I think it's pretty much a given that someone who criticizes the DNC stance on Palestine is also opposed to the GOP stance. Why do they need to list out all the other horrific people when they make a critique? You're engaging in whataboutism here.
If someone critiques the GOP for being blatantly racist, do you similarly ask them why they aren't mentioning the KKK directly? No, it's fucking assumed. Stop being a jackass.
I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.
Tiling Shell is absolutely one of the slickest extensions I've ever seen, it feels natural and incredibly polished.
Yeah technically you aren't supposed to ride on the sidewalks here (USA) but there's barely any safe infrastructure to do otherwise, and I'm sure as hell not going to ride on the street with the death machines honking all over the place, so the sidewalk it is until city infrastructure is less car-brained.
Thank you for providing a non lethal alternative method. I'm uncomfortable with how much death humans gleefully visit upon the insect kingdom when they don't have to.
Some exciting updates mentioned this week, but a couple stood out especially to me:
Individually encrypted user home directories using homed is a nice touch. Hopefully that'll become a more widespread practice.
This is the first I've heard of FlatSync, it sounds handy.
That has ketchup in it though, I'm not sure it's quite in the sprit of the question, though it's definitely astoundingly popular specifically in Utah.
I haven't seen anyone mention nutritional yeast yet, but that's become my go-to seasoning for almost everything; popcorn, pizza, scrambled eggs, bread, ramen, soft pretzels, and of course on fries. So damn good!
(Yes, I realize the name "nutritional yeast" sounds vaguely unpleasant and unappetizing, but I promise it's incredible if you like savory flavors, and it can also be used as a cheese powder substitute in vegan recipes.)
I fucking hate it, but there are items which I used to buy at the local grocery before the pandemic which are no longer available anywhere except.. Amazon Fresh. So, if I want to have the food that I want to eat, I have to buy it from Amazon and have it delivered (either to my house, or to a Whole Foods which then requires driving to pick it up and spending the extra fuel anyway, so might as well get it delivered all the way without the extra stop). I can't even find a way to buy and ship directly from the manufacturers, I've tried and they generally don't sell to individuals.
The grocery situation in the US was already depressing as fuck before Amazon monopolized a bunch of products; every grocery chain is owned by one of like 5 giant corporations, and they just rename the stores in different regions so people don't notice and think they are able to "shop around".
Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly "very popular" means, though I don't see how popularity is a useful metric when we're talking about free software which doesn't rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.
However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I'm not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I'll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:
For purposes of discussion, I'll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can't have 0.8 of a person).
In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it's funding strategy.
Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender's funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla's at paying developers to work on their software.
Again, I don't agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it's clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.
it's simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation
Please don't excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it's unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards.. it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
I place the blame squarely on booksellers (mostly Amazon) for this. By refusing to have any sort of consistency or transparency about what kinds of cover content will result in authors being "dungeoned" on their platforms, it essentially forces explicit content to have cover imagery and blurbs that obfuscate the content to such a degree that misunderstandings like this can happen.
Words like "sweltering", "sizzling", "swoonworthy" in combination with "romance" are meant to be a clue that there is sex in the writing, but the cover simply can not be obvious about that without risking the book (and the author's entire account) being unlisted without communication or recourse.