Plume (She/Her)

Vertical tabs, hell yeah! If we can have this, maybe we can imagine a world where Firefox gets its PWA support back! Right? ^…right?

I could come up with a thousand reasons as to why this would happen. Hell, I could even argue that the whole Steam Deck’s existence comes from a series of decisions that Valve made out of hatred for Microsoft. So, yeah, it’s not happening.

Still though, as a thought experiment, imagining a world where tomorrow, Steam is owned by Microsoft, it’s… interesting, to say the least. In the most horrifying way possible, but interesting nonetheless. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine anything worse happening for video games. Like to me, this is what a video game apocalypse sounds like.

You know, there is a lot that is to blame for why Firefox doesn’t get the market share that it needs, but I would blame a part on its community as well. I have never seen a community that is so reluctant to any change or basically any features being added to a product than the Firefox community.

Firefox developers:

Look! To try and make the browser easier to use for new users, we have added a pop-up remind you that hey, Firefox sync is an awesome feature of this browser. Because feature discoverability is hard.

The Firefox community five seconds later:

E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N

Mozilla isn’t perfect. Far from it. I have a lot of things to say about them and features that were never added or removed years ago that I’m still pissed off about and will continue to complain about until it is resolved, like fucking PWAs for example.

But damn, being a Firefox developer sounds really hard. Like, trying to please a bunch of people who are always complaining about the state of this browser, but also will, without fail, always complain every time you change or add features sounds fucking exhausting.

We say this every fucking year! Come on, this is getting ridiculous! Stop it! There will never be a year of the Linux desktop and if anything, this post shows why.

So much of the Linux community is utterly detached from what really matters to most users and focus on things that 80% of people won’t ever understand, care about or even use.

We focus on this and meanwhile, little quality of life features constantly get ignored when these are the real things that users will encounter and that will piss them off. They get treated as trivial. They get ignored in favor of other things.

Somebody mentioned it here. I saw it and I didn’t need them to mention it to want to say it. It’s already something that’s pissing me off. On Fedora for my Framework Laptop there is no way to adjust the scrolling speed on my trackpad which is moronically fast.

We are on the 40th release of Fedora, the 46th release of GNOME, and somehow this still isn’t baked in. I still have to go look around and use the fucking terminal to do something this basic. When some of them try Linux and will eventually push them to go back to Windows. And when users complain about this, what do we get? A bunch of elitists telling them to fuck off to go back to Windows, which I also saw as responses to this complaint about the trackpad.

Listen, Linux is an amazing project and I love it. I daily drive it. I don’t use Windows anywhere in my life. I haven’t touched OS in like two years at the very least. So many things that we are celebrating as brand new things that are finally working properly are things that already work by default on Windows and have been for years. We’re not going to convince people by mentioning that, “oh, we fixed this thing that’s been working forever on Windows.” It works on Linux now. People need more than this.

You want to know the sad truth? Here we go. We, collectively here, users of platform like Lemmy, are a vocal minority who are detached from the reality of most users. We care about ads, we care about privacy and so on, but the reality is most that people don’t. Most people won’t even notice that those things are there. For so many people, Windows is just the thing that stands between them and launching Chrome. It already works for them. There’s no reason for them to switch.

We are all way too invested in what runs on our computers and we forget that we are just us. Most people are not like us. Privacy scandals stop us from using stuff like social media and so on, but it clearly hasn’t stopped most of the world.

People heard about the shit that Meta was and is doing. Did people stop using Instagram? No, they didn’t. People know what Google is doing, how many of them switched to DuckDuckGo? A clinical moron turning the platform into a far-right haven didn’t stop most users from using Twitter.

The API bullshit didn’t stop most users from using Reddit. Sure there were protest, but I guarantee you that 99% who took part in the blackout just went back to it after. A lot of us didn’t. We left. We’re here now. But we’re still a tiny minority.

Ask a Firefox user did telling Chrome users that privacy was important ever worked? I’m sure you will get examples of it working but it’s a minority. Most people don’t give a shit and they use Chrome.

I don’t have a solution. I’m sorry, I made this long-ass comment but I don’t have much else to say. I don’t have a good solution to this problem.

This is a reminder that this guy has very large chances to go back in the office and be president of the United States once again. We are so fucked and I am saying this as someone who is not American.

That was me. 🐣

And like every other DRM, it’s just going to be something that the people who bought the game and play it unaltered will be forced to deal with in one way or another… while those who modify the game, emulate or pirate it, won’t. I love DRMs. Nothing like feeling like a sucker for actually buying the game and not cracking it.