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Even Windows 11 is more refined and consistent in its design. (well, in the parts that are modern, which...shouldn't it be damning that even with those legacy parts it's still better designed?)

Looking at a screenshot from KDE home page, it really does not seem like anything has changed with it in terms of design polish that much. It doesn't even seem like it's moving in a direction that's any different. https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/fullscreen_with... The most significant change for the whole look they could make is changing the system font, because that's the biggest and most visible thing, and the one they have looks amateurish and makes it feel slapdash, like it was an afterthought, just picking whatever default font there was and going "whatever", which kind of ends up being the vibe of the whole thing.

They already seem to vaguely echo gnome 3 look in macos. Huge titlebars with buttons, sidebar layouts in apps, transparent title bar, control center, etc., there's just a bunch of things that make you go 'huh'.

All of these "desktop search bars for everything" look way too generic for there to be really anything "stolen" either way. Credit for what?

It may seem like it's "convenient", but whatsapp is truly a nightmare when you try to move it literally anywhere in any way. Huge backups, needing to transfer phone numbers, having to restore from backups, having and moving those backups in the first place, the way it's designed in that regard is the most inconvenient for a platform that doesn't even necessarily provide more security or anything for that to be worth it at all, particularly for people who don't even seek that kind of security or even know about it and just use it for "texting and stuff". Not to defend that or say that it isn't just a convenient excuse (it can be for sure), but just to say that whatsapp is possibly the most annoying app in that regard. It's such a pain in the ass I'd rather store all of that in the cloud. (Which ironically whatsapp pretty much just does anyway if it backs up to google drive, it just makes it the most inconvenient it could be)

That project is many years old. Apparently they added bandcamp support somewhere in 2020, and then continued to not "provide" any clue that music could be bought there. They could do something, but clearly supporting artists, or rather, letting other people support artists and not getting in the way of that support, is not in their interests even on better music platforms.

That trending feed on mastodon would still literally be that, ranking posts on how much they're engaged with and further driving engagement on the platform. So I'm just wondering what hairs are even there to split.

It's totally fine if people would just say it like "bad algorithms" or "good algorithms", but somehow the meaning of the word "algorithm" in itself got so twisted that it apparently means "bad" just on its own. Which looks idiotic if you realize that everywhere there are algorithms, even in those platforms that claim to be "no algorithm/algorithm-free" or whatever other meaningless duplicitous marketing drivel they dress it up with. From where I see it, it's some other people that purposely mix the meanings there, while also overlooking how some arbitrary "good" or "unremarkable" things just kinda silently get a pass, despite being functionally the same thing. Almost to the point where you could just advertise as "no algorithms" (whatever that means) and just have algorithms anyway, and it's kind of whatever.

It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.

If you're not logged in, the evil algorithmic trending feed is literally the first thing you'll see being pushed onto you. (seems like it's a default setting, because it's that way across several different instances.) So what's the truth? Seems like an incoherent position to me, especially given how mastodon itself advertises it as "no algorithms". It doesn't hold true when you can immediately see algorithmic feeds, at most charitable it's confused, at worst it's just a barefaced lie.

So it's literally just "bad algorithms" (the ones other platforms make) and "good algorithms" (the good algorithms good platforms make, like us). Which is kind of literally how it is, there are good ones and bad ones, except both of these kinds of platforms employ "bad" engagement driving discovery algorithms, so it's really just 'us vs them'. The trending and news algorithms are literally just driving engagement and discovery, and top hashtags feed is proudly clamoring how much engagement there is. Doesn't seem like they're not "chasing" it.

Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.

iTunes/Apple Music (where you can literally pay per track), Spotify (pay for streaming access and some other stuff), bandcamp itself (the web page is the player. purchases are also available within android app), are all music players where you can buy music and stuff, with decades of history. iTunes goal was literally to purchase music and play it, all in the same player program, and that's been released over two decades ago. Countless web platforms of different scales offer buying music (album or track by track) and function as a player as well. Amazon still sells mp3s in that way, and Amazon Music website is both a music store and a music player. There's a long history and wide variety of platforms with a goal of both purchasing and playing music, all within the same surface, be it an app or a web page.

What's next, arguing that these aren't actually "music players"? that paying for streaming access to music isn't actually paying for music?

There's just a variety of music players with different goals. Some players' goals are to prevent people from buying music or even discovering that they can pay for music. Again, with bandcamp it's not even removing bad third party ads or anything, it's just removing a purchase option, when it very often doesn't even prevent you from listening to music for free anyway, or sometimes even just downloading some music for free.

It's there when you listen on bandcamp, it's not there in the player. It's removed from the listening experience in this app, and made further obscure by not linking out. Are we actually gonna argue whether a "music player focused on streaming" that touts removing everything else, isn't doing the thing it's doing?

It's not about choosing which artists you like and whether you want to give money to some particular artist or not, and not even just personally refusing to give money to any artist.

It's about going out of your way to create something that gets in the way of artists getting paid, such as obscuring/eliminating an option to buy music or give money to an artist, not just from yourself alone but from other people, who might not even have such a stance, or even realize that there has been an anti-artist decision made for them.

Not even adblockers go this far, because they just remove third party ads, and artists are still free to promote their stuff in other ways (for example, on youtube, there's still stuff in description, annotations, things inside the video, etc.). A player like this removes those options from artists completely.

It's also like, not even that different on bandcamp - you can just listen to some music there and move on without buying it. Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different. Imagine if ad blocker did that to a bandcamp webpage, that would be absurd. (bandcamp doesn't even have ads though. well, depending on what you consider "advertising or promotion", maybe the whole website looks like endless promo to you, if that's the way someone looks at entertainment)

There's being "pro-copyright" and then there's just the topic of paying artists, and then choosing not to pay them.

Which sometimes is bizarrely and belligerently defended like some moral stance (barely even in relation to copyright/piracy), and sometimes bubbles up like tools that not just avoid paying artists, but make it harder to pay artists, even when those artists have something set up that's a far cry from ad driven platforms. Like, it's not just 'removing third party ads', it's removing any surface and any mention that may have artist selling their music. Is that even about copyright? The music is available to listen either way so it's hardly even infringing that way, it's just that something like this app chooses an active stance (how else would one describe actively removing everything about paying aspect) that's against paying artists, at all and in any form.

It's not even about 'what does downloading music entail', it's just 'fuck paying artists'. Music has been beaten towards kind of just giving up and making things free to stream and just kind of hoping to get their money elsewhere (concerts, merch, music sales), and yet still some people want artists to shrink with their "paying for art bullshit" even further as to preferably have artists not even mentioning that and themselves not seeing any of that at all.

Previews/free streaming on bandcamp is 128 kbps mp3 only. If you buy music there, you get the whole spread, lossy and lossless, mp3 320/v0, aac, ogg, flac, even wav. (Only thing notably missing at this point is opus, which would be fantastic to have, like for example, opus at 64k (space saving/space efficient) and 256k (quality), although vorbis or aac at whatever quality they have it set to is pretty good as a space efficient option)

Yes, which is what I also mention (as more usual streaming services, what someone would immediately think of and which is more geared towards that conventional kind of streaming - which bandcamp is kind of just not), it's just that culturally one is further down the line of being shitty to artists, and something like bandcamp has much lower fees on payments. However yeah, this thing is shitty to artists in about the same way, just relatively even shittier to artists on platforms that are better.

It's completely understandable not just for the usual streaming services (like youtube, etc.) and the grievances there (payouts per play, whichever way it goes, be it that artists getting stiffed or people refusing to come up with even a fraction of a cent), but for something like bandcamp as well, which is kind of 'almost but not quite a streaming service' and more accurately described in a literal way like 'it lets you play music and buy it', from which apps like this just remove the 'buying music' portion completely.

For something like youtube, there's hardly any qualms whether it's ethical or exploitative to sidestep that whole thing and whatever else artists may put out around their music (even something like links in video descriptions), because it is just a mess and people just roll with it anyway. But for bandcamp it leans a bit more towards 'taking it for a ride', when an app like this completely removes the aspect of buying music. Perhaps some people might not even get a slightest clue that's even possible cause there is just no such suggestion in the app at all. And if you wanted to get there, it kind of makes it harder to do so, because there's no prominent links to the original pages of songs and albums in the app. Finding or copying a link is a bit non-trivial because there's no such option in album view or track items, there is in playing queue but it's also kinda buried there.

It's just the way that something like this completely obscures the fact that you could buy music from bandcamp, or sometimes even download it for free (depending on what artists have set up). It's one of the better platforms for artists, so it's kind of odd to see this 'fuck you got mine' approach to it. It's also kind of just crummy and shoddily made, so even bandcamp webpages seem like a better browsing and listening experience. Bandcamp website isn't the worst for finding and playing music (it may be plain but it's snappy, and their discovery tools are pretty nice), but it's remarkable to make something that works even worse, perhaps just because bandcamp doesn't even have that much going on.

That's legitimately a crazy thing to say about an extremely revenue driven company with a $3 trillion valuation. We can see their "human values" play out in real time as they court and bribe politicians.

>can? would?

They literally already do? https://f-droid.org/docs/Signing_Process/

Valve has already pretty much "shut the door" on its games relatively to how much money they have and how much dev effort they could put into it if they actually tried harder, because they're mostly just maintaining their gambling facades (cs/dota2/tf2) and abandoning everything else (l4d2/other stagnant games and ip).

>use profiles for what profiles are good at

This is what I'm saying and what people who recommend containers as a "replacement" for profiles sorely miss.

>20 minutes to set up

Meanwhile on Chrome this just worked out of the box and didn't have UI that's been abandoned for a decade.

Maybe you just don't understand the difference between containers and profiles, or what is it about profiles that's useful and more useful in some cases over containers. For one, it's impossible to have separate extensions with containers. That alone is already a deal breaker, and there are many more differences. Profiles are useful when you want to have things to be actually separate, not just pretending like they are while they're all cluttered in the same profile. It's also about more completely eliminating risk of having something where it doesn't belong.

It's kinda tiresome to see containers get peddled over and over as a "solution", when they're severely limited in what they offer compared to profiles. One feature set and clunky interface doesn't even get close to the use cases people have for profiles. It's not a solution.

It's done when you're not visiting old control panel anymore. I wonder what people are even doing regularly enough in control panel for that to be such a problem.

What's bizarre is not seeing any mention of Windows Vista, when it laid the foundation and had most of these design aspects and elements people fawn about.

Was there any attempt to optimize SVG? If it was just a single object/path, it'd be pretty small (if it was optimized/simplified for curves/node count, it could be even smaller), and then it could be harder matching that size with PNG or it wouldn't be that much of a difference.

Have to wonder what those 20 MB SVGs were like and whether they could've been optimized as SVG still. Doesn't seem to add up that at "huge" resolution that PNG would be that small either.

When compared on exact same use cases, smartphones don't have to be replaced either if they're used to just call people and receive messages. If it's just for calls, why would software support matter? People keep comparing smartphones to dumbphones, while not actually comparing them on that limited set of dumbphone functionality. Does that not seem silly, if not just fallacious?

That's an absurd amount of tuning to make a browser acceptable to use. What you're saying is that it's unusable as is out of the box.

Full range is a specific set. What does that range consist of? Also, seems odd to go from going on about "stretching a label past the point of meaning", but then put normal as some range that's just about vaguely everything. Can normal not be defined? Is it somehow more deserving of being afforded to be a vague spectrum or being under less specific definitions? Where is the point of meaning with "normal"?

What is normal human behavior though? Is it some combination of things that's gonna end up being so rare that only so many people fall under it, and is it normal if it's so rare? Is it gonna be "what most/average people are", and if so, well then, isn't everybody gonna have something going on, and isn't that just normal then?

With how widespread it is, labeling, self-diagnosing, inquiring about yourself, is kind of normal human behavior. It is everywhere, and has been historically. Putting it like it's just 'labels for significant things' and then 'normal', and that these things would stand far enough apart to actually make a clear distinction without dismissing people in between is pretty much just wishful thinking. There's way too many things and even more combinations of then. It's gotten so complicated and convoluted only because it is that way. Wishing for a binary clarity in a complex world.