I heartily approve.

Imagine a poster of Tom Holland, white powder all over his nose, with the slogan “Snort Milk?” in bold across the top.

Cura’s a fantastic slicer, but kindof a terrible program. They gave up on ARM support a while ago. And their dependency situation is majorly out of control. To the point that Gentoo has literally given up on supporting it and maintaining a working package.

Remember that scene from Prometheus?

Wait. “Eye contact.” Doesn’t that imply that the sun has eyes?

ARE YOU FUCKING TELLING ME THE SUN HAS HAD EYES THIS WHOLE TIME?

Z is only depth if your camera happens to be at the origin facing in the positive Z direction, though. In most games, the camera almost never rotates except about a vertical axis, though, so Z as the vertical axis stays vertical always. (Exceptions being space sims, that leaning-around-the-corner maneuver in a lot of games where the camera tips, games with shifting gravity, etc.)

I dunno. Z as up always felt more intuitive to me. It’s just another thing to argue about like Vim vs Emacs and tabs vs spaces, I guess.

No, just all I want to tell you about.

I vibe code Brainfuck using Eliza.

Communication with others might be limited without proprietary messenger apps. It could be argued whether Signal counts as proprietary or not, but that’s probably the only option alongside with SMS.

Well, I use Lemmy and lurk Mastadon, but I don’t use Facebook or anything else like that. I use Google Chat on my computer. But honestly not having things that incessantly ding at me in my pocket is as much a feature as a limitation.

Camera quality likely suffers a lot, without proprietary camera drivers.

I did say “proprietary apps”. I’m sure I’m running some proprietary drivers and device firmwares and such. My camera quality is definitely dog shit, though.

Online banking is pretty much impossible without proprietary apps, since (at least here in Europe) every bank I know requires you to use their app for 2FA.

I haven’t had issues doing online banking on a desktop/laptop(/Raspberry Pi) with a browser. My bank’s 2FA just requires access to email. (So far.) I’m in the U.S., though.

Games will be severely limited, since there’s not a lot of non-proprietary apps.

Sure. But there are decent FOSS games like Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Mindustry. Plus I use Lemuroid (emulator suite) a fair amount.

Navigation will be severely limited

Not sure what you mean by this. Like, GPS? Yeah, I don’t use that.

In many cities public transport requires you to use their app for tickets

Yeah, no idea. I haven’t used public transit to speak of.

Also, I don’t use Android Auto. Or my work’s 2FA provider’s proprietary app, but I have a YubiKey for that. I don’t have any cloud backup to Google Drive or anything. Yeah, you’re not wrong that there’s a lot you can’t do on a phone under the restrictions I’ve placed on my phone, but I’d rather deal with those things than the enshittification I’d get with proprietary apps.

The famous violinist. Yes.

Honestly, still better than working sick with an office full of coworkers.

Two books I started reading knowing I’d disagree with the author:

• Introduction to Austrian Economics. That school of economics is helpful as a model for understanding economics, though only through the lens of an idealized system. The same way that understanding how a point-like mass moves helps you understand how a canon ball moves. But then it goes on to say that your inalienable/natural right to safety in your person is basically the fundamental property right from which all of what the anarcho-capitalists call “theory” directly derives. Which makes it rather circular. “Property rights ∴ property rights.”
• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I knew my reaction to it would be visceral, but defending DRM was the last straw. I finished the Austrian Economics book. But I didn’t get a quarter of the way into the Kurzweil book before rage quitting.

Paid for by Nvidia.

(Joke. Maybe.)

Why all the downvo- oh shit this is an AI-generated image, isn’t it?

(Seems like the shoelaces are fucked up, the buttons are kindof inconsistent, the eyes are a little weird.)

Yeah, in that case it gets a downvote from me as well.

Everything you’re saying is good and valid points. And yes, the future may be bleak for Linux like the present is for Android.

But at the same time, I’m tapping out this very comment on a rooted phone with an unlockable bootloader without any of the Google apps and in fact running zero proprietary apps.

I think the option to use Linux the unenshittified way in which it was always intended to be used will be there for the foreseeable future the way it, quite frankly, still is for Android despite Google’s best efforts at killing open mobile computing.

So, I’m not a recent convert to Linux. I’ve been using it pretty much exclusively for over 20 years now. And almost entirely Gentoo and Arch.

And I’ll tell you… the Gentoo community is hard core. The sort of hard core that will not tolerate any enshittification. They’ll make sure Gentoo stays pure.

And I’m not just talking about “free from corporate influence”. If Gentoo announced that moving forward, only SystemD would be supported as an init system (and I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), a big part of the community would fork Gentoo and declare they could take OpenRC (or runit or whatever) away when they could pry it from their cold dead hands.

No matter what enshittified Linux distros come to exist in the future, that lifeline of purists will always provide a way to buck enshittification. And that’s a lifeline that the Windows and Mac ecosystems don’t have.

So, while I have little doubt that enshittified Linux distros will exist (indeed already do exist – after all what is Android but enshittified Linux?), I think opting out of said enshittification will continue to be an option for the foreseeable future.

Two caveats:

• I do think the likelihood is that the opting-out-of-enshittification option will largely skew toward a more technical/hacker/power-user sort of user base.
• Some things that aren’t exactly “Linux” (or within the Linux ecosystem) may well enshittify in ways that negatively impact Linux users. For instance, I’d imagine web standards will get more and more captured by corporate interests. WEI will probably return as a web standard. That sort of thing. And while that’s not so much about Linux, it will affect Linux users.

No, the ketchup goes on the keys and the fries on the touchpad.

Too bad you don’t have a CD tray. I’m guessing that’s why you didn’t order a drink.

Share an example or two?

If you’re a software engineer, memorizing an ASCII table (particularly the hex numbers of each character code) is definitely helpful. If for no other reason than so that you can read things that are randomly written in binary without having to consult a table.

Something not really otherwise terribly useful that nonetheless helped me keep my sanity: learn how to convert to base64 in your head. At work, we had really boring 8-hours-a-day training for a couple of weeks. To pass the time, I came up with random strings to base64 encode in my head. “Hat is 48 61 7a. The first six bits are 010010 which in base64 is an S. The next six bits would be 000110 which in base64 is G.” Etc. I’d write down the base64 strings character by character as I derived them and then check my results for errors when I got back to my desk.

How to convert various units of measurement. (Including between imperial and metric.)

2.54 centimeters in an inch. Degrees Fahrenheit is nine fifths of degrees Celsius plus 32. Stuff like that.