They shouldn’t.

Most include features such as a (subpar) news feed and weather.

These things are nice, but there’s no need for a launcher to have them. They can, and should be done by other, dedicated apps. Someone mentioned widgets, but the launcher doesn’t talk to the widget’s app via Internet… it talks to it via IPC (inter-process communication). Ergo, no Internet permission needed.

Same with keyboards. They give you access to stuff like “ID this song”, “get user-created themes” or “better swiping and handwriting recognition”, all the while doing god-knows-what with your data.

It’s basically a ruse. Give the users something thst needs the Internet permission, even if optional, so you can sensibly request it. Wheb you do, you get the unlimited, impossible-to-control permission (revokable only via ADB), allowing any and all Internet traffic.

As they say, “with power comes responsibility”. This is a lot of power. And most apps in the Play Store don’t give much confidence in their devs’ data responsibility.

You can try looking at Settings to disable Internet access, but YMMV depending on the exact flavour of Android.

Step 1 of Nazi mass murder: ✓

How does that even work?

We recognise you, but only if you immediately un-recognise yourself.

What a fucking joke.

If it’s just Germany doing this, maybe it is high time to dump it out of the union?

Perhaps protesting this would hit a little close to home and actually cause change.

People flying planes?

First put Copilot as the copilot. Then yeet the pilot as well.

3 LLMs duking it out with people in the cargo hold of a winged tin cylinder seems like a genius idea.

Last time I checked, cloaca was just the back. It is the everything door, though.

I don’t think individuals should have to pay - even with their private data

Agree.

[…] and that means companies shouldn’t either.

Disagree.

Whn a person pirates, they usually do it for a) themselves, b) their family or c) a close friend. Some might share on a larger basis.

And other than that, they also usually use it for a) educational or b) entertainment purposes.

For companies, it’s alsmost always d) On a larger basis and c) commercially.

As most licences and contracts differentiate the two uses, so should the law.

The fact that I can download a book online and read it (sneakily, and technically illegally) doesn’t mean that if I became an AI LLC I could download it, along with thousands of others, to then sell as my AI’s “knowledge”.

Making that an AI’s knowledge is “storing in a retrieval system” and commercial use isn’t a free use criterion.

The true problem with (common law) copyright is the fact that it can be bought and sold. Or rather, the author doesn’t own it - the publisher does. Which goes against the initial idea of the author getting dividends from their works.

Just stick a “MADE IN CAMBODIA” or other country. No one will know.

In fact, Trump may say how his TARGETED TARRIFFS managed to UP IMPORTS OF HIGH QUALITY CAMBODIA PRODUCTS by 90.000%.

Look, I get it. But I’m also burned out.

Noone forces you to use krita.

Krita’s devs specifically? No. I respect devs by default. I don’t doubt many of Krita’s devs love what they develop. I also use Krita. I don’t have it installed because I don’t need it.

The problem that I keep running into is my (Plasma) defaults being changed for (some) reason. Krita usually gets the defsult for photos. Rhythmbox for audio and MPV for video. I prefer using Pix for photos and VLC for AV.

Noone forces you to use krita.

Plasma, kind of - does.

99% of people do not want a photo editor to be their defsult app for opeing photos. Some artists? Sure. But me? No.

Again, it’s nor a Krita thing specifically - Plasma fucks with my defaults. It’s a Plasma/KDE thing. Krita is just the unfortunate app to have become Plasma’s senseless-default victm.

If it doesn’t fit your workflow or if you think developers are deliberately sabotaging your work

Oh, Krita fits my workflow quite well. Personally am in the process of switxhing to it from GIMP. I know I wrote up a huge wall of mostly garbled text in a passionate rage, but reading just the first part of my rant should’ve made that clear.

I use krita frequently and never met your bug so it’s not as recreatable as you think.

Of course you didn’t. Because who in their right mind enters “0” as the target resolution? That’s right - on one! Except for me, apparently. It’s a stupid bug. One which doesn’t mean anything. It opens no attack surface. It doesn’t cause random crashes. It doesn’t interfere with anyone’s work.

However, you clearly haven’t read my essay. Which is fine with me. It isn’t quality reading material by any sensible metric. But, were you to have read it and tried to recreate the bug, you probably would’ve succeeded.

With that out of the way, my main point was how no - devs (especially KDE, and very transparently so) don’t value your feedback as much as one might think.

Which is - understandable.

As you said, many keep FOSS software alive in their free time for nothing other than the moral gratification. Which is much more than merely commendable. And please, do not try to tell me I don’t respect that when I do.

Where would devs be if they only replied to stupid questions from new users? That’s right - in a tech support hub!

Which is obviously a waste of their time. The fact they don’t do that isn’t anything negative.

The problem, as always is - documentation. My little beef with KDE’s crash wizard is but one example of this deeply-rooted problem.

As is seen in our (both mine and your) example, reading is hard. Writing - harder still. Were I able to read and fully comprehend the ill-fated link on the KDE wizard’s “fuck you” page, you probably wouldn’t be rading this. But alas, I am a human whose reading comprehension skills aren’t top-notch.

Another, equally deeply rooted problem in FOSS is lack of general design thinking and logic. Am I calling KDE devs stupid? Of course not! But any UI (including the KDE crash wizard) should have a few eyes to assess it first. Then research on a batch of test users should be done. And then feedback from the general user population should be listened to. Is that a hard ask? Yes. Step 2 is expensive and as such out of reach of most FOSS projects, and not even Big Tech bothers with step 3.

But am I wrong in calling the KDE modal annoying and badly designed (“stupid”) even, when it has already wasted my time in the same way on 15 occasions? Maybe not. I am angry and it may have been irrational. But I feel my perspective is at least understandable even if the wording isn’t.

In the end, users can’t live without developers and developing user-facing applications makes little sense without users. I’m not in the Linux community because I don’t like FOSS, Linux or KDE. I’m percisely here to support them. However, sometimes issues arrise, and having a good community to help with fixing issues (because the devs can’t (obviously) handle all that load themselves) is good.

Having a community where the answer to a simple, begginer question is basically “bother the devs, they have a Matrix”, “it’s probably your fault” isn’t an answer. It’s a fuck you. And once they find out they’ve been mislead (not even intentionally perhaps), they might go back to Big tech.

Saying to me that I don’t support FOSS, that I don’t like it and that I can go back to Big Tech (when I haven’t been there for over 4 years now), is an even bigger one.

I like FOSS. Saying I don’t respect them wben I truly do is an insult. I merely don’t understand some of their decisions. Probably due to a lack of context and knowledge, which is on me.

But does giving a rant about, what are tiny problems in the running of a huge machine known as My Computer, spurred on by someone’s unhelpful advice, given in hopes of starting a discussion and the wholly implausible odds of the issue at hand given as an example being fixed due to it call flr the reply “Go to Big Tech, there’s clearly no room for you here”?

I’d hope not.

Are you sure it’s not a you problem? Or isn’t it a you problem? Go read the docs.

Have you contacted the devs? Reporting a bug would be helpful.

Sorry to be so rude, but you really hit a nerve. It isn’t even your fault.

Anyway, rant time:

KDE and bug reports. They always come to you like "Hey, bug reports are so really importsnt to us! And we’ll guide you through it. Here’s our lovely oh-so-helpful wizard!

Except it ain’t lovely. Nor helpful. The only thing it does is pop up whenever a KDE app has an aneurysm and asks you for a backtrace. And then… backtrace is declsred useless.

Why even bother people with the stupid popup if in 90% of cases it’s declared as useless. Why not do the backtrace silently and then annoy the user only once you declare the bug “useful”.

Last instance of this: I was using my KDE desktop. For some reason, Plasma seems to really hate me, because I need to fix default apps every few weeks. For some reason, jpegs and pngs open in Krita by default.

So, wanting to close Krita, becuse I don’t need an entire editor to look at a photo, with tools taking up 25% of the screen, when it asked me about the import resolution, I pressed 0. Krita proceeded to crash and open the report bug dialog.

Not having seen the KDE report wizard for quite some time, I felt inclined to go fill out the report. Got through the first few pages just fine. Then came the backtrace. Sure, do it. I’d like whoever debugs this not snooping through a data dump containing god knows what, but sure. Then it gets called useless. AFTER you’ve taken 30-ish seconds of my life on preliminary questions.

Look, if you’re gonna ask people for input and discard said input if something unrelated happens, at least ask after the something unrelated decided it’s not gonna be yeeted away. No need for the “Oh, wait, we don’t really need this, it’ll take too much time to play detective” after the user already passed three screens of interrogation.

Anyway, the point is:

KDE clearly doesn’t care about bug reports. Because if they did, the guide on installing backtrace-enabled packages once the inevitable verdict of “useless” wouldn’t be a wiki page with the generaal message of “find backtrace-enabled packages, you buffoon” when you could point to them.

Another problem with this is: when a bug happens without backtraceable packages, how is the user supposed to recreate it if they don’t know how?

And besides, my bug is very recreateable. Open an image in Krita (preferably from Dolphin, after Plasma mangled the defaults, again and again). When prompted for some integer, enter “0”. Instead of a generic error message, see the entire app sink into oblivion.

Anyway, if anyone feels like reporting the totally useless report with totally unrecreateable conditions, feel free. I won’t. Just too much work, for it to be discarded just like that by some wizard no one even thought through.

And why would I contact the devs? Or rather, where could I do that? They’re worse than government agencies, for god’s sake. The right person or place just doesn’t exist. Wherever you go to or ask, it’s someone else’s responsibility or your fault. And the wizard, that true single point of contact - refuses any contact just as consistently.

So tell people to call the devs. Tell them it’s their fault. Tell them to make a bug report. Say it just might help not just you, but someone else when all hell will freeze over before anything like that becomes even a remote possibility.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

It’s a Linux subsystem for Windows. As in, you run Windows and within it run Linux. Thus Linux is the sub-system, while Windows is the “overarching” system. Therefore, it’s Linux running as a subsystem on a Windows machine. Therefore, a Linux subsystem on/for Windows.

<edit>

That was just setting the two viewpoints equal.

Now, to add why this one is more “correct”: when talking about Windows (or Linux or anything else fir that matter) subsystems, you don’t call the Windows file system the Windows subsystem for Files or the Windows subsystem for Networking or Linux subsystem for RNG - You call them the filesystem, the networking system or the RNG system. And since none of them get the “for host” suffix, it seems natural to assume it’s the guest system that’s the “sub” system, with the other one being the whole.

</edit>

The EU is not an alliance, since member states give up a good portion of their sovereignty to the bloc. It’s much closer to a “loosely bound US” than a “NATO on steroids”.

“You are right, I made a mistake. Here is a better answer.” Continues to give wrong answers.

To be fair, the AI’s not wrong. It’s probably better, but just a teeny tiny bit so.

Honestly, AI is like a genie - whatever you come up with he’ll just butcher and misinterpret so you start questioning both your own sanity and the semantics of language. Good thing these genies have no wish limit, but bad thing that they murder rainforests while generating their non-sequitur replies.

adding that “no one is safe”

Of course no one is safe. Once you “fall from grace”, it’s a free-for-all. Seems the time has come for America to take a stronger stance against most of the “western” world.

the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something

Does that mean any search (AI insight notwithstanding) will get blocked if it includes a Reddit, Coursera or something on the blocklist result at all?

Because if yes, that’s much more than just asinine. It’s basically blocking entire search topics due to the sheer fact that Reddit will appear on the furst page of Google a lot.

Fair. Although, I consider Microsoft’s market “Most laptops” since Apple kind of does its own thing and Chromebooks are ultra-low end laptops. Thus Microsoft gets ~95% of the market for themselves.

Personally, I’d say that’s a clear case of monopoly since MS controls this entire segment of “non-Apple, non-ultra low power laptop, PCs”, but you’re right - there are other players. The thing is, they have relatively tiny niches in which they thrive and in fact pose no threat to the monopolist.

But I now I see how you see it as an oligopoly, which is quite valid.

In practice. Technically, were M$ to go sue users left and right (or send those ISP-style “gotcha”, now pay up) emails.

Luckiy, M$ knows well enough that 90% of that userbase wouldn’t have too many qualms jumping ship if they got slapped with a huge fine, so M$ lets them be.

They value the high userbase more than a quick payout (and rightly so). However, there’s no guarantee that can’t change overnight (just look at Unity and before that, Adobe).

oligopoly

That’s a way to misspell monopoly, alright.

It merely says “go European”, not “go domestic”. Of course you can join!

Linux definitely has a learning curve but

I’d like to interject here a bit.

For a “normal” user (read non-tech, perhaps even a bit lower on the “tech literacy” scale) any change requires a learning curve. While we Linux people don’t have too big of a problem switching distros and UI setups, someone “non-techy” finds the switch from Win7 to Win10 challenging, as well as from Win10 to Win11. We’re not in the 95/98 era when a “name” upgrade meant you don’t have to install USB drivers off a floppy - the UI stad the same. (which just means Greg won’t need to bother with that while he sets up your new computer)

Nowadays, the move from 10 to 11 is anything but “painless” to me - and for me it’s just annoyances. For people less tech-savvy it’s an enigma at times.

So, my point is - the switch from Win10 to Win11 will probably be worse than Win10 to Mint for old people (mostly). Those deeply rooted into varous ecosystems aren’t the focus of this comment.