And guess what? It won’t break like your over-complex Arch desktop because it doesn’t need to be.

Que people arguing about GNU’s importance / self-inflated importance or whatever

God the religion vs. faith thing, I’m glad to see someone articulate it. It’s bizarre to me how many people are seemingly super hardcore into their religion as a social club, but if you observe them closely they come across like “believing it” is just a game they play for the sake of staying in.

…I mean, it’s more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.

I mean, I’ve used it. It works. But I don’t get why you would bother most of the time. It’s slow as hell and while I’m generally fairly concerned about my privacy there is a point where I can’t be bothered.

I remember a video some dude put out where he discussed how he’s pretty sure he discovered that those hats were just some other article of clothing rolled up which is why they’re a little silly… I’d need to look for the video again. He’d made something, I forget what, and realized that it folded up into that hat exactly.

Counterpoint, sleeves.

A viable alternative to YouTube is impossible unless it was managed by a state, pretty much. The infrastructure required is immense.

FOSS software is developed in such a way that you can build it yourself freely (In other words, you can download the source code and compile the actual application yourself, free of charge). Obsidian doesn’t really work that way. Even if most of the code is available, the full app is only available as prepackaged binaries which might introduce god knows what (and make forking the application impossible).

The thing that comes up at the bottom has two buttons: Accept and customize. If you click customize you can choose what to accept and what to reject, and it defaults to rejecting everything.

Allowing you to reject it all is bad site design?!? Literally two button presses. This is the web being forced to actually respect your privacy.

At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It’s just sitting there waiting for people to use it.

As much as I love obsidian, I’ve been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it’s Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.

For anything that you really can’t get on Linux:

People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one’s mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you’re good to go.

Emacs literally calls it’s Vim emulation Evil mode :)
In all seriousness though, I say Emacs mostly because being a Lisp machine, it’s turing-complete. There’s web browsers in Emacs, PDF readers, email clients, EXWM is literally Emacs as your window manager.
Also what I’ve realized recently is… Vim keybindings aren’t even that great beyond being modal, anyways. Some dude made an Emacs plugin called Xah-Fly-Keys that makes it modal, but works off of what commands are used often rather than how Vim does stuff like making the “go to the end of the line” key $ for some reason. With Emacs being something you can sort of just live in, I can bring my workflow into it rather than praying that what I’m using has vim key support.

(Fuck I’m participating in the editor wars, fuck my life)

I really want to see someone get Doom running in Emacs. I’ve tried to figure out if anyone has but of course what actually comes up is “Doom Emacs” which is a specifically customized version of it.

IMO we went wrong as soon as we started trying to turn web browsers into their own mini operating systems. That’s just… not what they were designed to do. The web was designed as a thing that could sent text and links over a network connection. Is the thing that web browsers currently are kind of a good idea? Yeah, sure, but the fact that it’s a web browser seems like exactly what’s led to the “SuperFund disaster”. Everything about the way we’re doing things is terrifyingly hackish and inefficient.

…Oh thank god. This was single-handedly making the new user experience far more confusing than it had to be.

I guess what I don’t get is what were people using GoodReads for? Because I’m using BookWyrm to just track what I already wanted to read and use the review system as a way to sum up books for myself.

This. I own a basic Kindle because it only cost me $60, and while I could upgrade to a better e-reader from a less monopolistic company, it’d just be a bit of e-waste I don’t need to produce, and in the meantime Calibre + NoDRM / DeDRM means I can read books from anywhere on it.