Davinci Resolve is owned by Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd a privately owned Australian company. Australia is still a liberal democracy and a long term friend of Canada. Incidentally Røde Microphones are also Australian.

Canva is Australian founded and bought the UK company that created the Affinity suite. While the Australian founders are major shareholders I imaging there is a hell of a lot if US equity behind them but at least they aren’t Adobe.

I use a 100% free and open source software stack. It involves some sacrifice of features and interoperability that won’t be acceptable to many people but things have come a long way and it’s worth having a serious look before dismissing.

The US businesses mafia has deep hooks into enterprise, education and government markets and can’t be budged. I hope Trump goes nuclear on this trade war nonsense because it might be the best hope yet to open up the software market to some real competition.

I still remember owning a Matrox video card and using Corel applications. Good old days.

The US has had a stifling effect in its closest allies and partners for a very long time. I am not anti-US historically but the fact is no smaller country can hope to have an equal relationship with a super power and we have all lost locally developed technologies, businesses and capital to the USA to our detriment because the US pushed their interests over those of their supposed friends.

I am very much in favour of developing closer defence and trade relationship with small and middle power around the world and reducing US dominance. Trump may unintentionally be the best thing to happen to US partners and allies for decades. Btw am Australian, not Canadian but I suspect these feelings are widespread amongst US allies

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Probably should point out that DeepSeek is owned by a Chinese hedge fund. They specialize in algorithmic trading. Can’t get much more capitalist than that. Very happy to see Chinese capitalists release an open source model. No doubt Altman and cronies will seek protection under the guise of national security. I guess free market competition is only good when you are not getting your arse kicked.

Not excusing Chinese companies but everyone does the same shit. I bet a lot of US companies that behave the same or worse will be looking for trade barriers to protect their business so their interests will be stoking fear of Chinese competitors. I don’t really give a shit which country is doing it, I am not buying what they are selling.

US companies have a stranglehold on government, education and business and are getting access to my families data despite my personal objections. Far more concerned about that than a Chinese service I have no intention of using.

Deepseek can at least be self hosted if you want AI in your life. I can happily live without it.

I recognize many of the deficiencies of Gnome but on balance I still like using it.

I never migrated from Windows or Mac desktop. I got into Linux before WIndows 95 came out and although I had used Mac and Amiga desktops I never owned one myself. I have used tiling wms and plain wms with no desktop environment and I can find my way around on Windows 11 or Mac but I don’t like either as much as Gnome. KDE generally has a better foundation thanks largely to qt but I never enjoyed using KDE. Not surprised it is very popular with the new influx of Windows refugees. To me KDE always had a slightly dated Windows look and feel to it. It is still a very solid choice ofcourse.

Gnome hate became fashionable when they moved forward from Gnome 2 and some people never shut up about it. We get it. Your favorite band aren’t teenagers anymore and decided to make an album you don’t like. It is ancient history. Just use something else guys. Plasma is pretty damn good so use it. Whats the point of a free OS if you can’t accept people want the freedom to develop and enjoy different computing experiences.

What is socialist to Linus is libertarian to Eric Raymond. In huge collaborative communities people need to learn to get along and be tolerant but if they can’t handle that they also have the freedom to fork so there is room for everyone to find their own space.

Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.

For people with experience with any mobile 12th gen intel and the framework 13 AMD, can you quantify what you think the upgrade is worth or would it be better to wait for a refresh to the “ai” series if that ever happens.

I look at the price for board/ram/wifi upgrade and struggle to justify even though I expect the amd cpu to be cooler/quieter and have much better iGPU. I know it should easily outperform the steam deck in raw performance so with some scaling it should be reasonable for some light casual gaming but I don’t have any experience with amd outside of desktop cpus and dedicated graphics. Every time I consider an upgrade it makes more sense to buy desktop upgrades and cope with the intel system for a few more years. I don’t have a good use for the intel mainboard as it doesn’t have much expansion, multiple ssd, pcie etc.

They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won’t cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.

The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.

People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.

I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don’t know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn’t look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn’t change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.

Most mobile/laptop devices should be encrypted by default. They are too prone to loss or theft. Even that isn’t sufficient with border crossings where you are probably better off wiping them or leaving them behind.

My desktop has no valuable data like crypto, sits in a locked and occupied house in a small rural community with relatively low crime (public healthcare, social security, aging population). I have no personal experience of property theft in over half a decade.

I encrypt secrets with a hardware key. They are only accessed as needed. This is a much more appropriate solution than whole disk encryptiom for my circumstances. Encrypting Linux packages and steam libraries doesn’t offer any practical benefit and unlocking my filesystem at login would not protect from network exfiltration which is a more realistic risk. It adds overhead.and another point of failure for no real benefit.

There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.

I don’t want to see the terminal emulator. No chrome. Needs solid emulation. That’s about it. Still using kitty and it’s got a good balance of stuff I use. I don’t really get the point of ghostty. These things are a bit like browsers, they just display the content and are interchangeable. People get super weird about terminal emulators and window managers.

I have been using Linux since the early 90s. I don’t know it all. I read man pages. I use -h or --help. I read the arch wiki. I read docs. I read source files and examples. Lots of reading. You will never know it all. There is too much information.

You need to know how to find information. It can be tricky. Knowing how to ask the right questions often requires you to know a bit of the answer.

Stumbling about trying to find answers is training the skills you need.

I think it helps if you have a programming background and IT support experience. Not just because you will understand more concepts and terms but because you have already developed some of those skills but some people come from other backgrounds and pick things up really quickly because they have well developed research skills.

The only software I have paid for in the last couple of years are games. The licensing is still crooked but they are ephemeral entertainment so its not like they control your life.

The problem with commercial software isn’t the price. It is the lock in. They have you by the balls whether you pirate or pay so I don’t pirate as it doesn’t address my main issue with closed source software which ismt price but control. I prefer to adapt, sometimes live with less features and use free and open source.

Its hard if you have to work with others which is the whole network effect BS, everyone is on Reddit and shitter so why aren’t you. If you can work independently though you can get a lot done and have more control.

No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.

Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.

People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.

When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I’ll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.

It will be 35 years way too soon. I can’t remember the last time I compiled a kernel let alone what exactly I was doing with a computer in the early 90s.

Its weird that most of the world runs on Linux outside of desktop and we still have these discussions. I didn’t know what a distro was in the beginning. It was a Linux kernel and gnu user space someone had compiled to get people started. If the disk sets had a name I didn’t know or care.