I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.

This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you’re going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You’re betting on two facts to remain true:

1. That the issue of avoiding American products will even be salient in three to four years’ time. By that time it’s pretty likely that America has either taken over the word or been reduced to rubble. Trump will either be god-emperor of mankind or leaving office a broken, defeated man (or perhaps in a coffin before that—the man eats more Mcdonald’s than can be good for him, especially at his advanced age)
2. That people care enough about this to pay double the price of an American-made cell phone.
3. That your customers don’t count the fact that their phones were made mostly by American or Chinese engineers against you. America attracted all the best tech talent in the world with high salaries and China basically brute forced it with sheer numbers.

Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it’d have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.

Year 3 of using Fedora and I still don’t know what the equivalent of apt purge is

It is not because of a shortage of asphalt that potholes exist. It is a shortage of attention and money to fill said potholes.

Cannot agree more. I say things all the time here that people hate and downvote me for but the numbers are even more useless here than on Reddit so it’s difficult to care.

deleted by creator

Flathub is almost the perfect distribution system for software on Linux. The only thing it’s missing is a billing system. If it had that, it would probably attract more game developers to make their games available as Flatpaks.

I don’t think the designers of the game intended for it to be played this way.

It also makes content inaccessible to the blind who use screen readers.

The social security number can really be retired altogether. There already exists a form of national identity card in the US, and it’s called the passport card. It contains all the information found on a passport except the visa pages, contained in the form of a smart card. It already has RFID capabilities. The only thing is that passport cards are not universal, but they can be if they are made free and the Government phases out social security numbers for passport card numbers in all contexts.

Digital signatures are enough to transact millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. It’s not that they are “not ready”, it’s that there isn’t enough surrounding infrastructure for it. If everyone was issued a digital signature key embedded into the smart chips of their ID cards and every phone and computer came with the hardware and software needed to read and sign things, paper signatures would be the ones regarded with suspicion for not being digital and not the other way around.

The technology to embed digital signatures into smart chips on cards is already used on payment cards. We’re just not making full use of the technology available to us.

The ideal set-up would be that everyone’s ID card comes with a smart chip containing a private key issued by the Government. Everyone has a phone app that can sign and request signatures for messages. The public keys associated with any given identity can be freely accessed on some public database.

To sign a message, the card can be tapped against an NFC reader or inserted into a chip reader. This will cause the hardware inside the card to sign the message and return a signature to the requesting device. The requesting device must send the signature to a Government server in order to timestamp the signature and verify that the person who signed is the person they claim to be. The message itself does not need to be sent, just the signature and the hash of the message.

When your card is used to sign a message, you’ll get a notification through the app on your phone. Allow for some short timeframe (perhaps 24 hours) when the signer can cancel their signature without excuse, so that unauthorised signatures can be quickly caught and cancelled and the damage limited. If your card is lost or stolen, reporting it as such will revoke the corresponding key on the database and any messages purportedly signed after the revocation date will be invalid.

This set-up would also allow for 2FA to be implemented easily by using a simple PIN scheme where users configure a PIN in advance and this PIN must also be reported to the server in order for the signature to be regarded as valid.

The fastest way to get one minute on a microwave is to press the “add 30 seconds” button twice

Cannot say why decimal time didn’t stick, but a similarly-proposed semi-decimal calendar with 12 months of 3 weeks each of 10 days was abandoned in France solely because Napoleon didn’t like it.

It was also designed to frustrate Sunday church attendance because Sundays being every seven days would usually fall on a weekday on a workweek based on a ten-day week. While Revolutionary France experimented with state atheism and then deism, it eventually returned to Catholicism.

France spread its decimal measurements (the metre, gram, and litre) to the countries that Napoleon conquered or tried to conquer, but by that time, France was well beyond the “stamp out all semblance of religion” phase of its revolution, so a calendar designed with the intent to stifle religious attendance in mind was never going to stick very long once the French had left those territories. Besides, doing maths on length, volume, and mass is something that people do far more often than performing those calculations on dates. Sure, it would have made some things more convenient, but I’m guessing that for most people, the ten-day weeks just stuck out like a sore thumb.

It’s not wrong, but I don’t regard Lemmy.ml as being problematic enough to defederate from. Their moderation practices are questionable and their user base is annoying but it’s otherwise generally tolerable. People can block the instance if they don’t want to see content from it.

There’s too much content on lemmy.ml to defederate. We’d lose like a quarter of all the content.

I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.

Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

The UK is a small country that doesn’t have nearly the geopolitical sway that the US does. If the UK withdraws to itself, that sucks for Britons but the rest of the world will carry on. If the US withdraws to itself, it will suck for the rest of the world but the Americans will carry on.

Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?

This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.