sxan

2

Yeah. SimpleX has a similar problem, because it's basically creating a bunch of 1:1 connections between everyone to preserve anonymity - IIRC (I freely admit I could be misremembering this). As I understood, it's a decent limit, though - more than the 7-12 friend/family group you'd reasonably trust in a chat group.

I did not consider this a blocker - who's using encrypted chat for large groups? Large group chats are fundamentally insecure; is the use case about anonymity, not encryption?

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 7mo ago

Republicans 2025:

Toxic healthiness
Liberal helpfulness
Snowflake economic growth
Liberal Elite freedom

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 7mo ago

IME, beyond the install, it's all distro- and desktop-specific.

How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like "Install software", but on Arch (you'd have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you're helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called "settings", I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there's can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don't think that's an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can't remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that's Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that's because he couldn't find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don't think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There's a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller... well, that's very specific and again varies by controller. I don't think you can cover all of these edge cases.
Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there's a lot of moving parts. It's not just: go to the game's web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I'd guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE's relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they've learned to look, which aren't always where they are under KDE (I can't speak much about Gnome - I don't use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn't as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that's my experience.

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 7mo ago

This was many years ago, but since I was learning on the fly and asking Germans for translations of English words and was trying to learn words, I'd gotten in the habit of simplifying my requests. So instead of asking how to say "all of" I asked for "whole". I also may have phrased it differently where "whole" made more sense - this was 20+ years ago, and I don't remember exactly what was said.

4

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 7mo ago

I would still like to understand why Jami is never mentioned in these posts. I'm not aware of any technical or security objections, and the less I hear about Jami, the more concerned I become about using it.

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 8mo ago

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for "whole" was. I ended up asking her what she "did with her hole time."

2

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 8mo ago

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for "whole" was. I ended up asking her what she "did with her hole time."

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 8mo ago

Huh. tar tf and unzip -l. I'm not sure I'd even bother to write a shell function to combine them, much less install software.

Zips just exploding to files is so common, if you just mkdir unzpd ; unzip -d unzpd file.zip it's going to be right nearly all of the time. Same with tarballs always containing a directory; it's just so common it's barely worth checking.

You write the tools you need, don't get me wrong. This seems like, at most, a 10-line bash function, and even that seems excessive.

 bash

    
function pear() {
case $1 in
  *.zip)
    unzip -l "$1"
    ;;
  *.tar.*)
    tar tf "$1"
    ;;
esac
}

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 10mo ago

Gini is wealth and income inequality, which is States in the page you linked. In developed nations, income inequality is strongly correlated to wealth inequality.

The Gini index for Russia was 0.88; the US was 0.85. There was more of a delta between US in 2008 and US 2021 than that. There's more difference between the US and almost every other western developed country in 2021, than there was between Russia and the US in 2021. Russia is higher; it's not much higher.

The US entered into it when you replied to the comment:

Average monthly salary in USD: $1256

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 10mo ago

No, not on porpoise.

2

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 10mo ago

Well, once someone converted it to dollars and started comparing it to costs in the US, it kind of opened the topic, don't you think?

Also, according to both the link you provided and the income inequality page by country, the US and Russia are on par; they both have Gini coefficients of 85-90, and PIP (poverty & inequality plaform) indexes in the 35-40 range.

Which metric did you see that says Russia's wealth inequality is worse than the US's?

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 10mo ago

They were absolutely having sporadic outages a few days ago, but they've been Ok recently.

No, this is a specific configuration Midwest.social has enabled. It actually modifies posts and replaces external image links with proxies through the Midwest.social server. It results in really slow image serving in posts, and frequently outright breaks images. The server is also not correctly configured for mime types, so SVGs aren't served properly: even if the origin has the right mime-type, the forced proxy breaks the mime-type. So I can't embed SVGs on this account.

I appreciate the service, but I'm really going to have to abandon this account. The comment modification and hijacking of image links doesn't feel right.

1

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social 10mo ago

I have no idea! It seems to be the human material. Have you ever heard of a solution? I can be aware of it and resist it, but what I hate is that instinctive, negative impulse, and I don't think wishing it away is going to help.