’t. A lot of teachers have given up since the higher ups won’t back them up. This happened around 2015 or so, when smartphones became ubiquitous.

While true, there is the nonguix repository that packages both the proprietary Nvidia driver and Steam. Otherwise, you’re probably better off going back to regular distributions based on the others that you’ve ruled out thus far.

GNU Guix is the only other one I know about besides the ones you listed.

The BSDs got screwed over by a lawsuit in the 90s that made a lot of people hesitant to use them (coincidentally leading to the creation of the Linux kernel). Inertia carried it from there and Linux ended up getting more hardware and software support, which is the primary reason that people pick Linux over the BSDs now.

Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.