Huh, you’re right, he has been absent. He still seems to be updating notrack over on his gitlab, so I have to assume he just got bored with videos, or some other aspect of his life took priority. I don’t have a twitter account, so I can’t see if he’s posted there, but hopefully he’s in good spirits and health.

Oh sweet jesus, it’s finally happening! Huzzah! Rejoice!

Never a bad time to swap out to a degoogled OS. Graphene for pixels, DivestOS for non pixels that are supported, and lineage for the rest.

Shareholder Blight?

What term would you prefer?

What thing are you referring to?

Yes, it’s unfortunate it didn’t have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(

As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.

We realistically can’t ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I don’t use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.

Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.

Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.

It’s unlikely it’ll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.

There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.

it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.

For minor things it works alright. For slightly advanced things, like making making curved text, it’s not intuitive compared to Photoshop. Though personally, even for minor things I found Krita more pleasant.

A UI designer made this little short about Gimp, which I think captures the sorta things that can be frustrating.

I’m extremely pleased to hear they will be taking UI seriously.

And, at least from what I recall, the incentive for bell to toss that excess money into research, is the corporate tax rates were so high it would’ve been taken from them if not spent anyway.

That’s extremely sad to hear, I hope they recover someday :(

There’s a few areas where it’s lacking, the text tool being one of them, and it also can’t export to PDF for professional book cover printing. But I’m not a professional photo editer either, and almost exclusively use Krita for editing anyway, since it’s so my h easier to use.

gimp isn’t being held back by money, they have over a million in bitcoin just sitting there from an old donation that grew in value. In over a decade, no one has figured out how to pay the taxes on it if they start using it to fund developers.

I read on reddit a long time ago that a UI designer tried to help improve gimp, but the devs were hostile to it (i may be remembering that wrong though). Considering how long its been with no UI improvements, I don’t think gimp will ever revamp its UI. Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.

Proton, Tuta, Mailbox, and Posteo are all good.

Proton and Tuta have free offerings. Posteo and mailbox have the cheapest paid offering, but posteo doesn’t allow custom domains.

Depending on how long ago that was, you may have a much better experience. Linux now has a new audio subsystem that is low latency, and generally just works out of the box with DAW’s now.

FL studio is known to work well in wine, but third party VSTs can be hit or miss.

Your experience with XMPP will vary depending on the client you use. It’s not a 1 to 1 replacement for discord, and I’m not sure if there’s a client that can do group calls, but It can do 1 on 1 calls and group text chats. I’d recommend Cheogram for mobile, and possibly movim for desktop.

For group audio calls, if you found matrix unstable, then Mumble is likely your best bet, or perhaps Signal, if that’s not banned as well.

Microsoft offers a long-term support version of Windows called LTSC that’s stripped down, only receives security updates, and is supported for 10 years from its release.

It’s only officially available to business clients, but with a little yar har fiddeldy dee, you too can experience extended support!

Perhaps Privacyguides.org, but I’m not aware of a replacement for the exhausting level of detail and breadth which thatoneprivacysite once provided.