MudMan

Sure. There can be more than one terrible driver endangering everybody on the road at the same time.

I’m constantly, endlessly disappointed at how hard it is for human brains to accept that two people disagreeing with each other can both be wrong.

I mean, the text say the guy honked for going “70 in a 50”.

If you take it at face value, the person posting is the asshole and a terrible driver endangering everybody on the road.

Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.

Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.

That used to be the “but you have to use the terminal” of very early Linux, back when “can you install Debian from scratch?” was the old “can you install Arch from scratch?”

Man, I’m old.

It did happen, but that wasn’t an OS update, it was a third party update that bricked the OS. The fact that it could do that exposed some Windows practices that are a bigger deal than Linux’s general jankyness when they happen, but they also surface less often for end users.

I thought this particular boo-boo was revelatory because Linux is relatively on the ball anticipating updates breaking the system entirely (one wonders if it should have to be, but whatever). But this was a widespread but specific issue within a random system component. Without googling for it an end user wouldn’t immediately understand what’s going on, and even then there was a fair amount of confusion for at least a day. There wasn’t “a workaround”, there were serveral, as normies and newer users struggled to understand what had broken and how to fix it, and people weren’t very clear in reporting what worked and what didn’t. This all happened within forums and bug reports, with no central source of information or even a centralized official organization informing of the status. Definitely not how that would have played out in a commercial environment, for better and worse.

Also, this is a slight tangent, but can I flag a couple of frequent Linux community behaviors you’re engaging in here that I wish we would get rid of?

One, “it works in my machine” is a meaningless statement. It adds nothing to the conversation and it doesn’t mean the issue is less important. It works on your machine, your version or your distro but not in others. That is every bug, it adds no useful information. In this case, a static screen contains specific instructions that report a common default but don’t match implementation on every distro, so this warning screen isn’t always accurate. That, in itself, is a problem.

Two, “here’s all the smart stuff I did to fix it” (or the smart stuff I do to prevent it) is also entirely useless. The issue came and went, everybody fixed it. The goal isn’t to work around the OS or the DE’s jankiness, it is to have it not be janky in the first place. Putting the onus on the user to fix the shortcomings of the product is… a mitigation, I guess, but the goal is to compete with the paid alternatives on a mass scale, which has different requirements. Complaints about a wonky area of Linux shouldn’t be dismissed or excused with offers to teach people manual workarounds or even best practices, they should be addressed with fixes from the developers of the components that have issues.

I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn’t rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I’m using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn’t break and I’m not sure I have a way to tell when it’s fixed other than manually checking.

Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.

Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn’t have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t have been just… wrong, or mismatched.

Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because… well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn’t have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.

Statcounter is… a valid proxy, but I don’t know if I trust it for fine grain changes. Big trends, maybe. Windows overall certainly seems to have lost some ground over time. Whether that’s desktop PCs becoming less popular, the laptop market moving a bit towards Mac, the handheld market being weirdly represented because this only counts devices used for web browsers or whatever else is harder to parse.

They officially changed the name in 2016. I have to assume they changed what the browser reports earlier this year. For tracking purposes it would probably make more sense to count the ARM version separately from the Intel version, but I don’t know if that’s correlated to this change or what is. I’m not a MacOS user, though, so maybe the change is public knowledge and I just don’t know about it.

Yeah, I don’t know who made the offending changes. I don’t think it’s fixed yet, I’m using a workaround at the moment.

I mean, good thing, too. They just broke the lock screen this week. That was an annoying half an hour of troubleshooting to do in the middle of a work day.

Pros and cons in each, I suppose.

I mean, just to be clear on what …

That’d be the red line, there. Assuming you take Statcounter numbers at face value, even.

Incidentally, how have the MacOS and OSX not converged more, speaking of end of life stuff?

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

That’s a weird change of perspective there. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.

To be clear, yes, all social media with likes/votes has information about the likes/votes. That’s all likes/votes is.

The question is whether you surface that information to users. For a system like ActivityPub there are some hard limiters to how much you can keep that info hidden or build features around withholding information from users at all because the entire thing is built on the notion that anybody can be hosting an instance.

My point is that I’m not going to treat it differently or have different expectations of it just because it works in a different way. And if anything, I’d have some additional privacy concerns for a system like than I would for a less open system.

So from there I’m not sure what your argument is. Are you saying that you disagree that Fedi has the same expectations for privacy and usability than other social networks? That they have the same expectations but get there some other way? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.

I have to say, I normally find the “ha-ha, this word sounds like something else in English” stuff to be a bit… provincial, but I’ll admit some are a bit .

As I said tgo someone else above, I think this is a cop-out.

If Fedi’s features suck expressing support by giving them a pass on implementation or privacy issues isn’t helpful either to improve the issues or in the process of making open alternatives more popular.

For the record, nothing is being gained here in terms of features. Up/downvoting already doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and it already isn’t reliable or consistent across instances/services pretty much at all. Being public is the cherry on top of the “wanted to look like we have the feature but we really, really don’t” sundae.

Yeeeeah, I’m gonna say if a different social network tried to pull that move you would not be taking that line.

There’s a frequent undercurrent of “it’s fine because it’s Fedi” that I don’t subscribe to. Fedi moderation sucks ass and some of their hacks to visually replicate features from other social networks that don’t replicate the functionality suck as well. You could argue that up/downvotes shouldn’t exist at all, and I may agree with you, but this is a bug, not a feature.

Sure, but that’s a problem with the language selector setting, as I said above, not with the country list.

Yeeeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting UX question. For language selection, sure. For country? There are plenty of reasons why you may need to select a country name and not be clear on the native spelling of its name. Plus how do you end up in a country selector list in a language you don’t understand?

I’ll say that flagging the language selector for international users is even harder than the list itself. If you don’t have an icon for it in particular. You can make the name cycle, but depending on where it’s at it can be distracting or impractical. Accidentally changing the language to Hungarian (which may as well be an alien language, for how unrecognizeable its roots are if you don’t speak it) was one of the few times I ended up having to delete a config file just to be able to use a piece of software again because I just could not find the lanuage selector after that.

Eh… why would including English help?

Ideally you keep each language in their own language so it can be recognized by native speakers. Flags help. Adding English to the native name… does not.

And of course if you’re selecting a country, not a language, then it makes sense for the country list to be in the language you have selected. Why would you not know the names of countries in the language you chose for the interface? As somebody points out below, those are not language names in the screenshot.

OK, so it’s just nationalism, then.

I have a real problem trying to wrap my head around where you’re drawing that line. Is the problem that “patriots” honestly believe they’re making things better? Because it seems to me that the difference that leaves between a nationalist and a patriot is whether you agree with them.

From the side of the victors it’s easy to see slightly morally flawed patriots where, had things gone the other way, people would see nationalist zealots.

I’m also surprised at you bringing up left and right divides. There are plenty of violent nationalists across the spectrum. I mean, it’s definitely true that traditional leftists were internationalists (hell, left-wing movements organized in “internationals” and that’s also the name of their anthem). So historically yeah, right wingers are more patriotic/nationalistic, but there’s no shortage of left wing nationalists, either.

I don’t know, man, I struggle to share your very US-centric view, but also to see how anywhere in there is a distinction between those two terms. If patriots are just nationalists you like then you start to sound a lot like one.

The etymology of the term is certainly much older than the nation-state, but also entirely disconnected from modern meanings (or ironic/facetious, which I do appreciate). There is just no original, clean, virtuous instance of “patriot” dislodged from the nationalist undertones. It simply has never existed.

The mistake you’re making is assuming that US revolutionaries weren’t nationalists or were praiseworthy or fundamentally different than British colonists. We’re going to disagree on that one. I mean, never mind that they didn’t invent the term or that their whitewashing of it was self-serving. Even if your timeline of events was true, I despise their patriotism as much as anybody else’s. US revolutionaries weren’t some ideal version of a patriot, they were nationalist independentists who happened to borrow some French revolutionary ideas about the liberal democratic state-nation organization slightly earlier than their previous administration did (and perhaps due to the first draft nature of the thing, slightly worse, too).

I won’t judge them by modern standards, but I also absolutely, entirely refuse to sacralize them or idealize them. They were what they were, and they are absolutely not the thing that’s going to give patriotism a good name.