Sploosh the Water

Vlemmy.net here, loud and clear!

Just did it, I’ll test it out over the coming weeks and see how it works, thanks!

It will be ignored by industry, just like all the rest of the suggestions for the last 30 years from scientists. Profits come first, worry about the environment later (never).

What a complete knob. That’s like saying you didn’t know Michael Jackson was a pop star, or that the Pyramids were tombs for kings, pathetic.

Oh dang, do you just download and import into OSMand?

Magic Earth. I’ve tried every other major OSM google maps alternative and none have been as good as Magic Earth.

Osmand, Maps.me, Organic maps, and one other I can’t remember now, used them all. I still use Osmand because I’m trying to support the project, but Magic Earth by far has the best address searching, best UI, best directions, and limited but existing live traffic data to help you avoid really bad backups.

Now I’m in the USA, and some folks say some of these apps work better in Europe, that’s fair, but that’s still my point, Magic Earth. Not FOSS, but privacy respecting and uses OSM data. If you wanna break away from Google but aren’t willing to deal with a bunch of jank, Magic Earth is your friend.

In what way would you be “making clear the relationship?” Like restrict usage?

Sure, but you don’t need copyright for that. You can just have a registry of works or many other solutions that don’t involve all the baggage and nonsense of copyright.

I don’t believe in the concept of “intellectual property” so any laws built around that concept are nonsense to me.

Laws about protecting intellectual property are to me, like laws preventing the poaching of unicorns, they don’t make sense because the thing they are built around doesn’t exist.

I do think there should be protections against fraud, ie: falsely attributing somebody else’s work or not giving due credit. But the idea that a person, group of people, or a company can “own” a concept in the same way somebody owns a shovel or owns a house, that just makes zero sense to me.

It’s a fallacy, it’s like somebody saying, “I tried to go see Harvard University, but the tour guide just spent hours showing me a bunch of different buildings. I never actually saw Harvard University.”

I can understand owning an object, I even understand owning a piece of land to some degree, although that’s somewhat dubious IMO. But an idea? It just makes no sense to me.

I’m thinking of a planet right now called “HS-9970 Xagian Prime” where the oceans are all honey and the land is all gingerbread. How do I “own” that idea? What does that even mean?

I came up with the concept in my imagination sure. I’m the person that originated it, I put some kind of labor into it. But it’s impossible to steal from me, unlike land, a shovel, etc. Unless you literally went into my brain, removed the idea somehow and placed it into your brain.

Do I have some sort of rights to that idea? What rights though. Rights of ownership with normal property seem to be rooted in some kind of basic violations of person. As in, the only way you can steal my shovel is if you deprive me directly of the ability to use it. Your stealing directly entails me losing the ability to use that thing. Stealing my land entails kicking me off of it by force against my will, depriving me of using it.

But if you “steal” my idea of Xagian Prime, what am I being deprived of? Anything you add to it is your own creation, it follows the same rules as my ideas I came up with. One could argue that you couldn’t have come up with your new ideas without starting from mine, but that seems somewhat dubious, and even if true, it’s not like my idea of Xagian Prime was 100% original. It required concepts and ideas that other people already came up with too, and we don’t see that as “stealing.” I still have full access to my ideas of Xagian Prime.

One might argue that I am deprived of potential profit or social gains, but that seems extremely dubious. How am I “owed” potential profit that isn’t guaranteed?

It seems to me that the only arguments that are compelling for so called “Intellectual Property” are actually just arguments about fraud. Like it’s wrong to claim my idea of Xagian Prime is actually yours and then sell books on it. Sure, but that has nothing to do with property ownership, that is just fraud. That’s the same as saying it’s wrong to go around pretending I’m selling medicine when actually it’s just water with food coloring.

I am open to changing my position, but I’ve been discussing this for years with folks and I’ve never heard a compelling argument for the existence of IP. The most compelling arguments I’ve heard are ones about rights of people to have their work represented in ways they allow. That makes sense, but again, that seems like an argument against fraud, not for IP.

I think it’s generational. When I talk to folks about gaming in their early-mid 30’s, the majority of them either also game, or at least don’t think it’s weird. Video games and board games too.

I think once you hit that rough age cutoff for millennials, late 30’s-early 40’s it seems video gaming and board gaming also largely falls off. At least that’s been my experience.

My spouse and I are in our 30’s and most of our peers game. Keep it up and never stop having fun!

Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.

Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.

Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.

But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.

I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.

That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.

Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.

Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.

I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.

I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.

You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.

Lol!!! Just saw this response haha xD

That’s a fair point, I’ve been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.

It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.

Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don’t extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can’t get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

I scream laughed at this story lol, wasn’t expecting that twist xD

Even using ad block on most everything, some stuff still leaks through. It’s so refreshing once that’s all gone, I don’t think I can go back either.