There are a lot of comments here about which launchers are “close enough” to the Nova feature set, but very few people are talking about specific features and the alternatives that support them. I really just use two, and everything else is a cherry on top that I can do without if push comes to shove.

1. Icons that open a folder if you swipe them, but launch the first app in the folder if you tap them. That way my apps all pull double-duty as both the one-tap app AND the list of alternatives I use less often.
2. Google Now integration that swipes in from the left.

Action Launcher used to be my go-to, and it’s still the best implementation of #1 because of the little indicators it adds to let you know if something is a “cover” (folder when you swipe) or “shutter” (widget when you swipe). Sadly it’s gotten rather bloated over the years and spends more time force-closing from one glitch or another than it does actually running properly. Nova was my backup because it added “covers” a few years ago and I remembered enjoying the app about a decade ago. Now what?

Good point, and we should probably tease apart that distinction between funding models and project intent/scope. For me, I’ve always seen apps like Boost, Sync, Infinity, and Jerboa as being “indie passion projects” regardless of how they pay their devs because of things like the project’s scope, the dev team size, and their community involvement. They just don’t strike me as the kind of apps you build for their “explosive growth and profit potential,” you know? So by extension, I’ve got to assume anyone who builds one is doing it because they love lemmy, wish it was better, and happen to have a little coding knowledge to do something about it. That’s a mission I can get behind.

Funding, on the other hand, is something that everyone needs but no one has actually figured out. So as long as it looks like a dev is experimenting with their options in good faith and honestly engaging with the community to figure out what’s best, I can’t really fault them for going with one model over another. I’ve got my own preference for open-source community-funded projects of course, but I’m not going to begrudge a dev for seeing it differently.

With Boost, there’s an ad-free and privacy-respecting option, and then there’s an Admob version. Those are the two most common funding methods out there, and I’m not surprised in the slightest by any dev who reaches for them as off-the-shelf answers. Lemmy has an open-source vibe, sure, but Boost started as a reddit app. Go with what you know. I might be wrong, but it doesn’t feel like the ad supported one is being built to harvest data - it’s just a drop-in advertising space like websites have used since the beginning of time. And if I’m really that concerned about it, I can pay for ad-free. Do I wish that it was open-source, patreon supported, and community built? Sure. But this ticks enough of my boxes to say “sure, why not,” and then casually watch how the conversation about funding plays out in the comments. Who knows, maybe the dev will open things up or add a donation-ware version based on feedback, and I can upvote the Lemmings who suggest it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the project feels genuine and in a spirit that I can support. The foundation is solid. Everything else is just details, and I’ll happily tag along for the ride as the developer, the community, and Lemmy as a platform figure out what that means.

Look, I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a difference between a $965B corporation whose sole purpose is to harvest your personal info for ads, and a solo dev who just wants to make their (and your) Lemmy browsing a bit less painful. They’re putting in a hellofa lot of time and effort into this thing, which means a hellofa lot of time not spent making money at a regular job. I’m more than happy to kick a few bucks here and there to keep something like that afloat, especially given how apps like Boost and Sync make me actually want to spend time on Lemmy. Encouraging fediverse adoption is a win for the whole ecosystem. You don’t have to use Boost, and if you do choose to install it, you don’t have to pay. There’s an inexpensive ad-free version alongside the ad-supported one for exactly that reason. But complaining about Boost because you hate “social media apps” is like yelling “Fuck Nestle” at the 12-year-old selling lemonade from their driveway. Different scale, different purpose.

It’s fine to not pay, but I’m glad that some people do support indie devs when they can. The world would be a lot bleaker without little passion projects like this dotting the landscape and filling in the gaps to help bigger projects like Lemmy take off.

My guess is that it has something to do with my YouTube Premium subscription never triggering Google’s anti-adblock software, which means the app was never flagged for a soft lock.

I use Vanced for the SponsorBlock, increased default play speed, background payback, and other assorted tweaks rather than for the ad blocking, but blocking ads will definitely jump to the top of my list if my “Google Play Family” ever stops paying for premium. At which point I guess I’ll migrate to GrayJay?

Hell, I’m still using the original Vanced. No clue how it’s managed to escape death for all of these months, but I’m not complaining

They’ll still be fucked but they’ll at least stop worrying about this particular enemy.

The difference is that “in for a penny, in for a pound” implies all options are equal as long as the objective is achieved. “Surgical strike that kills 24 civilians? Nuclear strike that kills 2,400,000? Something in between? Why bother weighing the pros and cons because we’re fucked on the world stage either way. Might as well go big.” It’s an argument designed to sidestep the very real debate over “acceptable loss” calculations and the duty to safeguard human life. No one is saying that Israel shouldn’t retaliate. No one is saying that Hamas is playing fair. What they are saying is that 10,000 dead refugees might look like Israel doesn’t care that they’re dead. Especially when Israel says they targeted refugee camps and ambulances on purpose. And when you chime in saying “fuck it, just kill 'em” to a simple plea of “maybe count the kids before killing 'em all.”

The IDF is in an impossible situation, but the answer isn’t to shut down debate, it’s to actually talk about where the line should be drawn and try to minimize civilian harm. Allow foreign aid to reach the starving children. Allow civilians to leave the city. Listen to why there’s an outcry against indiscriminate bombings. Palestinians aren’t “meat shields.” Hamas might be hiding behind them, but that doesn’t mean you have to aim straight at the “shields” and pull the trigger. They’re people, and deserve more consideration than a simple “fuck it, what’s a little genocide if the bad guy’s dead?”

I agree that intent is an important consideration. In war, combatants are obligated to be intentional with who they target. That intentionality is even codified into international law. It’s why we say that civilian casualties must be minimized whenever possible. By law, commanders must attempt to discriminate between military and civilian targets, applying force appropriately to target only those who are part of the conflict. By law, retaliation is governed by the principal of minimum force, meaning only so much force as is required to remove the threat, and no more.

When those of us outside the conflict zone are confronted with dead children on the front page, that’s the standard of “intent” we’re weighing our reactions against. For many, it’s hard to see how attacks on refugee camps were intended to spare refugees. How attacks on aid convoys and ambulances intended to spare the sick and wounded. How refusing to allow food, water, and the gasoline that hospitals need in order to operate is intended to safeguard the welfare of civilians who have been forced to drink sea water just to stay alive. Even if Hamas is using the population as human shields, it doesn’t change that the intent should be to spare those civilians in spite of Hamas’ actions. They’re fellow human beings. They deserve that bare minimum of thought. Sure, dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza City would wipe out the terrorists, but I think we’d all agree that’d be a war crime since it would also murder millions. The same logic applies here on the smaller scale (though 10,000 residents - half of them children - isn’t exactly “small scale”). That’s why it’s hard to see intention in those headlines. At least aside from the intention to do exactly what you’d expect bombing a refugee camp to do - murder refugees. The indiscriminate leveling of a region isn’t targeted, but it sure as hell looks intentional.

I desperately want to be wrong here, and like I said, I’m an outside observer from America just like you. But that’s the train of logic that I see dominating calls for a humanitarian pause over here, and it’s rather compelling.

It’s a good way to frame things. As an outsider, the subjectivity of the IDF’s target is why I wonder if people are choosing one term for the war over another. Some see the intentional bombing of refugee camps, ambulances, and aid convoys as targeting the civilians of Gaza in what amounts to a systematic extermination of Palestinians. The casualty numbers seem to heavily favor that interpretation. So could this be one reason for some news outlets to frame the conflict as Israel vs Gaza itself? Or is the word choice more nuanced than that, given how it seems as though the two names are being used interchangeably on both sides of the line?

… which is not to say that it’s free or even affordable (despite the name), or that residents in every state have equal access, or that the government is providing the plan. The ACA is a subsidy that slightly reduces the cost of private insurance, provided that you’re poor enough to qualify and that your state chooses to accept the federal government’s help beyond a certain threshold.

Also remember that American homes are quite literally wired different, and kettles aren’t as efficient fast as they are on the UK’s electric grid. They’re still far better than the stovetop, but the combined one-two punch of less need and stoves being “good enough” for most people most of the time just kills the idea in its tracks.

I swear half the users here are running NixOS these days (with the other half on Arch). Redditors like Linux, but Lemmings take it to an whole new level.

I migrated my daily driver from Ubuntu > Kubuntu > Nobara (based on Fedora), and I understand that fear of switching away from Debian after investing years into its ecosystem. Even still, Nobara has been wonderful and you might end up enjoying it (or another Fedora distro) just as much as I do. Like with Ubuntu/Debian, most apps are pre-packaged for Fedora, and the switch from one to the other is often as simple as trading sudo apt install for sudo dnf install.

If your shoes, the thing I’d be more worried about is the transition from Kubuntu (with its built-in tweaks that smooth out the rough edges of Linux and offer an “it just works” experience) to bare-bones Debian. Love 'em or hate 'em, Canonical put a lot of work into their distro and it became the go-to for a reason. That’s actually how I found myself on Nobara - the promise of pre-applied usability tweaks. I’m not a gamer, but I love that media players, graphics packages, OBS Studio (which I use for Zoom meetings at work), and my condenser microphone all work out of the box. And then there’s the gaming stuff as a cherry on top.

I’m on KDE as well, but you’ve got to admit that the way Gnome’s overview, virtual desktops, app menu, and search interface all work so seamlessly and logically together is a thing of beauty. Tap “Meta” one time and you can see all of your running programs, drag them between desktops, scroll to switch desktops, start typing to open apps and files… it just works. Meanwhile on KDE, it’s a relative pain to remap the “Meta” key and moving windows between desktops still feels clunky even in the overview.

All of that said, I still prefer KDE. Plasma 6 is set to integrate many of the Gnome features above, and KDE’s design philosophy as a whole is much more flexible. For example, I use two side-by-side monitors and it makes logical sense to imagine my virtual desktops as being sets of monitors directly above/below my physical ones that I can vertically scroll between. On KDE, it’s easy to set my grid of virtual spaces to be one column with many rows and be done with it, or for someone else to pick the opposite, or for them to go with a full grid of spaces if they so choose. But on Gnome, even though the vertical layout used to be the default, their newly dogmatic insistence that we only slide sideways means I’m dealing with multiple plugins that often glitch or conflict with other parts of the UI.

Both systems have their merits and deserve a place. (But I’ll gladly fight with anyone who denies that KDE is the obvious king)

Ideally this would be baked into ActivityPub, true, as would a distinction between porn, gore, and other sensitive topics for easy filtering by flair. But in the meantime, I’m relatively satisfied with the (admittedly hacked together) approach we have now. We already spend a couple minutes playing around with the look and feel of any new client we download, and filters are just part of that “settling in” process. If we had a bunch of them to set, it’d be one thing. But porn filtering really is just a matter of tagging one or two instances to cover 99% of the content out there. And the best part is that you’re not even digging through the settings, you’re tapping 3 buttons (max) on posts if you see them at all. As far as inconveniences go when switching apps, that one’s pretty minor.

As for being “locked in” and beholden to a particular client, are you really locked in if all of them let you do the same things (albeit in their own ways)?

Many of the Android apps let you filter instances, as well as individual communities or users. Most instances don’t host porn because of the legal headache, so blocking the only two that specialize in it should (mostly) do the trick: lemmynsfw and pornlemmy. On Sync for Lemmy, tap the overflow button on an offending post > filter > filter instance