I’m not very familiar with Kodi, why do you recommend against it?

Oh that is beautiful, cool to see that manufacturers are interested in leaning into more relaxed designs based on the OGs. I’ve never been much into RGB-heavy peripherals and cases, so I’m excited to see more of these easy-on-the-eyes options.

I’m pretty sure you should be fine. Seeing as you mentioned you’re running Zorin in another comment, there’s a page from their support site that tells how to update. From my reading of it, it shouldn’t risk messing up your dual-boot situation unless you’re doing a fresh install (in which case, even that should be fine assuming you make sure to overwrite the correct partitions). You’re miles more likely to experience issues dual-booting after a Windows update than any Linux updates.

Side-note, while I understand that people are trying to help by saying you can run some other Linux distro for free, that’s neither helpful nor answers the question. I paid for a copy of elementaryOS once because I wanted to support the project, and their very fair pay-what-you-want scheme allowed me to use what was my first Linux distro for free.

I get that some people might be turned off by Zorin keeping some cosmetic features “locked” behind a pawyall, but they really aren’t – you can make all those changes manually with other apps/editing config files manually, it just isn’t as easy or seamless. But that’s the point of their business model, they save non-essential features for the paid version as an extra incentive to support their work on a solid distro, knowing that some people might either value the convenience enough, or simply want to support the development monetarily.

Okay, I think I understand your point better. While I still think his perspective on demanding users is pretty reasonable, I agree (and didn’t make clear enough) that Martin’s reaction here comes off less-measured than it should’ve. He definitely isn’t all victim, he’s stoked some flames and not done his part to de-escalate on many occasions, that’s for sure.

This whole saga really is a shame, the guy clearly is talented, and there certainly are issues with how the Rust4Linux integration has been handled. I really hope things can improve systemically here.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the projects you managed? Much respect for your open source work, shit’s not easy.

his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? … Surprised users wanted external display support?

I think this misconstrues his point: he was talking about a subset of users (“entitled users”), not calling all the users entitled.

To me, it seemed less that he was surprised users wanted certain features, more that he was burned out by the feature requests that spent time expressing personal grievances, making demands, or getting mad about the project’s pace. I understand that might come off as him being overly-sensitive, but I absolutely see why a constant cascade of FRs written like demands instead of no-BS questions would wear down on someone, especially while they’re simultaneously trying to deal with upstreaming.

he needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic

I totally agree here though, I just hope that this whole fiasco isn’t written off as the result of some vague burn-out. There really does need to be some change in kernel maintainer authority structure and the culture. That can only really happen if someone respected (e.g. Linus) makes some moves to encourage more cooperation/openness from certain C maintainers, and helps put in place better guidelines for how Rust contributions should be handled. It’s simply too disorganized right now, and that makes it too easy for individuals with power to let their egos get in the way of good progress.

I had the same reaction when he suddenly dropped the “ulterior motives line” and my hopes became true.

Been watching his stuff for a while, and it was great to see a pretty successful artist find a way to make their pipeline work, and also talk about it.

Haha the edit about split keyboards, you know my every damn move. But really, I think you’re onto something there about finding a way to make your home row into a number row via some kind of layering. How exactly that’s done depends on what keyboard you’re using: if it’s an external keyboard then maybe you could use a QMK board and make custom layers for that. If it’s the keyboard built into your laptop, I’ve seen people mention KMonad working well for them, maybe that’s worth looking into.

That’s a fair point, I guess I think of digital goods in a different context.

They definitely deserve compensation for their work, and how they chose to do it is absolutely valid. I think I’m biased toward open source hardware where the labor of creating their digital files is subsidized by selling the physical product instead. I realize that’s a risk and takes more effort though, so I totally understand why they didn’t do that.

I replied to another response similar to yours so I won’t bore you unless you want to read more, but I mostly agree with what you said and I totally agree that the work itself to create the file is worth compensation. I’m just a penny-pinching bastard who would rather find out if the print is actually good before paying lmao.

Pay-what-you-want, donations, and subsidizing with a higher price for the final product makes more sense to me in terms of these kinds of digital goods, but that’s besides the point, and I’m no expert on this kind of thing.

Honestly I’d be willing to pay 5-8 bucks for the final product since it looks more polished than any of the free designs I’ve seen. But yes, fair points.

I don’t disagree, never said people should work for free. I recognize there’s a disjoint in believing good information should be free[ly accessible] and also that people deserve compensation for work, though. It’s just one of those contradictions I haven’t solved as far as my own beliefs.

More than anything I was complaining, like I said it’s a totally valid business choice, I’m just a penny-pincher lol.

Oh definitely, I just think it’s easier to justify paying for a physical product than it is paying for a single file if you still need to manufacture it yourself. Still a valid business practice, I’m just biased toward “information should be free” and all that.

Looks like the specific design in this video is being sold here, but if you’d prefer something that isn’t behind a pay wall there’s a few options (like this one).

Side rant: I’m all for people getting compensation for creative work but I feel like it’s wrong to put the source file behind a waywall instead of simply selling the actual print directly to people that don’t have access to a printer, that seems much more fair imo

I mean that’s kinda the whole deal with 3d printing, it’s useful for really niche applications where you can just add a small amount of convenience to your life.

Someone else commented about this being good for school kids so they can safely make cat scratchers to donate to animal shelters, and as a cat owner with a constant pile of recycling I can see this being actually useful if I wanna avoid spending $20-$40 on one of those fancier cardboard cat scratchers from Target or whatever.

Yeah honestly if they could do a massive overhaul on performance and UX with the OSK then that’d solve the main complaint I’ve had with touch interfaces on Linux

I think it’s based on the xdg-desktop-portal accent color support, but there were specific hooks added to libadwaita to handle that desktop standard, at least that’s my guess based on this.

Definitely glad we have the major desktops all natively supporting accent colors now, it’s been a long time coming.

I use a mix of GSConnect/KDEConnect, Warpinator, and Syncthing. I’ve got a shared “dropoff” folder on Syncthing that lets me easily drop files from one device to another. You’re having issues with Warpinator but if you’re able to figure out the issue there, that’s my second go-to for one-time file transfers. KDEConnect is a bit more fiddly, but I use it mostly for sharing clipboard info and the occasional file when it’s stable enough.

They’re referring to the quality of integrations with third-party systems, like the built-in CalDAV support basically every OS has. For some people, using just the calendar app is fine, but others want that deeper integration so they don’t have to rely entirely on Proton to provide features in their frontends that OS apps might already handle.

For example, on Android I might want to let other apps access information from my calendar (e.g. my launcher so it can show me events from within its built-in schedule widget). Same goes for my Thunderbird client on Linux, it’d be nice to have the calendar events be integrated there too. Unfortunately, they currently only support a mail bridge, but the official Proton account on Reddit has made a few comments stating that they’re “looking into” adding CalDAV support to Bridge, but there’s no official timeline on when or if that’ll actually happen. I’m willing to bet it eventually will, but I’ll say I’d definitely appreciate it if they did.

EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.

Saw someone post that City Journal article on mastodon a couple days ago and I’m amazed that so few people picked up that the City Journal and the article’s author are basically puppets of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. I know most people aren’t tuned to look out for think tank propaganda but it came off as really obviously FUD-y and unsubstantiated.

Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it’s made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.

So far I haven’t had any issues elsewhere I’m Fedora 40, but maybe that’s because I’ve checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.