“Free software” doesn’t mean you don’t pay for it, but that it respects and preserves the user’s freedom. The opposite is not “cost software” but unfree software.
Most of the other points in this list are also questionable or inaccurate. In fact, I think the only true one is the first one: open source vs closed source.
It’s the best of the Chromium-based browsers, but closed-source is a shame. I wish Firefox would copy some of Vivaldi’s UI ideas.
I don’t recommend PopOS! because I think the Gnome UI is confusing to people who have only used Windows before.
There’s more information about the components of this system here:
There really isn’t much to this Holesail project - it’s a little convenience wrapper around Hyper DHT and that’s a part of this Pear project it seems. That site has a list of the various components and links to each one’s GitHub.
Pear looks like an interesting project but I haven’t looked through the details of how it works.
Great that they’re using the GPLv3 license too.
KDE Plasma is so much more snappy and functional than Windows. Linux has lots of good options.
Why compromise? Use 1-bit IP addresses.
My favorite Windows drag-and-drop feature is that if ever I drag a file over the left pane of Explorer on its way to another window, the whole thing freezes up for a minute or so. I think it’s polling all the network drives just in case I might decide to drop it there, and since my NAS is turned off (it broke) it just waits until the connection times out. Of course in traditional Microsoft style this locks up the UI thread. I have to remember to drag everything off to the right and then go around.
Naming different things identically is a thing Microsoft loves to do. I still keep opening Teams or Teams instead of Teams. And I think there are at least three things on my PC called Copilot, and they haven’t even released Copilot yet.
I think the main take on this is to learn the lesson that it is not safe to install random software you come across online. Is this lesson new, though?
I think people often have a vaguely formed assumption that plugins are somehow sandboxed and less dangerous. But that all depends on the software hosting the plugin. There was a recent issue with a KDE theme wiping a user’s files which brought this to light. We can’t assume plugins or themes are any less dangerous than random executables.
You just don’t want to do it regularly. It was an issue for a brief time when SSDs were new, but modern operating systems are smart enough to exclude SSDs from scheduled defrags.
I’ve been programming for almost 25 years and I’d still rather see too many comments than too few. A dogmatic obsession with avoiding comments screams “noob” just as much as crummy “add 1 to x” comments. If something is complex or non-obvious I want a note explaining why it’s there and what it’s supposed to do. This can make all the difference when you’re reviewing code that doesn’t actually do what the comment says it should.
Why not put the “why” in a comment and save people the job of dredging through old commits and tickets to figure out what the code is for? I’d thank someone for saving me the hassle.
All malicious extensions detected by the researchers were responsibly reported to Microsoft for removal. However, as of writing this, the vast majority remains available for download via the VSCode Marketplace.
Ah, the Microsoft tradition of always having the wrong priorities.
1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
Also the various BSD-based OSs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. are still around, and MacOS is based on BSD too. And since BSD (1978) is a Unix, you can trace these all the way back to 1969.
On the other hand you can just call wherever you end up the destination, and no one can prove you wrong. 100% success rate.
Yeah, the AUR seems pretty dodgy.
I’m using GitHub Copilot and haven’t dug into the license. It’s possible I’m technically handing all my code over to Microsoft.
These things cost money to run, so how are they offering it for free? Who’s paying for it? How do they profit from our using it? What’s the catch?
Edit: Someone else here found that the license basically means all the code you write with it becomes theirs. Seems like we found the catch.
Libre Office is also available on Windows.