> But I'd wager 99% of the folks commenting on this thread have never done a build from source before, nor would ever want to?
what an insensitive comment this is to anyone that has contributed. are they really saying "the source is available but it's fine if nobody can build it, who cares about building open source projects anyway?" what use is open source code that can't be built?
another of their comments from the same thread:
> We even took protective measures to make sure the open source work we do stays open, by putting them under GPLv3 a while back.
this is almost exactly what minio did; I'm generally in favor of copyleft, but a copyleft license can absolutely be used as a tactic to prevent other commercial interests from benefiting from and supporting an open source project. they want exclusive rights to distribute proprietary versions while benefiting from open source contributors.
I decided to stay away from truenas for my recent nas build precisely because it smelled of enshittification, and it's unfortunate to see it trending further in that direction.
my NAS needs are pretty simple, I basically just need HDDs on LAN. I have like a dozen arch linux machines and my old HDDs were already using ZFS from trueNAS, so I want with arch + ZFS, using zfs-dkms and linux-lts.
I don't know that I can recommend arch+zfs to someone not familiar with arch linux though. zfs isn't in the standard repository so you have to either add the archzfs repo or add an AUR package. most people probably expect a NAS to auto update, arch linux sometimes needs manual intervention for updates, which I only tolerate because I update multiple arch linux systems at the same time. and with zfs being out-of-tree, sometimes kernel updates can theoretically break it, though with linux-lts that seems to be very rare.
I have a remote system for security footage with debian+btrfs, which has basically none of these issues. installation is easier, btrfs is built into the kernel, I've had no trouble with automatic updates, it's been rock solid. btrfs still does the important stuff like software RAID, snapshots and scrubbing, and it's much easier to add more drives compared to ZFS. just note that I think btrfs has a bit worse performance. totally adequate for a 2.5 gigabit NAS, but a little slower for random access if you do work directly on the NAS like I do. it's also historically not been as reliable as ZFS, but that reputation seems years old at this point.
last phone I had was a motorola, you can unlock the bootloader but you have to make an account, give them the IMEI and request an unlock code. it probably has to be a carrier unlocked phone too. the latest motorola phones look to be the same way. pixels are afaik the only phones atm that you can just unlock without any fuss, so long as they were never used with verizon.
I once bought a oneplus phone to unlock the bootloader, they have the same process requiring an account etc, saying it could take up to 2 weeks to get the code. they never emailed it to me so I returned the phone.
valve upstreamed support for it in SDL3 already which I assume means basic inputs should work, but I imagine it probably still needs an app like sc-controller to use the touchpads for anything more complicated than mouse input.
I don't think many people want one monolith to own all content, what they want is an easy way to watch content from multiple different content owners without having to juggle subscriptions.
music does this far better, there's multiple different platforms that all have the vast majority of music people care about, you can easily opt to rent with streaming or purchase outright and download without DRM. spotify would probably love to have tons of exclusive content, and they're trying this with podcasts etc, but the music industry hasn't been able to enshittify as much as the movie industry, yet.
seems like it's just that element (the official, and most popular client) will ignore messages from unverified devices, but since it's part of the spec, other clients that want to be spec-compliant will implement this too. I don't think most other clients follow the spec that closely though.
I'm in favor of the change, the only downside I can think of is users with esoteric clients or simple bots that don't support verification won't be able to post to encrypted rooms with element users.
I feel like I'm alone in having good luck with matrix. I've been self hosting for nearly a decade to a handful of users, and it was a bit rough troubleshooting the encryption problems back when element was still called riot, but it's been a number of years since any of us have had a single encryption issue, and we added a new user recently with no trouble. we're still on 'element classic' though, the new 'element x' is a bit of a mess and loses the background sync feature, you need to set up a unified push server which I'm not looking forward to.
For what it's worth, I've been using element x with unified push for a month or so now and I get notifications with message contents without any delay. Maybe they fixed the issue you're worrying about?
Self hosting the call/video feature became a lot more complicated though (and it's incompatible with the old system).
my issues with element x are with the client itself, mostly missing features and bad UX. the main reason I don't want unified push is, it's just yet another thing for me to install and maintain, plus all my users need the client app installed. the ntfy server app even defaults to having a full web interface, fortunately it's possible to disable but it's just so much stuff to replace what used to be built-in to the app, to supposedly solve a battery life problem that I've never experienced.
I'm still going to get around to it, because element classic will be deprecated eventually. one of my users is on iOS and has a well-known bug with images not loading, which will probably never get fixed because they're focusing on the new client. and unfortunately I do have users that expect voice calls to work, so it sucks to hear that'll be annoying too.
I've had mostly good luck with Matrix too. Been self-hosting since 2022 and while there have been frustrations it has been pretty stable for basic chat.
as a beginner rust programmer, I agree. it takes me way longer to parse someone else's rust code than it does for me to read C or C++, even though I have about the same amount of experience with them.
in that example, I had to look up what "if let Err() =" does, because it's not intuitive to me. it seems like every time I read rust code, I have to learn about some strange feature that's probably convenient when you know it, but there's a billion of them and they add up to hard to read code until you've spent tons and tons of time with rust. it's just so much to memorize compared to other languages.
I have the opposite experience: C++ is what I have the most experience with by a very wide margin, but I find reading other people's rust code way easier than other people's C++ code. There's way more weird features, language extensions and other crazy stuff in C++ land.
I believe you, I haven't contributed a lot of C++ code and it's quite possible the projects I have contributed to (e.g. godot engine) just happen to be written very legibly.
It reminds me the experience I had when working with Scala, I really tried to like it but the mind-boggling amount of features created similar issues.
It took me about 2 years to feel somewhat comfortable but I'd still run into code where someone decided to use their own set of unconventional favourite features, requiring me to learn yet-another-way to do the same thing I had seen done in other ways.
I just got tired of it, didn't feel more productive nor enlightened...
Don't understand this complaint about Rust, but I'll give you Scala. Never seen a language so finely tuned to empower architecture astronauts to make terrible decisions. And boy do they make terrible decisions.
the towers in my area all switched to LED recently. the slow, glowing blink of the incandescent ones probably isn't as visible as the modern ones, but I do dearly miss seeing it out my window.
I tried making an account once, technically my account was created but trying to log in only gets me a screen that requires I verify a phone number. I was never even able to attempt to join a server. I assume it's my browser's privacy settings and ad blocker but I'm not sure.
they discontinued it because of quality control reasons, which tracks with my experience. the key mechanism is weird, a circular membrane around plastic posts, and it makes some of the keys (especially the top row) constantly miss inputs. there's a 3D printed shim 'fix' but that barely helped me. off-center keypresses also bind really badly. the pogo pins that connect to the phone are flaky, which can make it lose connection and require a reboot. like the keys, there's a shim you can use (putting some paper behind the contacts) which only sort of helps.
a benefit of the keyboard case is the battery it has that extends the phone's battery, which is nice, but it's an odd setup too. the charge controller on it was originally designed for a power bank and seems like a bit of a crude solution that's lead to multiple issues, like how you could damage the phone having it plugged into USB while the keyboard case is connected.
it's slow to charge too, often it can't even keep up with the phone during use.
if a new base model nissan versa was $40k and an F150 was $18k, then maybe I could agree with that. of course I don't even need to point out the reverse is true.
auto manufacturer lobbyists may have been successful at convincing the government to incentivize the production of more expensive, more profitable vehicles, but it's not like there aren't still cheap small cars that everyone knows about and would fulfill 90% of people's needs for half the money, yet they spend on average $50k for a 4,000lb SUV, to never carry more than 4 people and some groceries.
maybe lobbying got the price of SUVs down 10% relative to smaller cars, and sure some people considering a smaller car might upsize because of that. but I don't think it's possible to discount the cultural component when you look at what people in the US buy. and if people fall for that because of advertising, that's essentially cultural.
> But I'd wager 99% of the folks commenting on this thread have never done a build from source before, nor would ever want to?
what an insensitive comment this is to anyone that has contributed. are they really saying "the source is available but it's fine if nobody can build it, who cares about building open source projects anyway?" what use is open source code that can't be built? another of their comments from the same thread:
> We even took protective measures to make sure the open source work we do stays open, by putting them under GPLv3 a while back.
this is almost exactly what minio did; I'm generally in favor of copyleft, but a copyleft license can absolutely be used as a tactic to prevent other commercial interests from benefiting from and supporting an open source project. they want exclusive rights to distribute proprietary versions while benefiting from open source contributors.
I decided to stay away from truenas for my recent nas build precisely because it smelled of enshittification, and it's unfortunate to see it trending further in that direction.
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