I’m a billionnaire too - in dongs - but nobody forks my repos…
But most of my repos have more stars and more watchers than this one.

That’s remarkable considering Linux is only 33 years old.

thats a lot of words for contributing for a single year, only half of which was ‘volunteer’

How long have you been contributing?

Two comments about this:

• It is my firm belief that 99% of the population of any country ruled by a dictator are the primary victims of that dictator, don’t condone what their rulers do, have done nothing wrong and are just trying to be good people in unfavorable circumstances.

  The Russians are no different and it isn’t fair to impose on Russian individuals of obvious good will the treatment governments apply to the Russian government, because the Russian government and the Russian people are two very different things.

• Linus said in this interview:

  I’m Finnish. Did you think I’d be supporting Russian aggression?

  and here I’m telling you this: Linus acts like a dipshit.

  I know the Finns very, VERY well, and while they’re generally great people, when it comes to Russia and Russians, they have epidermic reactions of totally unreasonable proportions.

  I understand where they’re coming from and why they react like that, but Russia is to the Finnish people what peanuts are to someone with a peanut allergy: the reaction is totally disproportionate and with zero nuances.

  Don’t ever try to argue with a Finn that a Russian person can be good, and that Putin is also their enemy: the Finn will shut down and stop talking to you - meaning, in their culture, that you can politely go fuck yourself.

  And that’s what we’re witnessing here with Linus: however many years he’s lived in California, he still hasn’t shed that part of his upbringing, and quite frankly, shame on him.

I use Github for 4 reasons:

• Everybody else is on Github. Github is to repo hosting what Youtube is to video hosting. It’s sad but that’s how it is in this world of unchecked, extreme big tech monopolization. So I put my stuff up there because it’s just simpler to be found.
• I use Github as a dumb git repo. I don’t use any of the extra social media garbage Microsoft tacked onto it. So I get free hosting and Microsoft pretty much gets no data on me - i.e. I’m a net loss to them.
• You can use dumb repos as PPA and RPM sources, if you need to distribute Debian or Redhat packages. Microsoft never intented for repos to be used this way, but if I can abuse Microsoft services, I will six ways to Sunday.
• Github lets you drop videos in your README.md. But here’s a trick: you can use the links to the video files anywhere. In other words, you can use Github to host videos that you can post on other forums - including here on Lemmy, or on Reddit if you’re still patronizing that cesspit for some reason. I find this a nice way to abuse Microsoft’s resources also, and I’m all for abusing Microsoft’s resources.

TL;DR: I use Github not only because it’s the most prevalent git hosting service out there, but because I can abuse it and make Microsoft pay for the abuse without getting anything of value from me in return.

I’ve been arguing this many times with many people, and everybody seems to adopt their own way of interpreting things to suit their preferences.

Here’s my line of thinking:

• If the first buyer buys a Google cellphone new for, say, $500 (no idea of the price, just making it up for the sake of explaining), this buyer gives $500 to Google
• If I then buy this cellphone second-hand for, say, $300, the original buyer gets $300 back, meaning Google now has $300 of my money.

That’s a hard no.

Of course, there’s the argument that Google got $500 no matter what and they don’t know who the money is from. But that’s besides the point: I know Google got my money. I most defintely parted with $300 to acquire a Google cellphome, meaning as far as I’m concerned, I indirectly gave Google $300 of my money. And I refuse to give Google any money, however indirect the transaction might be. The only way I could become the owner of a Google phone is if someone gave one to me, I found it in the trash or I stole it.

There’s also the argument that if I don’t buy the cellphone, it might end up in a landfill, so if I’m environmentally-minded, I should save it from the landfill. That’s true, but my counter-argument to this is that a healthy second-hand market for Google phones gives them more value, therefore makes them more appealing to potential buyers and ultimately supports Google’s business.

I don’t like serviceable stuff being landfilled for no good reason (otherwise I wouldn’t pay extra to buy a Fairphone) but in the case of Google hardware, I reckon it should end up at the landfill as often as possible to diminish its value and hurt Google. Of course, I’m only one meaningless guy, but I reckon boycotting Google is a moral duty for anybody who’s concerned about privacy and civil liberties.

And of course, I don’t want a Google product in my pocket because it would make me nauseous. But that’s entirely subjective.

I use i3 - Sway is supposed to be 100% compatible with i3 - and I find the configuration file very straightforward. What’s different in the version in NixOS?

Yes. On a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Not if you run the stock OS you don’t.

My comment was generic. The vast majority of Android users don’t unlock their bootloader and install a custom ROM. The people who do that are fringe users.

My point was that when the normal state of affairs is Google controlling YOUR property that YOU paid with YOUR hard-earned, and you have to be technically competent and willing to risk bricking your device to regain control, that’s full-blown dystopia right there.

It’s so ironic that Pixels are the go to devices for privacy roms these days.

It’s so ironic it’s a show-stopper for me. I’m not paying fucking Google to escape the Google dystopia. Nosiree! That’s just too rich for me.

This is why I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS. Yes, I know GrapheneOS is supposedly more secure - I say supposedly because I think 95% of users don’t have a threat model that justifies the extra security really. But I don’t care: my number one priority is not giving Google a single cent. If it means running a less secure OS, I’m fine with that.

There’s no way on God’s green Earth I’m buying a Pixel phone to run a deGoogled OS. That’s such an insane proposition I don’t even know how anybody can twist their brain into believing this is a rational thing to do.

Who truly owns the device is a question that has been answered ever since Android came into being.

Ask yourself: do you have root access to YOUR phone? No you don’t: Google does.

It’s the so-called “Android security model”, which posits that the users are too dumb to take care of themselves, so Google unilaterally decides to administer their phone on their behalf without asking permission.

Which of course has nothing to do with saving the users from their own supposed stupidity and everything to do with controlling other people’s private property to exfiltrate and monetize their data.

How this is even legal has been beyond me for 15 years.

Well if you say so, I defer to your higher authority on bullshit.

Not cheers, no. But it increased my problem-solving reputation within the company and it made Linux more appealing to key people in the company.

What’s wrong with that? What’s your butthurt? Are you bitter about something?

Well I’m sure they have very good reason and I’m not questioning them. I’m just talking from a user’s standpoint (and I’m a very poor Windows users): whenever I try to port any of our tools to Windows, wham the damn antivirus kicks in and puts my stuff in quarantine. If I use an engineering application that talks to some device on an unusual port - and I’m talking outgoing traffic, not incoming, wham it’s blocked. And unblocking it requires making a formal request to IT, that whitelists the application, until WithSecure updates itself and forgets about it, and here we go again.

It’s just a complete PITA. You constantly feel like you’re fighting an algorithm with stupidity built in just to get normal, honest-to-goodness work done.

Ah okay, I didn’t know that. I personally try to stay away from Wayland as long as possible so support for it gets better before I have to jump in. I’m not an early adopter for that sort of thing - even though Wayland is 16 years old at this point, but amazingly it’s still too green for my taste.

The reason why I posted this is because there’s nothing that prevents you from using any old screensaver / screenlocker out there in KDE. As I said, I use the Cinnamon screen saver in i3, which is not the Cinnamon environment.

That’s the beauty of Linux: you can mix and match things to your heart’s content.

It’s whatever works for you.

Me, depending on the type of file, I either have a more or less full description (so I can find things with find and English words) and/or some sort of short coding system that makes sense for a given type of file. After using the same codes for a long time, I know exactly what they mean.

For example, I would name an ebook “823-sf-rah-The_moon_is_a_harsh_mistress.epub”: that way I can look it up by DDC number (823), genre (SF), author if they’re well known (Robert A. Heinlein) and of course the title of the book, or any combination thereof. That’s my own system for ebooks.

For music, I make one directory per album or record named artist-comma-name (e.g. “Al_Di_Meola,Orange_and_Blue”) and the individual tracks inside as e.g. “track01-Paradisio.mp3”, “track02-Chilean_Pipe_Song.mp3”… The reason I only do one directory deep per album instead of, say, author/album/tracks is because most MP3 players back in the days, and most music apps today, understand that way of organizing music. That’s my own system for music.

Etc etc. Just make up your own system that works for you. Just stick to characters that are acceptable in all OSes’ filesystems so you can move your stuff around without problems, and avoid spaces so it’s not a pain to type.

mv?

Honestly, just prefix or suffix the filename. I’ve been cataloging all my stuff like that for the past 30 years - including, for things like music, the track number, which the filesystem and every portable device under the sun will naturally sort and play in the correct order. Finding things can be done with regular filesystem tools like, well, find. And it will work exactly the same way in all OSes that have a concept of filesystem.

I use the Cinnamon screen saver with i3wm. It’s just a Python script, it’s reasonably light in resources, it looks smart enough and it comes with a nice command to remote-control it if you need to start the screen saver, lock or unlock it programmatically.

I’m not sure it works in Wayland though. I only use Xorg. I suppose it should since Cinnamon works in Wayland too now.

Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.

MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:

• What do I care looking at the source code of a Google Play Services replacement when Google still holds my cellphone by the balls for certain critical functions?
• Why do I need permission from Google for apps to function properly on my cellphone?

I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.