Just a small personal touch -- my coworker is constantly pushing me to use Chrome because it "just works", but I'm stubborn as hell. Used Firefox from early 2000s. Oh how I will love to twist his nerve even more once I will switch to Ladybird. Saying this because there has been more harder days to counter these pushes. And to be honest I think we are overthinking about how much this last 3-5 % actually matter for huge crowds.
I understand that your argument still stands in big picture, but in this big world there is plenty of room for Firefox and Ladybird and there is more than enough room to grow. Firefox mostly is being held back with their organization. I'm not convinced that it is technical problem.
But then again, I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
> I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
It started 9 years ago.
That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.
By 3-4y later this was worldwide.
So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.
But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.
It's still a Linux distro. Ext4 partitions, glibc, upstart as the init. The GUI is weird but it's just another desktop.
I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played.
It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian.
ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
This. Just cleaned up my t-shirt shelf and need to archive the nice yellow T-shirt they sent to early adopters. Not wearing it.. (Obviously it goes for the services as well). Not happy at all.
Closed private trackers are bastions of hope of preserving human culture. Every iteration since oink, they have become better and better and while at one point they will close the current ones, we will persevere. Where else would we find forgotten underground music only few people remember and how specific vinyl sounds. It's the community and love for music.
> But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
But this is how culture works I think. It's not the act of copying or rearranging or borrowing but how the material is being processed and what drives the change I think.
Culture is also an expression of real-world concerns and values held by those who create it. AI-vangelists will say “all art is copied” over and over again to justify generating their slop, but no matter how many times you ask them, you’ll never get an answer to the question “What is a single great work of art that did not represent a single real-world value of its creator?”
See also: various defining works of ancient Greek literature featuring the same characters, that are almost certainly fanfics of earlier works, like the Telegony.
Culture has been reworking existing culture since the idea of culture existed.
I understand that your argument still stands in big picture, but in this big world there is plenty of room for Firefox and Ladybird and there is more than enough room to grow. Firefox mostly is being held back with their organization. I'm not convinced that it is technical problem.
But then again, I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
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