You’re not being fair, that wasn’t the conversation thread at all… I didn’t reply to OP’s initial message directly.

It was more like this:

1. OP: Hi guys, I’m looking for yellow tomatoes, do you know where can I get them?

2. Commenter: I go to this store, they have tomatoes that are yellow enough for me… for more sophistication you need to go to a much further away local shop.

3. OP Response: My question isn’t sophisticated! …all I want is my tomatoes to be of the same color as all the other yellow vegetables I exclusively eat, all yellow, tomatoes and ketchup being red is a step in the opposite direction.

4. Me: there’s a reason why the red ones are sold, [valid cultural reason]. But you can still change them, here’s a manual / recipe to turn them yellow when cooking.

As you see, when I was talking about reasons it was mainly directed to the apparent indignation of comment “3”, when the person was painting their request as something that should be seen as the more reasonable / less sophisticated approach… so I gave the reason to show how the opposite is also more reasonable / less sophisticated from another point of view.

But even then, I did link to the manual for readline to configure the input handling. It’s not like I just dismissed the initial question like your simplification implied.

PowerShell still runs inside a terminal emulator (e.g. Fish), so it changes nothing in the input/output behaviour.

You can definitely change the input/output behavior by changing the program that runs on the terminal… in fact, when I posted that link earlier, what I said is that you can configure this in readline, which is a library that bash and many other programs that run in the terminal (not all, not fish, for example) use for interpreting the input, so all terminal programs using the readline library for handling interactive input have the same shortcuts. It’s not the terminal the one with those shortcuts coded into it.

“GUI-friendly terminals”? What does that mean, in the context of the conversation? Why are you talking about GUI?

Because a terminal emulator is a GUI app… OP wasn’t talking about about real terminals, nor about a virtual console session in Linux (which runs without any GUI), but about a terminal emulator you open in a window within a graphical compositor.

My point was that most of the popular (amongst terminal nerds) GUI app terminals stay away from the traditional GUI toolkits when possible because they want to keep the app slim and lightweight. And it’s those toolkits the ones that orchestrate the standardization of the typical Windows-like shortcuts (similar as the readline library, but for GUI apps). This is also why in many terminals you don’t even have a menu when you right click, since those menus are usually done with GUI toolkits. But there are also heavy-weight terminals like the ones bundled in some more user-friendly DEs that do include GUI toolkits as dependencies, so they might actually have an easier go at playing nice with other conventions in their respective DEs. However, you’d still need to pair it with a shell that also plays nice (or configure it to play nice, if possible).

Is it weird to explain the reason why something is as it is? If you were already aware of it then it shouldn’t be as baffling.

There are also modern terminals and shells that do things the way you expect in a more convenient way, but maybe you also know this, OP mentioned powershell, that can be used in Linux too. It’s just that this hasn’t been a focus for traditional and slim/lightweight terminals coupled with traditional shells which is typically the popular combination amongst heavy terminal users, many of the slim terminal apps stay away from GUI toolkits that are what normally give consistency in settings to the GUI apps. And because they are slim and try to eliminate what isn’t absolutely needed, typically they don’t do configuration profiles, specially given that it’s relatively easy in Linux to backup and reuse your configuration across installs. It’s more of a job at the OS/sysadmin level.

There’s also not a real standardized setup in Linux as a whole. There are environments that default using the Super (Windows) key for all window management, or use TUI terminal apps for most things so they get terminal navigation keys for all their apps. Some people even configure Gtk/Qt to use vim/emacs style for navigation in text boxes because for them it’s the other way around, all their apps use terminal shortcuts because… well… they are terminal apps.

The thing is that vi and emacs have existed since long before those other new editors came around.

What you want is possible to do by configuring your ~/.inputrc (see readline manual page for details), it’s just that the defaults are different because they are from a time when many keyboards didn’t even have arrow keys (and the ones that had them were in non-standard positions) so most of the shortcuts that became standard in those days are completely different than the ones common today. Given that the terminal is meant to emulate old style DEC VT100 terminals (that’s why it’s called terminal “emulator”) it made sense to use those default that people had grown used to.

Personally, I’ve grown used to Ctrl+a, Ctrl+k, Ctrl+w, Ctrl+e and Ctrl+y …I dont have to reach to wherever the Home key is in whatever keyboard I happen to be using at the moment (specially with modern 75%/60%-sized keyboards today). Or use a combination that also requires shift and having to hold so many keys together. In fact I went the opposite direction and customized my Powershell profile while I’m on windows to keep many of those old shortcuts in the Windows pwsh terminal as well.

The thing is that Apple is even worse when it comes to its walled garden practices and locked-in bundled software. For example, in Android you can at least choose amongst alternative apps for SMS, etc. And some are even open source, and available in the official store. But in Apple devices you can’t compete with iMessage, by policy. It’s simply not allowed. Even from a technical standpoint it’s not possible either, since they don’t even offer an API for a third party iOS app to handle SMS/MMS/RCS. And that’s just 1 example.

So you are jumping from the pan to the fire if you go from Android to iOS. Even if you are ok giving up the “sideloading” aspect, you are still worse off with Apple anyway.

Yes! I mean, blame those who post AI-generated translations as if they were their own, or blame the AI scrappers that use those poorly generated pages for training, but it makes no sense to blame Wikipedia when the only thing they have done is just exist there and offer a platform for knowledge sharing.

In fact, this problem is hardly exclusive to Wikipedia, every platform with crowdsourced content is in some level susceptible to AI poisoning which ultimately ends up feeding other AIs, the loop exists in all platforms. Though I understand wanting to highlight particularly the risk of endangered languages being more vulnerable to this, since they have less content available to them so the AI models have a smaller dataset which makes them worse and more sensible to bad data.

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.

Did they work on developing new web standards to unlock that potential on the web?

Back then HTMLv5 wasn’t even a thing, there was no concept of video/microphone/gyroscope/gps access for webapps, notifications, web workers, web sockets, offline PWA webapps, etc. It was not a viable idea unless they actually were to invest big. They weren’t so committed. In Firefox OS even the dialer was a webapp, Mozilla brought forth a lot of innovative APIs to make it possible, many of which are in use today even after the OS was discontinued. And nowadays you even have things like Webassembly that allows you to code it in C or whatever low level language you want.

I feel Apple has always been more interested in their own ecosystem. Opening the web to have the same level of potential as the native apps from their walled garden goes against that strategy, so I don’t believe they were really serious about that approach, it’s always been more interesting for them to prioritize their native apps.

I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.

There’s the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it’s more targeted to low power keypad-based phones… and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source… maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we’d get a fully free stack.

Good marketing means achieving an arbitrary limit of what you consider “good” marketing. So it depends on where you set the bar.

The best marketing necessarily requires some level of unethical behavior, because being honest and saying the whole truth doesn’t sell. Everything has drawbacks and benefits… the better marketing minimizes (or even hides / fails to mention) the drawbacks and emphasizes the benefits, which is a form of deception.

I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).

If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.

I always saw I2P as a more modern and distributed onion-routing alternative to Tor.

The thing is that people are used to making use of Tor in different ways than the way they use I2P, but you can also have outproxies (ie. exit nodes/relays) in I2P the same way as in Tor… and you can also host a service inside the Tor network without relying on an exit node, like in I2P. It’s just that people only seem to want to host exit nodes for Tor and not so much for I2P, this led to internal communications in I2P being more common (which is a good thing), whereas in Tor it’s common to use it for anonymous access to the clearnet (which strains the network and causes chokepoints, specially with big downloads or torrent sharing). That’s just a matter of usage, not capability.

I think it makes sense to choose a phone that’s freer than most phones as a start, then fill up the gaps to make it fully free. As things are all phones have blobs (even non-Android ones).

I expect non-Android linux mobile OSes can also benefit from the reverse engineered firmware.

What should be the highest priority in terms of being able to use a fully FOSS phone? I feel we already have FOSS alternatives for most things that make the phone usable.

Perhaps free hardware might be top, but the S in FSF is Software and being able to avoid non-free software would be close 2nd, imho.

I expect it’s a combination of all the above in some sense. They state they want to build on LineageOS (an Android variant) and replace its binary blobs, I expect the result would be a new custom ROM targeting specific compatible hardware with the goal of ultimately supporting usable phones working on fully Free Software.

What it’s not is the creation of a libre hardware phone. I don’t think they are working on hardware, at least not anytime soon. Also if by “Linux phones” you mean non-Android based, that’s not necessarily a requirement (given that they mention LineageOS), but I expect regardless the kernel will be Linux without the blobs and it’s entirely possible that they add support for installing their firmware on those “Linux phones”.

I do kinda wish they’d focus on stuff that has a way bigger user impact 😅

The thing is that technically we already have fully usable FOSS software at that user level. Using for example LineageOS with F-droid as the only app store already gets you there. Whereas, ensuring your phone is not spying you or having some malicious functionality on the hardware/driver level is something that currently is simply not possible.

The FSF has always been doing the thankless job of championing for the things that are harder and less rewarding to do, but that will advance software freedom most for those who do seek it. Even when that thing is not necessarily the most popular/mainstream. I feel this has more of an impact in software freedom than, say, if they were to reinvent the wheel just to have their brand attached to it, and/or provide a slightly different UI to do the same thing other FOSS software already does.

There isn’t much concrete information, but my guess is that OS/ecosystem is exactly what this project is, and that they are not talking about physical hardware. Specially considering that they are putting the emphasis on free software (not hardware) and they are involving a software developer. Making a phone’s hardware free would be an entirely different beast.

In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone.

Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s. “Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we’re very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world.”

From the official FSF post about the event.

I didn’t downvote you, but it’s unclear what you meant by stating that.

Depending on how one interprets it, it can be seen as a justification for using “fascist” (since there isn’t a more accurate word) or simply a way to emphasize that the term is inaccurate and shouldn’t be used.

So I’m not surprised if you get up/down votes from both sides in either direction, specially in a polarizing discussion. Not because of what you said being wrong/right, but because of what they might read between lines.

In theory, it can. One possible reason with Btrfs might be that you are only mounting a subvolume even though there might be other files in the same filesystem (such as snapshots/copies of the subvolume for backup) but that are not being mounted.

Also some tools like gparted do not handle btrfs disk usage very well and will display it as if the whole partition is 100% full.

What’s your filesystem?

If you are using something like btrfs, for example, the usage reports can be misleading, and getting the exact size can be complicated… I’d recommend using more fs-specific tools, such as btdu.

I see, thanks for the overview.

If NixOS really does need a community in order for things to work at all, and it cannot be independent from it, then it looks like the moderation team asking for independence is a hard ask. It’ll require restructuring it.

However, with this context it looks to me that what they are asking is not really independence for the moderation team, but independence from Anduril… which are 2 completely different things. The message is misleading.

I get that big projects are not the same, but in my experience there’s always a hierarchy, not a collection of independent bodies (except for fan-made communities that are clearly “unofficial”, those are independent, sure). It’s not unheard of for maintainers at the top of the hierarchy to influence other parts of the organization, like moderation. In fact most open source projects are like that, led by a group of “benevolent dictators”.