I’m not negative on this. Streaming apps are easy to cancel and move to something else. Roku will probably raise the price someday and when it’s too high, shift off. I checked Roku originals on Wikipedia and they have barely anything significant. A small amount of feature films they have distribution rights to. TV shows, nothing original narrative seems like a hit. Then a bunch of reality shows and like cooking shows.

They’re a very long way away from being able to get subscribers on the basis of their original content. Not even Sony has a general streaming service and under them are a bunch of hit TV shows and movies along with their decades of back catalog. Not planning to sub but if I’m insanely bored, I can sub for a month and find some old TV show comedy to put in the background

Not that I’m for any bans on social media

i can see why from my personal experience. Even back in like 2014 I viewed YouTube as home to crackpot conspiracy theorists because of friend’s I’d seen go down YouTube rabbit holes and pretty much go crazy. Facebook and YouTube. Facebook was home to stupid image macros of stupid conspiracy theories. YouTube for crazy hyper edited conspiracy nut videos. YouTube where someone wants your email or number so they can send you a video you should watch and you learn the person you met is crazy

To this day other social media platforms have cycled in and out as conspiracy theorist and school shooters favorite platform while YouTube has never cycled out since it enabled anyone to upload video

Instagram has always been the self hate/image problems/terrible life planning thinking life after your 20s is over then a person gets to 30 and realize they actually want to have happy next 30 years too and they shouldn’t have spent all their money and time chasing dreams they made each day watching other people on Instagram. 6th graders with skin care routines and wanting to show off a lavish lifestyle at like 11 years old, that’s Instagram. Also short form Instagram get rich quick schemes and stupid harmful challenges are just as bad of a problem on Instagram and YouTube as they are on TikTok. Before those terrible challenges was based out of Twitter+YouTube.

Twitters it’s own weird trending towards underworld now rather than mainstream. Maybe it’s like a far less popular Facebook where it’s becoming more and more for old people but people don’t view it as a basic social media to keep in basic touch with distant people like Facebook

YouTube and Instagram are the worst to me. Facebook used to be worse than Instagram and YouTube but YouTube and Instagram have gotten more important and worse while Facebook has become less important over time while probably being just as bad as before

I see the modern internet as sometime in the early 2010s when YouTube shifted heavily towards monetisation and changing up the UI for that, Facebook started to shift from VC money to monetizing the platform culminating in its post-IPO super monetization. Facebook buying Instagram and then eventually monetizing it heavy with advertisements

Facebook IPO, YouTube profitability push from Google, Instagram profitability push from Facebook. That all came together to birth the modern online influencer. An incredibly fast rapid shift from a short decade of body acceptance and mild movements against over consumption to now 6th graders have skincare routines and therapy shopping seems bigger than it has ever been

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It just needs a dark theme. Work computer is powerful enough that I can run local models and use it occasionally. A cloud one that’s just using similar open models as what you can easily download is fine to me.

Proton does have aot of work to do understandable to people’s annoyance with them. Lack of Linux Drive application but they’ve released alpha/beta API for Drive. Drive performance isn’t great yet. The Docs feature is pretty barebones for now. Calendar is too simple for power users. Regardless for now they’re the closest privacy centric replacement for Google services

Whenever it seems like people are saying there’s a solid RVA23 dev board out there, I’ll buy it especially if it has a pcie slot on it

I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

It’s to pander go conspiracy theorist. Not that a digital currency isn’t a privacy nightmare and a potential powerful tool for control, but I think the reality is that every country in the world will eventually shift over to a digital first based currency/finance system rather than the current Frankenstein of old paper banking with digital services stapled on top. It would be more forward thinking to legislate requirements for privacy and limits on government actions towards account freezes and seizures for digital currency accounts

Games from half a decade ago

Pretty sure Brood War and Counter Strike never stopped working. In the past on PC, developers released the files needed to host your own servers for online games. Ubisoft has been gleefully trying to kill offline single player games for over a decade though. The best we can hope for is that Ubisoft fades go irrelevance or even fully close shop so money can flow to better gaming companies

I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it

I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support

This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress

Excellent. The umbrella of KDE is home to a bunch of my favorite applications. Kdenlive, Krita, Digikam. I’ve been hotly anticipating the day I get a phone running Plasma Mobile

This may be better eventually than Plasma Mobile for what I imagined as an ideal gaming frontend that isn’t just Steam Big Picture

Maybe someday Waydroid and Android Translation Layer will make Linux as a HTPC+gaming great

It the country wasn’t so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I’d imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren’t so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech

It isn’t even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it’s political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it’s really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology

If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop

Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday

Tariffs be damned, I will not buy an American brand car. They’ve been mediocre my whole life and it’s always been easier to source parts for Hondas and Toyotas. I’m not sure how repairable any EV is, but I doubt American brands will top the charts of value in repairability in my lifetime

They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming

So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade

One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi

…

Zawinski has repeatedly said:

Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

3. There is no 3.

This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.

Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.

Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they’re all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services

Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I’ve seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email

At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you’d regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures

Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it

Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker

Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux

Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else

To me there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.

Then there’s national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn’t seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now

Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support

Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.

Canceling NordVPN was a pain. It took numerous emails across numerous days for them to cancel and remove my credit card info. Lesson learned, I only pay with PayPal where I can revoke permission for recurring payments or pay with crypto. Went expressvpn to the cheaper nordvpn then to proton unlimited

Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users