Quoting: Purple Library GuyHis ideal it seems would be a Linux that continually improved in quality and which was treated as a first-class OS citizen, but without actually growing much in number of users so as to stay a congenial group of communities.

That's not what I perceived from your quoted text. The idea isn't that we shouldn't grow much, but that we shouldn't grow too fast. Notice, in particular, "work to artificially inflate the userbase" and "create a more attractive platform" (emphasis mine of course). I think his point is that if you just invest on putting a half-baked product into more people's hands to inflate your numbers, you'll ultimately shoot yourself in the foot by showing potential returning customers a bad experience. Whereas by prioritising your product's quality, you may not get as fast a short-term adoption as with an equivalent marketing budget, but your retention rate will be much better and favor steady growth.

We don't want everyone to use Linux so we can make it better.
We want to make Linux so good everyone wants to use it.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Plenty of doctors here still use dictation and have secretaries transcribe everything for them,

Pompous bastards.

Leaves more time for actual consultations. Waiting rooms are crowded enough as it is, and it's easier to find someone who can type than someone who can give sound medical advice.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut now, nothing is written down in longhand and nobody has secretaries for doing anything except looking like a big shot. You don't transcribe things, you don't take dictation, you don't in general use your fingers to reproduce stuff. You make copies by copying the friggin' file.

Um... dictation, transcription and especially secretaries are all very much still a thing. Some going the way of the dodo, perhaps, but not there yet, and that's just considering industrialized countries. My cousin recently graduated as a stenotypist and was guaranteed a job as soon as she finished her exam. Plenty of doctors here still use dictation and have secretaries transcribe everything for them, as well as digitalize handwritten records. The same holds in many courts of justice.

Even for direct typing, faster tools and techniques have their place for some, but if I wanted more speed than qwerty I'd just go straight to steno if I were gonna learn a new keyboard layout anyway.

(Man, what is it with this article attracting all the off-topic? :P)

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Quoting: Dunc

when I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling

I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?

So much this. I'm especially annoyed at Kickstarter projects that list hundreds of nobodies that contributed to the project as if anyone cared besides those desperate for a misplaced ego boost. The way I see it, credits are only really useful if you want to prove that you worked on something. For anyone who's just curious, Wikipedia and IMDB are much more efficient at turning up the info. Sorry for anyone who has an inglorious, behind-the-scenes job, but if you can be replaced by literally any other qualified person without affecting the end result, no one's gonna remember you for it regardless of your name being in the credits.

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Quoting: ArthurBut it's become clear to me that a lot of the Linux community is not very consistent. Free and Open Source only matters to some, while a good bunch are just posers.

Is it a bad thing that not everyone in the Linux community is a hardcore activist, that some are just looking for a more respectful system than Windows and Mac OS or simply can't afford proprietary software and rely on FLOSS to have access to computing?

You said it yourself: it's not all black and white. To me open source matters when it comes to things like science, knowledge, and basic functionality like Internet browsing or text processing. I really can't care less about reverse-engineering my music, movies or games and changing the way they work, since they're meant to be distributed and used as a specific experience. Am I a poser for not going full Stallman? If so I don't give a damn, these are my opinions, choices and preferences and I'm not trying to conform to anyone's model of who deserves free software.

Of course there's also the issue of trust and privacy, but frankly it's not like I go and monitor the source code of every piece of free software I use anyway. I see privacy as a losing battle -- every part of the network/system is potentially compromised by corporations, governments as well as individuals -- and if I wanted to win it at all costs I'd probably stop using computers altogether and start growing vegetables in the woods. That doesn't mean I can't make the better choice where it's convenient and sensible to do so.

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Quoting: 14Hmm... I do not think this screen [External Link] is that bad of a way to ask.

I agree. I'm definitely not up in arms about it. But I feel it should be off by default so that someone quickly clicking through stuff isn't enrolled by mistake (i.e. protect privacy by default, make data collection a conscious opt in). Same about their Amazon partnership a few years back (I don't know if that is still a thing) that showed recommendations right in the main menu until you turned it off. Sure it's not forced on users, but it feels dirty to put it in without asking first.

Quoting: KristianAside from gaming what are the most cited missing applications? MS Office? Visual Studio? Autocad? Adobe's suite of software? Anything else?

I don't know about most cited, but ones I've experienced myself are speech-to-text software (all I could find were tools for vocal commands and research projects that are unusable by the average person) and computer-assisted translation tools (there are a couple options on Linux, but a lot of companies insist on big names that only run on Windows).

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Quoting: razing32Hmm the no multiplayer part bugs me out as well.

[There will be multiplayer.](https://steamcommunity.com/app/780290/discussions/0/1745594817429103129/ [External Link])

Quoting: BrynnvincibleI can confirm that while the early access version will only have the single player rogue-like, based on the community feedback you can expect to see online coop and the full campaign being worked on as a priority after that.

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Quoting: Arehandoro

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ArehandoroWould you mind providing a link for this, please? I'd like to create some "fireworks" back in the office tomorrow... xD

I've only got a German one...

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Behoerden-ignorieren-Sicherheitsbedenken-gegenueber-Windows-10-3971133.html [External Link]

(If I find time I'll look for more.)

Thanks!

Time to practice my German :D (I wish my level could allow me to read the article lol)

P.S: I found this, are they related? https://borncity.com/win/2018/03/30/german-authorities-demands-microsoft-must-disable-windows-10-data-transfer/ [External Link]

It also made waves in France back in 2016 [External Link], but I don't think anything concrete came out of it (of course):

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system collects "excessive" data on users, violates privacy laws in "numerous" ways and must be fixed within three months, France's national data privacy watchdog announced Wednesday.

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Quoting: ageres

Quoting: Mountain ManMy wife recently bought a new laptop with Windows preinstalled. I spent a couple of hours uninstalling all the junk software that it came with and configuring the OS so that she could use it.

But if you uninstall ALL junk from Windows, you'll get this:

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load.

Source: helpmyos.ru

View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

An acquaintance recently told me he had removed all the privacy-violating crap from his Windows 10 laptop, to which I quipped "well, what you know about at least." He insisted that he went deep into the system ripping things apart and didn't just change the user-facing settings, but I didn't have time to enquire further. I would have liked to ask why he would go to that much trouble if he was really concerned with privacy (he also uses ProtonMail) instead of just using Linux.

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Quoting: dodrianWhile I'm grateful for Wine, and Steam Play, and their associated technologies, sometimes I think focusing on them (the "Brutal Truths" ) holds us back from talking about what the platform really has to offer. What do y'all think?

I see it as managing expectations. You give something a glowing review and pretend it doesn't have any flaws, people will feel betrayed and be that much quicker to bash it. You tell them right off the bat about the issues that exist and the choices they need to make, and they'll be ready to face and accept them if they do decide to try it out (and if they don't, they won't feel personally let down by the shortcomings).

To me it would be a much graver mistake to go around claiming that "Steam can now play thousands of Windows-only games!" and leave it at that than to say "Steam can now run thousands of Windows titles with acceptable performance, subject to your system specs." The caveat may not be as shiny, but I think there's value in being open and honest instead of trying to make things look better than they really are (even if it's just by omission).

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