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The things nobody wants to pay for

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Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#61

Post by gorjusborg »

zeroCalories wrote: post #13
candiddevmike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?

I hate having different install methods for every distro. I don't wanna build from source. Even if you give me a binary, I don't wanna manually make a symbolic link. I hate having multiple conflicting ways to do the same thing. Even within something like Ubuntu I can think of eight ways I've installed software. Steam regularly fails to open, and games compiled for Linux, not running through proton, regularly crash. H…

I'm sorry you are so annoyed, I've been there too.

That said, I wonder if some of the pain you are feeling is self-imposed. If you just use a single linux distribution, it is generally consistent in its install methods. Wouldn't you find it weird if someone complained about how the MacOS install process differed from Windows? That's roughly the equivalent of what you are saying.

The power management issue is a real problem, and it plagues not just linux, but the PC ecosystem (x86 / intel,amd) in general. MacOS gets around this by tightly controlling their hardware and software to create a great experience. It's harder on the PC side due to the sheer number of configurations of hardware and software that have to cooperate to accomplish good power management.

This is the same root cause w/ 'hardware feature' support. A PC is a collection of independently designed hardware and software, smooshed together into some sort of computer. Making that work is difficult due to the sheer number of combinations that are possible.

My feeling is that this situation is ripe for solution by a company that treats their software and hardware as a complete system, and to deeply attack these challenges by curating (and eventually designing, if needed) components and software to polish the user's experience.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#62

Post by EvanAnderson »

jorvi wrote: post #41
bruce511 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers. In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."

> Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? The difference between FOSS and OSS. > In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality." And yet despite the extreme market capture of Meta we now have things like ActivityPub and soon WhatsApp will have support for 3rd party messaging services. Dar…

The Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition[0] doesn't permit discrimination against fields of endeavor. A license that discriminates between personal and business use is neither Open Source nor Free.

The dichotomy between Free and Open Source software centers around political ideas around protecting user freedom.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd/

Edit: re: your "hopes and dreams" edit - I think it's safe to say reasonable people have no problem with proprietary source-available licenses (like the BSL, for example). Just don't call those types of licenses "open source". They aren't.

Those who attempt to free-ride on the goodwill Free and Open Source has amassed by using improper terminology to describe proprietary source-available licenses are what create frustration.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#63

Post by jeffbee »

hashtag-til wrote: post #21
newgre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you elaborate?

Many thousands of companies use LLVM in their products and benefit from the technology. As it is an open source project, in an ideal world, it would e fair to assume they would somehow contribute back, but instead they just take it for granted as there is a group of people who make it available for free. (please read to the end before posting your "wHy pUt iT oPeN-sOuRcE tHeN???" bigoted comments) Don't get me wrong:…

> they just take it for granted

I just looked at 1 page of the most recent commits to the LLVM project and every single one of them is from a corporate developer. I can't imagine how to arrive at the conclusion that the industry takes LLVM for granted. The major LLVM subprojects that I follow are not just largely written and maintained by large companies, but were also initially invented and contributed by them.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#64

Post by jeffbee »

red_admiral wrote: post #55

It's strange not to mention the OpenSSL situation pre-Heartbleed in this article. It would make a very strong case for funding critical "infrastructure" - I think the fallout from that was estimated at half a billion dollars or something?

It's not an interesting situation. OpenSSL is a dysfunctional project, maintained by unreasonable, antisocial people, following exactly none of the practices that professional software developers take for granted. Throwing money into that project solves none of its problems. On the other hand many of these problems are solved by just ignoring them and reimplementing their junk, which is what several companies have done.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#65

Post by sokoloff »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
nox101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source. Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source. Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) a…

Yeah. The scheme that was posited could potentially land us in a really perverse place. We'd be paying Apple way more than they put in because they don't use much but they pour out projects that others use. My suspicion is that this probably works for some of the big companies, but for places like Apple, we don't want to get into this situation at all. This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing somet…

> This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway.

If Apple is a net creator of useful open-source software, I don't see this as much of a problem.

If it results in a more viable/better open-source ecosystem overall, I'm more than happy to see all the large contributors to that benefit. (I'm ideologically for open-source software; I'm not ideologically anti-Apple/anti-company.)

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#66

Post by phkahler »

planede wrote: post #53

As an individual where do I click and say donate $20 towards the development efforts of the Linux kernel? It looks like one can donate towards the LF as a whole [1], but the LF manages a ton of other projects besides Linux. So if was possible to restrict small donations towards the development of the Linux kernel, that would be great. [1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate

Directed donations don't always work. If there is a fund paying to multiple things and you say "this $20" goes to that project, they can just send that much less from the fund and send it elsewhere.

My state promised that money from the lottery would go to education rather than the general fund. It does, but that doesn't mean education got more money when they started the lottery.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#67

Post by jorvi »

marcosdumay wrote: post #49
jorvi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you could set up a non-profit organization with smart people that are passionate (but not dogmatic) about open source, that could selectively fund projects or even just GitHub sponsoring / bug bounties.

So, you just solved general governance? No, you absolutely can't set such an organization and expect it to work. You are marginally better giving the task to some government body, but expect failure either way.

Yea right man, based on a single comment let me just bash out a 500-page governance manifest + structure real quick.

I don’t know what you were expecting.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#68

Post by dehrmann »

roenxi wrote: post #4

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…

It might not be corruption. It could just be that there are unsexy problems neither volunteers nor companies want to work on.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#69

Post by narag »

Adverblessly wrote: post #58
narag wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same person, but I've recently switched from Windows 10 to Debian stable with KDE, so I can share my experience. It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive. That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of…

> - Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#XDG_Desktop_Portal_... for Firefox, you have to both install the relevant portal (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-kde) and enable its use in Firefox (as the wiki page explains). While these instructions are for Arch, I assume something similar exists in Debian. > I started caring because it had t…

Thank you for the file pickers info, I'll try that.

Does it have tiny scrollbars on Windows? I agree that they suck, though I've learned to live with it by now...

Try these "about:config" settings:

- widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled -> false

- widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.round-thumb -> false

- widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size -> 0.9

- widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override -> 18

Then I wanted to match bars (and some menus) colors with my theme so I found these:

- ui.themedScrollbar

- ui.themedScrollbarInactive

- ui.themedScrollbarThumb

- ui.themedScrollbarThumbHover

- ui.themedScrollbarThumbActive

- ui.themedScrollbarThumbInactive

- ui.menu

Colors are in the usual HTML #rgb format.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#70

Post by p_l »

timeon wrote: post #23
massysett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sometimes wonder if GNU Herd would have been better at this, since everything would be designed by the GNU folks for one unified ecosystem. You just invented *BSD.

WhichBSD?

Considering Hurd is mentioned, I humbly nominate OSF/1
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