Just a small note that the businesses only have to open source their version if they release it. If they just use it internally then they don’t have to distribute the source code. So it depends on the use case.

My wife hates it when that happens

Thanks for the info! I’ll have to give Element another go and see if it’s more reliable for me nowadays.

Is the fix a client thing or is there an interaction with the server as well? I had really bad issues with message decryption on Element for Android last year (July 2023 based on the date I installed a different matrix client).

I’m self-hosting synapse on Debian Bullseye (from bullseye-backports).

Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).

I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.

In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.

I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.

Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.

Harry Plotter

It made me chuckle, so thanks for that!

I’m feeling warmer already, thanks!

Was not expecting that! What a dark character arc :D

What do you use nowadays?

With the price of energy being what it is, people need the systemd flame wars to keep them warm!

I’m just grateful to have a place to discuss niche topics where there’s a reasonable balance of power between users, mods, and admins.

Federation means no more rug pulling after years of building open source apps to access proprietary services.

Proper ‘competition’ between instance owners means nobody can degrade the quality of experience for a quick buck.

Thank you for your part in building a better alternative!

Auto updates works really well for me so far!

I’ve wanted this for years; in the past manually flashing the privileged extension after every system update was such a pain that I quickly gave up on it.

Wouldn’t this be quite slow to transmit messages? When you send email between federated servers your mail goes in a queue on your server to be sent and depending on the connection speed and how busy it is you could easily wait 5 minutes before it’s delivered at the other end. Not that the messages caused by this app would be big enough to slow things down a lot, but if the server you are using is also being used to send normal emails with large attachments then you could end up waiting a while.

HP are pretty awful when it comes to shenanigans with ink cartridges and all that, but HPLIP is great and deserves some credit.

Boost loads adds from a shitty network though. Most open source apps don’t do this stuff because nobody wants a Lemmy client to load ads; users only ever tolerate it in return for a more polished UI or whatever.

I might have to ask you more questions about this when I’m up and running!

It’s a gaming PC but I will use it for other things as well. I don’t want to complicate other tasks because I’ve chosen a really specific OS for gaming, if that makes sense.