I am quite comfortable finding my way around ArchLinux, and recently decided to give Gentoo a try. I didn’t expect it to be that much harder but all the cflags, emerge, conflicts and updates feels like black magic. I guess that if you know your way around Gentoo, reverse-engineering a deb file is not a real challenge. However I’m assuming that most Linux users would hope for a less involved solution.
Arch User Repository. If you’re using Arch, you get the basic stuff from the official repositories. But for most programs there’s the AUR. They’re often less polished, some of it may be proprietary. There are package managers dedicated for it, that also know to handle the official repositories.
HP can make good printers. It has the right hardware, capabilities and price (Of the printers, not the ink) to be a very good product. It’s just their obnoxiously asshole-design software that is designed to make you to keep paying for using a product you already own.
Looks better, but every time I tried it it didn’t work for me so much. I noticed that I associate an app with its color, and that it’s easier for me to look for something orange when I’m looking for Firefox than just the shape of the logo. This is one of the reasons why I hate Google Icon designs which basically use the same colors in their designs. Might look more aesthetical, but for me at least it is less practical.
Yup. Just like Spez predicted. The site is maybe less popular, but it will survive. The protests will die off eventually. The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was. Maybe eventually the investers and advertisers will return, and it will be seen in hindsight as a smart move. The quality of the content may take a drop, but it was a calculated risk of making it more profitable.
It is a lot better than it used to be. Emulation tools got much better over the last couple of years, and there are many things that required applications in the past and now just work from the browser. You can edit documents, send emails, play games and videos, configure devices, edit images. All from the browser - over windows or Linux.
Making the shift to Linux is easier now than it has ever been. Linux caught up, Windows got bloated, emulation and platform agnostic web services gave a lot more options for counteracting Windows main advantage - which is software compatibility. And as Linux gains popularity that is changing for the better as well.
You did pay for a computer. But not just with your money, you pay by being forced into using the services of the company that subsidized the price of your product. Be it Android bloatware that you can’t get rid of, a free version that keeps reminding you about the premium features or simply ads.
Back in the day, the products you bought didn’t keep trying to sell you other products. However, we tend to take for granted the amount and quality and value of services that companies just give for free. Back when free mailbox used to be limited to 6MB, encyclopedias and map services used to cost a lot of money. The sheer amount of things we can do today online without giving a payment method is astonishing. And it is not just because of the advancement in technology. Personally I prefer this model of giving a product for free and using it to promote the paid product as long as it “polite”. Those who would like to get a premium experience will pay.
You could use Linux to avoid paying for software while avoiding the bloatware. Linux had massively improved over the recent years in being noob-friendly. However, you still pay for it with your time as still there are things that are not supported and you have to come up with workarounds. Personally I use Linux, but it took me a while to get comfortable with it. Unlike Windows, I can configure it nearly any way I like. But I can’t recommend this to everyone.
Or rather, being tech savvy is the force. You can then choose sides. Personally I’m with the open-force community.
No. It should be minimalistic by default. If you want to add a tail just grab one from the AUR.