[meme where the hero pulls the mask off the tied-up Firefox’s head, revealing Safari]

Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn’t help you if you need to edit photos, though.

KDE has neat stuff, but Compiz was the king of bling.

Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.

They want to make it impossible to block other machines by address? Including ones that are attacking you? That’s a horrible idea.

Also, this sounds like it will require way too much intelligence in the network itself. The Internet works because the big trunk routers do very little processing per packet—just look at the destination address, decrement TTL, and send the packet to the next router. If trunk routers have to do a lot of per-packet processing or keep track of every single node on the network, they’ll fall over very quickly.

Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…

Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.

You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.

Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…

All of those issues are also present in proprietary software. Not sure why you think free and open source software is unique in that regard.

In my experience, FOSS generally works better than the proprietary alternative. It tends to have fewer features, but the features it does have are designed to be useful to the user rather than to collect more money from the user, and tend to be much more thoroughly debugged. My favorite example of this right now is Thunderbird versus Microsoft Outlook; the latter has plenty of bells and whistles, but trying to use it is an utterly infuriating experience.

Also, FOSS alternatives tend to be sparse in topics that most programmers don’t personally care about or don’t have access to. For example, there are a great many FOSS text editors, because every programmer needs one, whereas FOSS business accounting software is not so common, because most programmers don’t own businesses.

Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.

That’s a problem with proprietary software (i.e. proprietary apps and websites), not free and open source software (i.e. your browser, operating system, and Reddit client).

When a business refuses to do business with me because I use FOSS, I take that as an insult, and take my business elsewhere if I can. I suggest you do the same.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Not as long as we practice capitalism, no. As long as investors demand that businesses grow faster than inflation, those businesses will look for ways to take more and more of your money, forever, until they finally collapse, and then the cycle of enshittification starts anew. What you want is stability and equality, but stability and equality are anathema to someone who wants to be richer than everyone else.

QT, writing C++, or both?

Qt.

Paying for a good technology can be cheaper in the long run if you save development time.

Only until the price gets jacked up beyond what you can afford, and then you’re scrambling to rewrite your entire application to use something else that’s still affordable.

And sure, developing in C++ is more expensive than JavaScript, because you can’t let cheap web code monkeys do it.

An awful lot of code is written in C++, so I’m not sure that was ever a serious constraint.

I think I made it quite clear, that I set the scope for the desktop. There are several.

Sure, if we’re targeting desktop only, then there are lots of options: GTK, wxWidgets, Swing…

But what does it matter? You can’t ignore mobile in 2023.

That only helps if there’s a viable FOSS toolchain for .NET, including editor and debugger, which as far as I know is still proprietary. Using proprietary development tools is to be avoided if at all possible, not only because of principles but also because they will create problems that you are powerless to solve.

You forgot to read the very small fineprint after the rant hyperbole: *) true for desktop applications.

Ignoring phones in 2023 is patent nonsense.

You could go with C++ and QT. Though, writing C++ code is never easy/fun

It’s also ludicrously expensive, so as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.

Everybody and his mother tries to push their custom iOS and Android apps, relegating web sites to the desktop.

Madness. I’m not going to develop and maintain three completely different versions of the same app in perpetuity.

Any multi platform GUI toolkit with a cross-compilable language will give you twice the functionality in half the development time over HTML+CSS+JavaScript.

Maybe it would if one existed.

I’m trying to paint a picture what a horrible absolute clusterfuck the web GUI technology stack is.

I don’t disagree, but I also don’t see any viable alternative.

That’s what shadow DOM and custom elements are for.

It is easier to write platform independent GUI applications in C than in HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

Um, what? There are very few GUI toolkits targeting both desktops and phones, and none of them are reasonably usable from C.

Yes, and it’ll eventually be worked out to the point that it’s mostly accurate, but there will always be edge cases like the one I described above; they’ll just be rare enough that nobody cares or even believes that it’s happening.

Now, humans reviewing job applications are also subject to biases and will unfairly reject applicants, but that only shuts you out of one company. AIs, on the other hand, are exact copies of each other, so an AI that’s biased against you will shut you out of all companies.

And, again, no one will care that this system has randomly decided to ruin your life.

I’m talking about asking the AI “where’s the bug in this code” and pasting a snippet of code from my non-public repository.

Oh God, I can see it now. Someone makes an AI for filtering job applications, it’s great, all the employers use it. Before a human ever sees a resume, the AI decides whether to silently discard it. For reasons known to literally no one, the AI doesn’t like your name and always discards your resume, no matter how many times you change it. Everybody uses the same AI, so you never get a job again. You end up on the street, penniless, through no fault of your own.

At least code on Stack Overflow was written by a human who presumably has some idea of what it actually does.

Non-AI rubber ducks don’t steal your code and sell it to your competitors, though.

This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it!

And that’s why it’s not going to swallow the world. It’s a toy, not a tool.

Tools behave consistently and predictably. You know what you call a tool that doesn’t behave consistently and predictably? “Broken”, that’s what.

Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”.

I was “old man yells at cloud” about cryptocurrency for years, and now it’s dead, exactly as I predicted.

Sometimes, the old man is right.

What do you dislike about GnuCash?

Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.

I hadn’t heard of it, so I looked it up, and…WTF? Systemd-networkd with extra steps? Systemd-networkd does not need extra steps!