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Desktop open source applications is a broad category. I can list a few that are decidedly better than their commercial counterparts: VLC media player, qBittorrent, Firefox*, Calibre

In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place.

What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades.

For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.

As someone running 29.0, Emacs development pace is amazing, if not little breakneck.

27.1 was a pretty big step-up, 28.1 is even larger. Native-compilation being the biggest improvement in probably a decade.

And yet, I find myself compiling latest master, even with occasional breakage, because it provides even bigger jump, with correct font weight selection, Pure-Gtk support, smooth-scrolling, Haiku port and more.

Being an Emacs user has probably never been more awesome.

Developer mindset is a finicky thing. Haiku has been around for 20 years, actually boots on large amount of hardware, now even has ports for Qt, GTK, X11, Wine and loads of other applications people are already familiar with. This year I handed over old Acer Aspire to a friend in need, slapped Haiku on it and he has a working computer. By all fairness, Haiku is already actually 'useable'.

But majority of indie OS mindset was suddenly captured over past couple of years by SerenityOS. It is a good project in itself, but goes to show 1.0 does not matter for capturing Dev mindshare.

Eventually, there will be businesses offering support contracts. And if history is any indication, MS cannot out-litigate that future. RH/IBM rose despite SCO lawsuite. If the code is there and it works, people will make use of it.

On another thread an HN comment complained that Win32 was becoming standard API for games instead of Linux native, thanks to Wine.

The reply kind of opened my eyes. If Wine/ReactOS do continue the trend of becoming better more stable platform than Windows itself, thanks to Microsoft hell bent on destroying their reputation, eventually, Wine/ReactOS can even Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Windows itself.

A man can dream..

As a newbie who only learned Java and JS in bootcamp, and C in EE, Rust's tooling is absolutely phenomenal.

Things just work, and that is a rare experience.

Pardon if I'm getting this wrong, but

> This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.

> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

This is quite low effort, and frankly doesn't add anything to the known status quo.

I just keep the 'busy' hours for other people. Thankfully WFH has made it easy. Basically 11AM-7PM are for other people to interrupt me, and for calls. I stay only half-engaged with chats and emails so it doesn't cost in me my cognitive budget and I get a lot of stuff done within the household. Either 7AM-11AM or 7PM-11PM, depending on circumstances, I do work. You know, the 15 minutes of real actual work mentioned in Office space. This is when other people are away and I get to focus. Thankfully my company culture is good and nature of my job allows me to only sit and mash keyboard couple hours a week or so, rest is thinking, or light research.

Overall, I don't engage with $JOB more than 8 hours on any given day and never on a weekend. It works for me, and my boss nor team have complained so far. I'm not sure how long the party will last, though.

Which is a great boon for both Haiku and my old netbook. 9/10 times I'm using terminal, browser and Emacs anyway, and Haiku is stupid fast. Now if only wireless support was bit better...

These things are designed to hassle legitimate customers only. Pirates are never going to pay anyway. DRM is so they can squeeze more out of paying customers.

That's why they now embed displays with verification modules. Basically whole stack from server to your display is a giant chain verifying you are not doing what they don't want you to do.

It has been more than 10 years since Maverick Meerkat. About time to repeat the mistakes of the past.

This is beautiful. It is just likeS with all the hacks in Windows that made their software utterly reliant on each other being still standing. Then when the paradigm shift came, none of their technology (nor culture) was able to advance fast enough and we are here today.

It made Microsoft utterly wealthy and able to survive for another decade until they were able to transition to services, so not everything is rosy. But, they are not the only option anymore.

With another paradigm shift, Google won't be either.

Hacker: Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to be preparing children for a working life. Three quarters of the time they're bored stiff!

Sir Humphrey: Well I should have thought that being bored stiff for three quarters of the time was an excellent preparation for working life.

- Yes Minister (Season 2, Episode 7 : National Education System)

I'm not sure I trust Reddit of 2021 to be halfway competent at rewrites.

Aside from obviously great quote, thanks for reminding me of Stanislaw Lem and Pyron. I grew up reading translations of old Russian books and (I know he was Polish) your comment was a good walk on the memory lane

The worst sites a.k.a. those a user might want to block are probably also bringing Google disproportionally large amount of income is my guess.

Syncthing is the easiest, cheapest, most reliable way I've found.

> Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs

Exactly. Ironically, Emacs is also the place where transition from tourist to resident is the smoothest. You can stray writing and evaluating Elisp practically anywhere. (Almost) Everything is programmable via Elisp, everything is documented in excruciating detail, learning about any system attribute is two keychords away, there are debugging and profiling tools built in, and source code for very built in thing is available. If the target is to make average Joe into a programmer with least effort, things don't get much better than this.

Traditional systems have complexity too. Its just not up front.

I like to compare it to fossil fuels and global warming. Traditional systems get one started quick, but eventually build a large fragile system that gets harder to fix/rebuild the longer it goes on.

Nix is different, it forces you to do your work upfront. But once setup, you pretty much can (and to my attestation do) forget it is in place. You do have to learn setting a anything a and everything. But you only do it once. If the house burns down, you don't need to remember what you had. You don't need to remember what to setup in what order. You don't have to find out you forgot something in the middle of something else. In other words, the onus is no longer on you.

That last sentence is incredibly liberating. I stopped worrying having black screens after updates and pretty much stopped having rescue disc, because rescue functionality comes built in the system. It sounds cultish, and it kinda is, but as I said in previous comment on Nix, it is the worst system management tool, except all the others.

I just want to appreciate the article. Starting with non-clickbait title, upfront summary, detailed numbers, code for reruns, great graphs, no dreamy story and no advertisement of any kind.

It is hosted on Medium but the author has done a banging great job, so gets a pass. If he is reading, excellent work!

My guess would be automated crash reports. Those are too good to ignore, and usually don't include much PII.

But its a guess. Would be nice to have devs pitch in here.

Impressive indeed, but what is a sustaining engineer?

And eventually, Mozilla's 'telemetry' will tell them that 95% users never opt out, and that'll justify removing the opt out option entirely.

This is why I believe Nate Graham does a fantastic job with weekly KDE updates[0]. He actually goes through the pain to condense every bugfix/feature addition to readable and grokkable single line, and it makes for great changelog read.

Of course, not every project can manage to write such a thoughtful post for every release, but if Mr. Graham can do it for something as sprawling as KDE, then can sure at least try.

[0] https://pointieststick.com/

As someone who used 768p 15" laptop until late 2019, yes, everyone else has to deal with bs huge menus. Oh the number of webpages that would have you scroll horizontally, often with white bar on both sides... The day I upgraded to 1080p I could feel a sense of joy in being able to see the web as it was designed. And now every web developer is beginning to develop on 27" (or less) 4K displays and the target is shifting for less fortunate yet again.

virtualenv, pyenv, venv.. I'm sure they all work well, but for a newbie, the sheer choice is a killer, especially when they all work almost same, but not quite.

Now compare that with cargo or npm and the canonical way makes newbie upbringing SL much easier.

Or for NeoVIm: https://github.com/kristijanhusak/orgmode.nvim

A formal spec is being worked on: https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html

As a bonus tip, you can simply remove the recommendation/trending tab from main view. I did, and now all I see when I open NewPipe is my subscriptions. Since I don't subscribe to many channels (highest frequency channel is twice a week) , my YT consumption is down to couple hours per week of explicitly channels that I want to watch. This view also let's me see easily if any subscription is generating more content than I'd like (quality a quantity ratio is universally constant), so it automatically limits oversubscription too.