Make it open source on F-Droid, compatible with the Fediverse, and maybe you’ll even get 500 installs.

I find 95% of foss software to be better than the commercial alternatives, and I’m not joking. As for bugs, foss devs are usually faster to respond to bug reports and user requests too, unless it’s some mismanaged behemoth like Mozilla.

Thing is, commercial software can use the money for advertising and marketing. Foss, especially of the free to use kind, usually only spread by word of mouth, and even that only within the foss communities at first.

Let’s not get into examples, because I’m sure we can always find examples for every case and it often comes to specific preferences. My general point is, that people who think free has to be crap, and commercial has to be good, are categorically wrong.

It’s in fact backwards: if you do something only for money, you’re incentivized to do the least amount of work either for maximum effectiveness or to give yourself time to do stuff you actually want to do.

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

Check out Like Stories of Old and Joseph Anderson, although the latter haven’t posted anything in a long time…

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I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don’t need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I’d say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I’d say that’s a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.

(Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it’s nice to introduce people who don’t use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don’t know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that’s the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it’s up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that “Reddit moment”.

Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…

I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it’s always much of the same news:

• a new private messenger (like we don’t have 500 of those already)
• a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
• a “simple” app/program that doesn’t do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
• something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
• a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
• announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again

So I’m not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons

*customers

Haha they definitely can’t claim there was no space for a headphone jack indeed.

But I mean, electronics is tiny, it can go with the same motherboard as a phone. The only thing it needs to be larger is a battery, and that’s a capacity/weight balance.

Speakers maybe, but that’s also a function of thinness so I don’t know how much of a difference size makes. Thin laptops sound just as crappy as anything else thin unless the vendor shells out for some expensive units.

Yea like that

They’re really nothing. If it wasn’t for the marketing, there’d be nothing of interest. I’m honestly tired of hearing about this brand all the time.

Want to make a phone for techies? Make one with a relockable bootloader, documented hardware features, available spare parts, removable battery and SD card.

Remove apps through adb. There’s also an “universal debloater” that can automate it, but I could never make it work.

Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.

Android 6 and 2GB RAM are still pretty sufficient, that should run everything important. I’d try to flash some lightweight ROM (maybe with higher Android) or at least debloat, and just use it normally for whatever I’d use a tablet for.

As long as they sell spare parts and make schematics available, they can sell as much stuff as possible.

I guess there is a small incentive to buy more phones for friends and family, that’s not a bad thing.

But they should stop with the ewaste earbuds and rather think of something else people might use. I hear home automation is a big market, and lots of space for open, sustainable products.

Lynch from Kane & Lynch

Nice!

Automation can run apps, you just need to specify an activity too. Usually it’s the Main activity if you just want to run the app normally.