There are so many things that we describe as a graph of boxes with inputs & outputs that we can indeed draw many parallels see many similarities between them. I think it's quite interesting to think about this diversity of tools and try to analyse what's common and what isn't between them (some are stateless others aren't, some have the notion of "time" and some have not, some are closer to state machines while other closer to mathematical functions, etc.) and it gives a lot of inspiration about new/alternative programming models & architectures
In most countries (eg Europe, US, Brazil, China, etc.) it's not the case and you have to give your ID (or some sort of identifier linked to your real identity) to get a SIM card or any internet service
Agreed. On the long-term, Apple is the one which might harm Privacy the most because they will kill the real Privacy alternatives by pretending they are one.
People use Google & Facebook because they are dependent on their services but some of them know they are unethical (for e.g the recent WhatsApp scandal shows that at least some people are kinda aware).
Apple on the other hand lies and does propaganda about their fake Privacy and people (even on HN) think they are the solution, and that's far more dangerous I think.
Many people think real Privacy solutions are not worth supporting because they have Safari, IOS & Icloud. Well guess what, ICloud is not even (end2end) encrypted, employees have been listening to your Siri conversation, HomeKit doorbells are doing nonconsenting facial recognition on you & your friends, Apple tracks every app you lunch & when (and no that's not necessary for security, you could just download a blacklist instead of sending Apple your history), and no, Apple does not audit or read any line of code of the apps on the store.
It's killing me that my friends think it's okay to install Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat or whatever on their phone because "No but it's okay, I have an IPhone so Apple has checked the app and everything". For them, Apple is magically going to protect them whatever they do.
That's where you see their lies & propaganda really worked.
Apple is like a polluting gas car that sells & market itself as a green clean ecological electrical car so that people can use without conscience issues
But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away.
Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.
Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
It kind of seems like a second attempt to the do-not-track switch which was a failure. There must be strong backing in the laws for such feature to be meaningful otherwise nobody will respect it
The same reason Firefox and Safari don't use Google V8 & Blink. They (mostly Safari) are the only opposition to Google monopolistic control on the web.
You will always be under control of others if you don't take your independence and open-source means little when it is in practice controlled by only one entity.
If you build an OS on top of Android like /e/, replicant & Lineage & etc. , you are doomed to be living in Google' shadow . They'll shut you down anytime you do something they don't like. And even if it is open-source, if you disagree, you'll never have the financial means to maintain an up to date Android fork. Once/if they abandon Android for Fushia, it's going to be hard maintaining all abandoned Android legacy code alone.
Then, there are also technical reasons. We could ask "why create a new UI lib from scratch when we have QT ?". Yes for the end-user it's mostly the same (a bunch of text and buttons), yet people are developing custom UI lib (eg. Blender/Godot), Flutter, React, Svelte, Druid, Moxie, Makepad, etc. This is needed for innovation and/or to fit your own needs.
Real Linux has lots of potential : it can run Blender, Krita, Godot, VsCode, Steam games, any language, FreeCad, KiCad, Matlab, etc. (None of them have mobile UIs, but still are an asset for tablets & convergence). It is not governed by Google or Apple and it has already quite some drivers for several devices (I could just install Bitwig on a Linux tablet, plug a MIDI keyboard and make music).
So there are definitely reasons to take this path and personally I find this far more exciting than Lineage (although I use Lineage daily & I'm super grateful to that it exists)
Because this era of "separate parts" comes to an end. Now everything is single SoC that are only compatible with big tech proprietary OS.
Google has on purpose made Android different enough so that no Android SoC could run mainline Linux.
Today, no decent SoC can run real Linux, the "best" SoC that can run mainline Linux are :
- Rockship (PinePhone) which is reversed engineered so only old SoC have support and it require massive effort from the community.
- NXP (Librem 5) which are thick power hungry slow SoC (because they are made for automobile I guess)
- Broadcom (Raspberry Pi) which is still super slow compared to most modern smartphone.
In any case the manufacturers of decent SoC don't give a crap about Linux, they only support Android and any Linux support must be done by someone else, often through reverse engineering.
This is a totally anticompetitive situation which is far from what we had on the desktop side.
But even on the laptop/desktop side, this is also coming to an end : Microsoft custom chip & Surfaces, Apple M1, etc. Soon this will be the same as on mobile.
FairPhone makes no special effort about the choice SoC, they just use a SoC which supports Android and which obviously doesn't support Linux.
On the other hand Librem & PinePhone use the only SoC that have Linux support, and they often must develop support themselves through reverse eng. because the manufacturer doesn't care.
Unless we pass laws about it or unless Pine64/Purism become very successful, it is the end of any hope for alternative as no mobile device is able to run anything else than IOS & Android (or HarmonyOS, Fushia or whatever next privacy hell OS is coming from those big tech)
Even in Planes & Cars , the entertainment systems are now powered by Android and not Linux.
Mainline Linux will disappear until it only exist in a emulated VM running on a M1 mac, or on a headless datacenter server.
Purism & Pine64 are currently our only hope for alternative and I encourage anyone to support them. They represent the ugly reality of what is available to the competition, it is slow, thick, power hungry and old but that's all we have.
The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device.
So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people
Maybe it's biased from my personal experience but I feel people overestimate the importance of the engine features for big games. When you do big games, you often write everything yourself
My friend works at a studio who's doing an open world game in Unity and they did : their own terrain system (with their custom tessellation, collision system, etc.), their own LOD system, their own pathfinding algo, their own crowd sim, their own multiplayer sync, etc.
That seems totally fair, thanks for your response. If the core is powerful thx to the choice of tech while plugins can be contributed easily then it sounds like a great plan !
Really cool. I think using standard JS or TS with a standard UI framework (like Vue, React, Svelte, etc.) would have attracted more contributors than Clojure.
But otherwise , I'm really looking forward that project !
I have tried using wlroots, it's very hard. If you had to build your own compositor Mutter is far easier (it provides a GUI toolkit and all you need graphic wise). QTWayland is very nice too but won't get you far outside embedded uses (no xdg portals, no screen capture, etc.)
WayFire makes wlroots a bit easier but I find it quite messy/not clear (but it's very powerful & flexible).
There's definitively the need for an easy high level API for wlroots (the main wlroots dev started working on a high level scene tree API some times ago but it now seems kinda abandoned)
Yes that's totally true. But first Google doesn't really portray themselves as a "Privacy respecting" alternative. And second, it's not because other companies are doing similar abusive things that we should praise and thanks Apple.
The title should be more like "At last, after years of using it, Apple finally remove the abusive cross-app tracking that other companies still use", but not "Thank you Apple".
There are so many things that we describe as a graph of boxes with inputs & outputs that we can indeed draw many parallels see many similarities between them. I think it's quite interesting to think about this diversity of tools and try to analyse what's common and what isn't between them (some are stateless others aren't, some have the notion of "time" and some have not, some are closer to state machines while other closer to mathematical functions, etc.) and it gives a lot of inspiration about new/alternative programming models & architectures