101–110 of 239 posts
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>To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac Until you try to plug in a WiFi Dongle, printer, SD Card reader or pretty much any other piece of hardware that isn't a keyboard or mouse.
Those all mostly work out of the box these days. Even devices that don't get driver support on newer Windows anymore.
If the issue is that everybody's doing it, author is an example of a market that someone could serve to disrupt the trend. But if he represents a tiny market, then probably not.
I feel like the implication is that people prevent you from customizing stuff for ego reasons, but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI? But thinking about it more, I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients. Netflix should have a JSON API that's a list of all the programs, and each record should contain a link to video file. They don't do that because of DRM an…
They could do that but you deeplink back into the Netflix app to actually watch to solve the DRM issue. Which I think shows that it's about more than just DRM. They want to control the experience.
This is my main issue with so many services. The reason I don't use Instagram is because Instagram gives me no control over what I see. You want to look at pictures without seeing comments? Too bad. It doesn't matter that the top comment on one of the accounts I follow was an anti-Semitic jab at the account owner, I have to read it because Instagram knows what's best for me. Ditto YouTube comments & suggestions, Twit…
> and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. What I do: Fight it by being part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem by continuing to use these platforms. This is obvious, but the only thing that makes it the “primary” means of communication is the people using it. Don’t be one of those people, and tell your friends the preferred way to get…
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Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac. SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.
Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME de…
I reject the framing. The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience. Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, col…
Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great. But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them.…
I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great.
But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing.
Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?
Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.
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GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.
Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac. SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.