Max-P

And the instance’s sidebar:

A lemmy server for, but not limited to, leftists in the Midwest USA

I have both. I find that YouTube Music has a much better algorithm, but the app really does sucks, although at least it doesn’t crash for me. Spotify’s app is a lot more polished (although lately it too has started to enshittify), but the music discovery is a bit lacking. Audio quality is better on Spotify, YTM just sounds compressed to be as loud as possible.

Because it’s too flexible, and assumes everyone has source code to glue it all together. There’s endless choices you can make to have a functional system.

• Before you even compile the kernel, you have to provide a C compiler. That can be GCC or LLVM/clang.
• Before you even build the kernel, you have to pick a CPU architecture and subsystems to enable.
• Before you can even boot the kernel in any useful manner, you need to select a partition table format, one or more filesystems to put on the drive, all with varying amounts of features, but are at least mostly all POSIX compliant. Or a ramdisk.
• Even just starting at the very core of userspace, the C standard library, you have glibc, musl, uClibc. That can only be dealt with at compile time.
• Then on top of that, for the core utilities, you have the GNU coreutils, uutils, busybox, toybox, the BSD coreutils.
• Great, we can start booting now. Wait, now there’s the choice of init system: systemd, sysvinit, OpenRC, runit, upstart, dinit, and a lot more. Good, we’re booted.
• Now we need a login prompt, which can be agetty, greetd, mingetty, GDM, SDDM, LightDM. You’ve entered your password: that may or may not trigger a PAM session, which can verify your password from just about anywhere (locally, Kerberos, LDAP), start a D-Bus session, register a session with logind, that can trigger decryption and mounting of a drive, which itself could be local or remote or removable.
• We’re logged in! Now we need a shell. There’s bash, dash, zsh, ash with their own small differences, and that’s just the POSIX compatible ones. There’s also fish, nu, ksh, csh and more.
• We have a prompt! Now we should probably install some software. Is it gonna be apt, yum/dnf, zipper, pacman, apk, xbps, emerge, port? What’s the package names? Depends on the distro!
• We have a way to install software, now we need network to get it. How’s the network configured? ifupdown, systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, Connman, dhclient, dhcpcd, netplan, netctl. If you have WiFi, there’s iwd and wpa_supplicant.
• Lets get a graphical session. Xorg or Wayland based? ALSA, PulseAudio or PipeWire? Window manager or desktop environment?
• You want to mount a drive. systemd can do that, udev can do that, fstab can do that.

That’s just the basics to make it to a desktop. Now there’s some stuff to help that a lot, like Flatpak which aims to provide a known base system for apps to target. The portals help get access to resources with varying backends. PipeWire supports pretty much every audio protocol in existence so that’s alright. Flatpak is a pretty good standard/ABI to target. For server software we have similar things in the form of Docker and Podman. But all of these solutions are basically “lets just ship the distro with the software”.

The only really standard interface is the Linux kernel’s public interface. If you’re writing a driver, you better be ready to maintain it because stuff moves around a lot internally, the kernel doesn’t care not to break out of tree modules. Go makes use of the stable kernel API and skips the libc entirely, so Go binaries are usually fairly portable as long as the kernel is somewhat sane.

The only real standard you can target is POSIX, which is fine if you’re writing CLI or server software, but if you want to write GUIs, you just have to make choices. Most Linux stuff runs fine on FreeBSD too, they have Wayland, PipeWire and Mesa there too, so technically at this point you’re not even targetting Linux per-se, more like generally POSIX-y systems with software that’s just very commonly used and target that.

On Windows and Mac, you have what Microsoft/Apple provides and if you want anything else you bring it yourself. However, technically you can install PulseAudio on those, install an X server (Xming, Xquartz), run most DEs in there, run browsers and quite a bit of Linux-y stuff, natively on Windows and Mac in their respective binary formats.

The thing with FOSS is there isn’t a single standard it targets, we just port everything to everything as needed. The closest thing we have to a standard is targeting specific versions of specific distros, usually Debian/Ubuntu or RHEL and derivatives because that’s what the enterprise customers that pays for the development tends to run. That’s why Davinci Resolve is a pain to run on anything other than Rocky Linux. Thankfully, it’s also just software and dependencies, so if you just give it everything it uses from Rocky, it’ll work just fine on other distros. And that’s why source code is important: you can make everything work with everything with enough time and patience. That’s what powers the ecosystem.

Probably mostly a carryover from Reddit where it’s an either one or the other kind of deal.

Good luck with that given 3D printers are full of open-source software.

Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Lemmy is primarily a link aggregator, just like Reddit. It also happens to somewhat work for Q&A and help forums, but fundamentally Lemmy is more oriented towards new content.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts, that’s why I’m not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either. I don’t know why people feel the need to dump all their thoughts on the Internet, like I care that a celebrity is on a plane or enjoying a nice meal.

Lemmy is about topics, not people, that’s what I like about it. I don’t care about people.

Make it through the web UI, this is not implemented as far as I know as that’s not a particularly common operation.

Also [email protected]

I used Boost for Reddit, and now Boost for Lemmy.

It’s incredible how much the app is part of the experience. Same experience, completely different data source, it mostly just feels like early Reddit again, with niche subs of mere hundreds of people.

People are on average nicer here. Few loud nutjobs but overall I have mostly pleasant discussions.

Texting is also damn convenient, I can deal with several conversations at once without having to pause the movie I’m watching.

Speaking on the phone doesn’t just tie your line, it ties your whole life too.

Don’t subscribe to lemmy.ml communities if you don’t like them? You don’t have to block them to not see them, just don’t subscribe to them.

deleted by creator

Probably my KeePass database since it holds the keys to everything else.

That’s true of every social media platform, everywhere, before an election. Most social media companies are US companies or frequently visited by americans, but you’ll find the same shit happening on foreign platforms too.

Why? Because it works. A lot of people end up voting based entirely on what seems to be the trend, so if you flood their feeds with enough propaganda, they flip.

And people with extreme views don’t care about that, it just makes them feel like they’re not alone and thousands of other people share their views and reinforces their narrow view of the world. And they feel entitled to be platformed too, because in their eye, everyone’s going crazy and the world is really about to end. Just like a religion. Religious people genuinely think you’re going to hell, no matter how sane your argument because their beliefs are more important than reality, because God is reality to them.

And despite all that, if you don’t bend over to emulate Chrome’s quirks a ton of sites still won’t work properly and users won’t use your browser because the other one is more “compatible”. And you might still have to fake your user agent to be Chrome or Firefox so sites will even give you the fancy HTML instead of giving you the mobile or “limited” version meant for IE and older browsers.