This is what it looks like when they try to police the software that's NOT from their store (or their partners).

All the Google-verified malware that infests Google's marketplace will continue to be a problematic vector after this change. But this change will put obstacles in my attempts to install safe alternatives that are free of malware and not part of Google's junkyard or spyware full of anti-features.

So paying in order to prevent search engine competition is ok as long as you are rich enough that your payments become essential for those receiving them.

I generally agree but it depends on the application and the computer purpose / input you will most use.

Like.. it doesn't make much sense to have a CLI/TUI for an image editor.. if you start using things like sixel you are essentially building a GUI that runs in a terminal, not a TUI. The same happens with videogames, video players and related entertainment applications.

But like I said, I do generally agree. I'd even argue that when possible, GUIs should just be frontends that ultimately just call the corresponding CLI programs with the appropriate parameters, avoiding duplication.

From what I gather, I don't think it's about any stance from Codeberg in general, it seems they are attacking "several projects advocating tolerance and equal rights" in particular. They just happen to be hosted in Codeberg.

I think that's the point, he's saying he'd rather use USA-linked FOSS than non-USA proprietary software.

espeak default voice backend is synthesized without using actually real voice samples. So it doesn't require downloading a huge package for each language, which is convenient in some cases, but the outcome is extremely robotic.

You can use MBROLA as backend for espeak so that it uses some voice samples and the result should be less jarring (it'd still be easy to tell it's not natural voice, but at least you'd be able to understand it better). There's a tutorial on this here: https://github.com/...

Or you can try piper (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper) it's one of the most natural-sounding TTS (here are some samples).

This is grounded in the assertion that a website’s HTML/CSS is a protected computer program that an ad blocker intervenes in the in-memory execution structures (DOM, CSSOM, rendering tree), this constituting unlawful reproduction and modification.

This is ridiculous... the in-memory structures are highly browser dependent, the browser is the one controlling how the DOM is represented in memory.. it would imply that opening the website AT ALL in a different version of the exact specific one they target or with a different set of specific features/settings would also be a violation, since the memory structure would likely be different too.

At that point, they might as well just ask for their website to not be visited at all.

And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn't only open, and not only GPL.. but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.

Yea, but he's (intentionally?) misrepresenting things.. people are not "unimpressed" by AI, what they are is not interested in MS "agentic OS", these are not the same things.

It's irresponsible to hand in control of your machine to an AI integrated that deeply into the OS, particularly when it's designed to be tethered to the network and it's privately owned and managed by human entrepreneurs that do have the company's interests as first and main priority.

Thunar is a much better alternative, in my opinion.

I prefer getting comfortable with bash, because it's everywhere and I need it for work anyway. No fancy shells in remote VMs. Another one is pwsh (powershell) because it's by default in Windows machines that (sadly) I sometimes have to use as VMs too. But you can also install it in linux since it's now open source.

But if I wanted to experiment personally I'd go for xonsh, it's a python-based one. So you have all the tools and power of python with terminal convenience.

1. The Pixel is easily unlockable, so one can install custom firmware without being a "pro", its hardware is (or was reverse-engineered to be) compatible enough to make the experience seamless, with a whole firmware project / community that it's exclusively dedicated on that specific range of hardware devices, making it a target for anyone looking for a phone where to install custom Android firmware on.

But I'd bet it's a mix of 2 and 3.

The desktop has been losing market for a while. I feel Windows is already under serious threat (if not already in the minority) when you think about all the devices that mainstream audiences orbit around (phones, tablets, portable consoles, etc), often using the Linux kernel. Only about a third of most website traffic comes from desktops.

Many of the people who frequently use Windows desktop do so because of their job, and often avoid using it outside of work as much as possible, since it feels like.. well, work.

Microsoft has been desperately trying to appeal to those other bigger sectors of the pie and has failed every time.

PC Gaming was one sector they had advantage on, yet that has already started to crumble thanks to Valve. I feel that MS will just try to push for integrating their xbox with Windows OS more and more...

I feel it's a battle with many fronts, since PCs have many uses.. so MS is likely to run their typical spiel: copy what the competition are doing and try to centralize/integrate it with their OS in a way that gives them an advantage, as they are famous for doing.

Another sector they can do this is with the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)... they could turn Windows into a frontend for running Linux apps... so if Linux apps became popular, they could try to advertise Windows as the "best" way to run Linux software without losing the full first party support of legacy Windows software.

It was part of Firefox before Chrome was even a thing.

Many people aren't aware of firefox -P and/or about:profiles.. but it's one of the oldest features in firefox.

Or distributed serverless P2P communication (like SimpleX does). Specially when it comes to an app that is just meant for person-to-person communications to begin with.

Paradoxically, this move towards trying to make things more secure is actually gonna make things LESS secure.

Because it means that now the only way for people to continue using alternative apps is for them to be shipped with debug keys (the ones used during development) which are fundamentally insecure since they allow anyone to produce an apk and be accepted as a valid update of the app..

You still can release an apk that works by using a debug key.. the problem is that debug keys have essentially "public" credentials. Until now, it was possible to use your own credentials and ensure the app is secure by protecting your own keys and credentials, which is what F-droid was doing. Now this no longer is possible. I don't think this is the end of F-droid, but it'll be the end of F-droid using mechanisms for verification that used to be built-in on Android.

But I expect F-droid should be able to have it's own system for verification, before installing, that is parallel and independent of the apk signing process. They could have signatures in a separate file, outside the APK. This also has the additional paradoxical result that in order to ensure that the apps installed are safe, it's MORE important now to have a store app alternative that you trust and that can implement alternative signing/verification methods.

So... if anything, this move from Google makes Android less secure and makes key signatures within the apks kind of moot for any store that isn't Google-owned... however, it also means installing a non-Google owned store with some level of security guarantees is much more important now.

interoperability == API standardization == API homogeneity

standardization != monopolization

Samsung s22 and s25

I'm still holding some hope that maybe Samsung's flavor of the OS won't have the restriction of requiring Google keys. Specially considering that Samsung has its own "Galaxy Store" with app submissions controlled by them, not Google.

Though it's possible they might simply extend the signatures accepted to include also the ones signed by them ^^U ..still it would give them a competitive edge to remove the restriction so they might be incentivized to do it.

It's ironic that GTK actually used to stand for GIMP ToolKit.

They were the first ones to use Gtk ever.. and it's looking like they will be the last ones to migrate to the newer major versions :P

Since they are closed source, we can't know. We can find out that messages are being sent at certain moments, but not what data is being contained in the messages, communications carrying this sort of data are always encrypted (for obvious reasons).

For legal reasons they often include some vague allusion in the terms of service about collecting information.. but they are never very clear on what data exactly they take when and how, so it's left up to interpretation.