Oh, ok.
So anyway, arguably more than now, where every distro needs you to download an iso and use some application, most likely third party, since that is what every distro’s install instructions suggest, to make a bootable external drive on some device that already works, then manually boot into it.
I swear if missing the usability forest for the tech minutia trees was free marketing Linux would dominate the desktop OS landscape.
Beyond just being a Chromium skin my impression of it these days is that their entire business model seems to revolve around tacking on AI and crypto features, and they’ve been caught messing with URLs in weird ways.
I have no specific technical reasons related to privacy, but for whatever part of software privacy is trust in authoring, Brave sure seems like the same browser you already hate rebranded by the worst techbros you’ve ever met. It definitely seems weird to highlight it that prominently among that lineup, given some of the omissions.
And just in general their specialized feature set is entirely irrelevant to my use cases and actively annoying, so even assuming it’s on equal footing with every other entry on and off that list it’d be the last one I’d choose to highlight.
Those were so relevant at the time. Especially when installers started getting smooth and streamlined it made things so accessible. Arguably more than now, where every distro needs you to download an iso and use some third party software to make a bootable external drive on some device that already works, then manually boot into it.
Back then you’d just buy a magazine at the shop, pop that CD in and your PC was up and running, which was a process every Windows user was familiar with anyway.
I remember running down to the nearest store to see if I could find a live CD on a magazine cover being a non-trivial troubleshooting option there for a while when you were trying to fix some computer that wouldn’t boot but you needed to rescue some files stat.
They are advertising Brave as a safe alternative in June 2025? Maybe it was fine for print to die.
I’ll be honest, I thought this cover was from sometime in the early 2000s. Once you format the subjects anachronistically you realize just how long the highlights in the Linux community have been the same. Live USB, easy dual boot and Ubuntu “blasting off”. That takes me back.
For sure. Good UX is not “simple” UX. Professional software doesn’t need to be flashy and clean, but it does need to be efficient and usable.
Bad UX is bad UX, though.
I bring up Blender because Blender vs Gimp is my favorite example of how FOSS can find a very functional alternative AND compete with the paid side with no compromises… but also of why it often doesn’t.
Blender is for power users, but it’s well designed enough you can dabble with it or follow a tutorial and have fun doing it. Gimp will make you hate the very act of opening a file and trying to make the most basic crop on it even if you’re a Photoshop master.
Sure, I can agree with that.
The problem with OSS tends to be that engineers are more willing to work on it than UX designers and it’s quite rare for them to have the lead on that area. Forget convention, just on quality. There are exceptions (hey Blender!), but not many.
More often than not what you get is some other paid upstart hit some big innovation and then that propagates and sometimes it gets to open source alternatives before it does to fossilized, standardized professional software.
I do think there’s some value in having UX that makes it easier to jump back and forth, though. Especially if your positioning is “I’m like this paid thing, but free”. The easier you make it for the pros to pick up and play the easier you can carve some of the market and the more opportunities you give to newcomers learning on the free tool to migrate to the paid tool if the market demands it.
I mean… cool, but by that logic you want to design all your graphic designers from painters and artists to do posters with brushes again.
That’s just not practical, and “it’s not efficient, but” is a massive dealbreaker for a whole lot of applications. Artisanal product has a premium and is very cool and if you can get away with making a living out of it I find that amazing.
But sometimes somebody just needs a poster made or a shop logo or a trash bag removed from their wedding picture background. Industrial work at pace is important and the baseline for a work area.
I’m also not sure what time was before the standardization and consolidation of software. Word replaced Wordperfect. Photoshop replaced the Corel Suite. Premiere replaced (or at least displaced) Avid. It’s not like there weren’t industry standards before.
Some companies still use proprietary stuff and train people on their in-house software, it’s doable. It’s just easier for most of the pack working with multiple clients and vendors to be using the most popular thing at any given time.
Yeah, well, too late. These guys DID do a Deus Ex collab. Officially. Marvel, too. Their thing is they want to make these cool for kids and teens, so it’s mostly fine.
That would be a more interesting line of questioning than all the viral stuff about “mind control” and whatnot.
It may just be cheaper to slap a wireless connection in there than to engineer routing cables through a fully mobile articulation AND keep the whole thing water resistant. I bet whatever the real answer there it’s fascinating.
I wish that worked better than Deus Ex collabs and morning show interviews, but given how often I’ve seen this pop up the last couple of weeks it clearly is not.
Sure. And I love finding better solutions, particularly when they’re for a thing I do for my own sake.
But if you’re a newspaper that is ingesting hundreds or thousands of pictures a day from dozens of photographers and having half a dozen people editing all that input into a database that a dozen composers and web editors are using at the same time sometimes janky but universally familiar is a lot more valuable than “better at this thing on interesting ways”.
It doesn’t mean you can’t displace a clunky, comfortable king of the hill. Adobe itself used to be pretty good at doing just that. Premiere used to be the shitty alternative kids used because it was easy to pirate before it became THE editing software for online video. The new batch of kids are probably defaulting to Resolve these days, so that one feels wobbly. Other times you just create a new function that didn’t exist and grow into space previously occupied by adjacent software, Canva-style.
But if you see a piece of industry-standard software with a list of twenty alternatives broken down by application, skill level or subsets of downsides the industry standard is probably not about to lose their spot in favor of any of those anytime soon.
Woof, I don’t know if I can pick up what you’re putting down.
Particularly for professional use nobody is trying to have fun and exciting new solutions for UI or functionality every week. Industry standards get to be industry standards for a reason. It’s useful to be able to just go hire someone that knows how to work on the software platform you’re working and your clients are working and your providers are working.
For casual home use, go nuts, I don’t mind. And there is certainly room for multiple things to remain relevant at once, especially if the concepts are close enough that crossing over is trivial or easy.
But I don’t need to edit video in seven different pieces of software, I need to get the video edited. And if I need three people editing video I need them all to be editing video in the same thing, or at least in things that are perfectly interoperable. Standards aren’t a corporate imposition, even if corporations benefit greatly from lobbying themselves into becoming the standard.
See, my problem with these types of resources is if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement.
That’s not a hard rule, I do think some of these are a better first choice, or a better-for-some applications first choice. I’m just often frustrated by the way these things are communicated.
Welcome to the concept of human history.
That said, this isn’t particlarly new, or even that meaningful, and Europe has a LOT of US decoupling to do whether it wants to for nationalistic reasons or not. And a lot of integration, too, so they’re a good ways away from having enough of a shared sense of identity for that to be a concern.
Your grandkids can cross that bridge when they get to it, if there are any bridges left to be crossed or grandkids to cross them.
Oh, stay away from semioticians, then.
Semiosis diagrams are like trypophobia bait memes but specifically for information scientists.
Hah. Not necessarily, but student strikes were absolutely a thing where I’m from.
Was it mostly a convenient excuse to take a day off? Yes. Was it great civics training? It was a convenient excuse to take a day off.
If that list was made in my generation it wouldn’t be in English.
But also it wouldn’t be made in my generation because what the hell do you mean “banned words”? We would have set that trash on fire and gone on strike.
Regardless of how precisely the grid operators manage to handle this task in Spain and Portugal, they face a monumental challenge at the moment. If you’re seeing estimates of several days for the restoration of power, it’s because failing to meet this challenge will leave things back in the state they’re in now.
I was much less impressed by the 24 hr turnaround before I saw this guy posting this halfway through the process in what seems like full confidence he had plenty of time to get it out in a relevant timeframe.
Good job Iberian operators, I guess?
I don’t know about “masterpiece”. People who liked it really liked it, but coop games always struggle a bit with reach, and it gets harder to revisit them for streamers and the like, since gathering more people is a hassle. Once that ship sails and they start pumping out sequels it’s easy to just decouple from it and let its community have it their way.
Road to Perdition is a bit of a different story. It sits with Watchmen or From Hell as comic adaptations that aren’t… bad, but they’re also not as groundbreaking as the source material. If you’re going to revisit there are two separate other things you can focus on that arguably hold up better than the movie.
But yeah, hey, the memory hole exists. We are in a winner-takes-all culture where viral things explode and the next rung below that is obscurity. That’s why I mentioned that From Hell got a movie adaptation and you went “Ooooh yeaaah” just now.
Whaaaat? You’re telling me someone in the Linux community chooses to be deliberately obscure based on a technicality no end user cares about in a patronizing, elitist manner?
Naah. Impossible.
The issue with the special characters for accent marks and diacritics is their importance fluctuates per language, so you have to keep them separate unless you want to make different rules per locale instead of per character.
They do it the other way for number formatting and that’s already a mess. If you’ve ever tried to work with spreadsheets across locale formats it’s absolutely bonkers. Excel outright changes the separators in formulas.
Just because it’s only mentioned in some reposts, they had the grid back up and running at 100% in like six hours after this was published, so about 24 hours after the event itself (and it was at about 30%-50% when this was published already).
I mean, I still think it’s interesting to learn about this, but I do think it’s fun how much more pessimistic the article’s estimate is than how this actually went down. It’d be interesting to see a follow up covering how they went about pulling that off.