Colour me cautiously optimistic

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Any significant communities impacted? Scrolling through my subscriptions list and I don’t have any in my list.

I remember when Mandrake was a young distro – a redhat derivative – and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!

tl;dw?

I’m sorry you had a bad experience. I’ve used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I’ve found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.

The only actual pain point I’ve seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer … required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to “home”, you’re pretty golden.

Does CTRL-ALT-ESC still work in Wayland (assuming KDE, might be desktop dependent)

MATLAB is basically a UI wrapper around Fortran’s BLAS and LAPACK – change my mind. ;)

Insist they index from 1. Like God and Fortran intended it. ;)

A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)

I use old.reddit in desktop mode still, on occasion. Today I clicked on a screenshot of a game cause I wanted more detail. I was directed to the new Reddit interface. I right clicked on the image and chose “open image in new tab” and got the new Reddit interface. I tried CTRL-scroll to zoom in the image, and it made the UI elements larger and in the process shrunk the image. I left the site.

Or, hear me out, they went public and now they are making their product worse as enshittification takes its toll.

I was trying to keep my comment short(ish), but you’re not wrong. There are other complications :)

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.

Just use wine on windows ;)

I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.

The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.

There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)

So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.

Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.

meow