Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction.
Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
Some people pay per text message received. So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication" well then I'm sorry, but their preference is my cost, so I don't think it's out of line to politely ask them not to.
Ultimately, this is something that I'd rather be handled at the carrier layer: I should be able to have my phone reject a text message and not pay for / receive it.
On the topic of configurability: Software should ultimately serve the end user. When a developer makes an undesirable (to a user) change to the software and provides the user no way to opt out of that change, it's serving the developer's interests, and it's doing a slightly worse job at serving the user.
> So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication
No, it doesn't, because that's engaging in bilateral negotiation of how the communication will go with the others involved in it. Unilaterally disabling the feature, however, is different, and that is what I was criticizing.
AFAIK it resulted in huge bill for the receiver, though I have no idea if certain services weren't billed differently (wouldn't surprise me if you could send text messages that were billed only on sender side, for extra)
> by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have
I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently.
If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on.
> it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something
For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
Well, nobody I know would respond to such a question with a reaction (an emoji, yes, a reaction, no), so this is not an issue in my crowd. I suppose (and it's obvious now that I think about it) this depends on what the social norms are in your group.
> By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things differently for you.
To a trivial degree, sure. Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
Social interaction always involves compromise and reasonable accommodations for others. In this sense, I ask people to do things differently for me every day, and they usually do. And others ask me to do things differently every day, and I usually do. It's part of the social negotiations that make societies work.
I do feel the need to reiterate that I am not opposed to reactions generally. Only in email.
> Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
It's ok either way. But it was you who claimed you don't request changes. We live in a society and all that. We can collaborate and agree on the way we communicate in groups.
For christ sake, if there is explicit question do not react with reaction only, but use words.
Because, recipient does not know whether you are acknowledging that you read that question or answering it or what. Emoji reactions are ambiguous majority of the time. Which is fine when they are used to add emotions to the discussion, but not fine when you are actually communicating with it.
> I've not read any of these comments but it sounds like the author of that message is somewhat peeved at the fact he can't control the conversation of others.
Are you fucking serious right now? Did you actually read what they said? Want is wrong with you? They're not "peeved" about "not being able to control the conversations of others", they're pointing out that because of Hacker News's lax and irresponsible moderation and disturbing overlap with much worse communities, it is a breeding ground for endless hate and harassment that can, and has, driven people to suicide on other occasions. That's way more serious and understandable, and playing that down as just someone being "anti free speech" as being part of the problem.
That sounds highly unlikely given the strict moderation on this site. So unless I see any evidence of it, I'll continue to assume otherwise.
From what I can gather after looking at previous posts on Asahi Linux, as another commenter suggested, the author of that message is furious that some HN users were talking about a cartoon character alter ego that he uses to make video streams. Seems to me like he's overreacting a bit.
The letter Martin wrote literally explains why you wouldn't be able to see such comment threads, as a result of the way HN's moderation works. Did you bother to read it?
Also, don't even start with the whole "Asahi Lina = Hector Martin" thing. You're literally echoing a Kiwi Farms thing and wondering why people accuse HN of having an overlap with that site?
I browsed the comments of previous Asahi Linux posts with "show dead" switched on and that's all I could find. I couldn't care less if he presents himself as a cartoon character on his video streams, I only mention it because that's what the flagged comments on those posts were arguing about.
Perhaps you could link the comment threads that you believe is evidence of what he's saying in that message?
Once again, I have to stick my ore in here and chill for LibreWolf :D I think it might really be worth checking out for people like me that prefer the user interface and functionality of Firefox over chromium and don't want to contribute to the blink engine monopoly, but also often doesn't approve of what Mozilla is doing upstream and wants someone to shield them from it. It's my daily drive for browser for basically everything, and 99% of the time, even on stuff that you would think wouldn't work, it works just fine. I keep chromium in my back pocket just in case, but I've only had to pull chromium out like twice in the past year, once for something that required the USB-HID protocol and once for iCloud.
And yes, for those of you on distributions, you might say that your distribution maintainers will just patch out or customize out, and the nefarious changes that Mozilla makes upstream. But the thing you have to remember is that distribution maintainers are handling, by a whole lot of other things, tens of thousands of other packages, and an entire operating system, and its upkeep, go through them. So they will often just not patch out or patch things out inconsistently or not really pay attention. I think it's much better to rely on a project whose whole purpose and explicit mission is making Mozilla more privacy-friendly and secure and who have a dedicated community of a few developers consistently working on it. Especially since distribution maintainers don't really make any specific mission statement promises with regards to specific packages, but something like LW does. It does a lot more than just this one thing. It's essentially equivalent to having a arkenfox config maintained for you and always applied to your browser and updated in lockstep with your browser, as well as a set of patches that they maintain to remove things like Pocket.
I've followed Kling's videos for years, both the ones working on serenity OS and the ones working on Ladybird, and followed the general arc of those projects and even contributed once a few year' back, and they actually seem to take the quality of their work very seriously and enjoy producing good high-quality code. I think it's just that none of them had experience with website design and the one guy who stepped up to do it happens to be one of those people that thinks AI generated stuff is fine.
Insofar as you are even making an argument here, instead of simply childishly parroting what someone you disagree with has said, it's a nonsensical argument — a slippery slope fallacy or something similar: if we replace our display technology stack once, next thing you know we'll do it again next week!
Simply because we replace an outdated protocol that didn't and couldn't have take(n) into account the needs and technological capabilities of today (because it was made long before then) with a protocol that is better designed for modern technology and modern requirements once does not mean that it has to happen wantonly and repeatedly — it may or may not happen again at all. There's no forcing function there. Whether it will be replaced again will be determined by whether the fundamental structure of how our computers are used and the graphical technology we use to display things shifts in such a fundamental way again... In which case we should absolutely rethink our display technology instead of layering more shit on the big ball of mud.
Xorg's design was fundamentally intended for time-sharing mini-computers, where graphical thin terminals would connect to a central computer where the actual applications ran, and the apps would send display commands to the terminal in return. It was also designed for an era where there was no such thing as GPU acceleration regular graphical applications, so every application would want to communicate with a display server to explain to it what should be displayed instead of directly to hardware. It was also originally designed without support for compositors, when compositors have now become the main thing that displays servers even do in the first place at all, and so therefore should be merged into them. Things have changed significantly since then.
Of course, there are protocols layered on top of XORG to account for all these things, but it means that there's a ton of extra complexity and functionality laying around inside it that isn't needed, and much functionality and deficiency left on the table, which is exactly why Wayland exists.
If we never see such a substantial change in display technology, again, then there will be no reason to reinvent Wayland.
And if you argue that despite the requirements and constraints of display technologies changing so drastically, we should still not replace XORG in fear of it, precipitating some sort of eternal shifting and changing of display technology, then that is simply conservatism taken to the level of insanity. My personal humble opinion, I think we should change our software when our needs and requirements change enough that simply adding more mud to the ball of mud produces a subpar and product.
> Insofar as you are even making an argument here, instead of simply childishly parroting what someone you disagree with has said, it's a nonsensical argument — a slippery slope fallacy or something similar: if we replace our display technology stack once, next thing you know we'll do it again next week!
It's not a slippery slope fallacy that refactors are not guaranteed to improve anything in the long run. The costs in adapting all graphical software are bad enough but when you are even asking end users to change the software they use and how they use it to adapt to your display server then you need to seriously reconsider if the change is worth it.
> a protocol that is better designed for modern technology and modern requirements
What requirements are those - of a free desktop operating system or of an appliance running untrusted crap from a commercial app store?
> Xorg's design was fundamentally intended for time-sharing mini-computers, where graphical thin terminals would connect to a central computer where the actual applications ran, and the apps would send display commands to the terminal in return. It was also designed for an era where there was no such thing as GPU acceleration regular graphical applications, so every application would want to communicate with a display server to explain to it what should be displayed instead of directly to hardware. It was also originally designed without support for compositors, when compositors have now become the main thing that displays servers even do in the first place at all, and so therefore should be merged into them. Things have changed significantly since then.
And X.org has managed to adapt to all these changes. And even if there are breaking changes needed it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing.
> Of course, there are protocols layered on top of XORG to account for all these things, but it means that there's a ton of extra complexity and functionality laying around inside it that isn't needed, and much functionality and deficiency left on the table, which is exactly why Wayland exists.
And with Wayland you already need tons of extensions to support very basic desktop functions, with varied and often incompatible support between compositors. So instead of having that complexity in one display server it is now multiplied between various wayland compositors AND applications.
> It's not a slippery slope fallacy that refactors are not guaranteed to improve anything in the long run.
Yeah it's not like we're just getting things thanks to Wayland that other OSs have had for years like proper HDR support, variable refresh rate, different refresh rates for different monitors, not having constant screen tearing, reasonable security, support for a modern GPU acceleration (Vulkan)... Plus, I would prefer a system designed by people that cared about actually having clean, maintainable, up to date codebases and protocols, instead of the backwards-compatibility morass that is Windows. That's part of why I like Linux — it's made by people that care about the craft and the future, a lot of the time, instead of bending over backwards to make legacy business customers happy.
> The costs in adapting all graphical software are bad enough but when you are even asking end users to change the software they use and how they use it to adapt to your display server then you need to seriously reconsider if the change is worth it.
I think they did seriously consider it. And sure Linux has never asked people to change what software they use, totally.
> What requirements are those - of a free desktop operating system or of an appliance running untrusted crap from a commercial app store?
This is just such a disingenuous rhetorical question. Of course I mean the requirements of a free desktop operating system. It's also silly, because 90% of the time an "applience" (whether you mean that literally or mean that in the sense of an iPhone) wouldn't be running "untrusted crap," it would be running only applications the company making the device approves of. Whereas we who are free to run any software we want, from ANYWHERE, on our computers, who aren't forces to run only things that have been signed by our "betters" have more need of something that is secure by default and gives us agency to choose what our apps have access to instead of simply assuming they should have access to everything.
Plus, the needs of a free desktop OS fundamentally includes being able to run commercial apps which might try to spy on you, or apps you don't completely 100% trust, because unfortunately we live in this dystopia where free software doesn't cover everything and we can be required to run proprietary software to communicate with loved ones or do work or even play the games we enjoy.
> And X.org has managed to adapt to all these changes.
Poorly, with a ton of unnecessary cruft that we don't need or use anymore cluttering up the code base opening up security vulnerabilities and making maintenance harder. That's why the Xorg maintainers eventually gave up on it and moved on to start Wayland. Plus, it's fundamental protocol and model of the world is just wrong and inefficient for the modern workstation, and you can't fix that by just adding more code and extensions to the ball of mud.
> And even if there are breaking changes needed it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing.
When the fundamental model the entire code base is built on no longer makes sense for what it's being used for, even if it sort-of works, I think it is.
> And with Wayland you already need tons of extensions to support very basic desktop functions, with varied and often incompatible support between compositors. So instead of having that complexity in one display server it is now multiplied between various wayland compositors AND applications.
Lmao that's a false equivalence. The problem with Xorg is that the extensions are layered on while leaving in* the old things they obviate. So you have everything you need, but also everything you don't. The whole jungle comes with the banana. Meanwhile, Wayland has a small easy to implement core, and then each DE/WM implements just the protocols they need, so that everything isn't massively overcomplicated, but composable and customizable to the needs of each. Isn't that what Unix people like?
> variable refresh rate, not having constant screen tearing, support for a modern GPU acceleration (Vulkan)...
These all work under X and have worked for years. HDR support is also possible under X and I'm confident that different refresh rates can also be made to work without breaking applications. The only real difference Wayland brings is the "security" model and for an open desktop OS with trusted programs that's more of an anti-feature. I don't want a consumer appliance but a system where I am in control.
> Plus, I would prefer a system designed by people that cared about actually having clean, maintainable, up to date codebases and protocols, instead of the backwards-compatibility morass that is Windows.
Maintainable is a meaningless buzzword if you throw out the system instead of maintaining it. And backwards compatibility is seriously underrated.
> I think they did seriously consider it.
I have yet to see any evidence of that.
> And sure Linux has never asked people to change what software they use, totally.
Linux is a kernel and one that takes the backwards compatibility of the userspace API very seriosuly. You can use pretty old software on modern kernels just fine. That is what all system components should strive for.
> This is just such a disingenuous rhetorical question. Of course I mean the requirements of a free desktop operating system.
Then your position makes no sense.
> It's also silly, because 90% of the time an "applience" (whether you mean that literally or mean that in the sense of an iPhone) wouldn't be running "untrusted crap," it would be running only applications the company making the device approves of.
And what the appliance operator approves of is more often than not largely untrusted crap that would have been classified as malware only a decade ago.
> Whereas we who are free to run any software we want, from ANYWHERE, on our computers, who aren't forces to run only things that have been signed by our "betters" have more need of something that is secure by default and gives us agency to choose what our apps have access to instead of simply assuming they should have access to everything.
We have the option to containerize untrusted software and we actually have trustworthy open source software available along with a social mechanism to protect us: distro maintainers.
> Plus, the needs of a free desktop OS fundamentally includes being able to run commercial apps which might try to spy on you, or apps you don't completely 100% trust, because unfortunately we live in this dystopia where free software doesn't cover everything and we can be required to run proprietary software to communicate with loved ones or do work or even play the games we enjoy.
A) no it doesn't and if it did you'd actually care about backwards compatibility. B) if you want to run untrusted programs you sandbox just those programs instead of neutering your entire toolbox.
> Poorly, with a ton of unnecessary cruft that we don't need or use anymore cluttering up the code base opening up security vulnerabilities and making maintenance harder.
Meaningless buzzwords repeated without anything to back it up.
> That's why the Xorg maintainers eventually gave up on it and moved on to start Wayland.
Yes, because it's more exciting to develop something new than maintain an existing system if you are not the one bearing the cost of breaking the world around that system. Also the companies paying those developers (mainly Red-Hat) would very much like to sell you an appliance rather than a desktop OS.
> Plus, it's fundamental protocol and model of the world is just wrong and inefficient for the modern workstation, and you can't fix that by just adding more code and extensions to the ball of mud.
Again, a string of meaningless propaganda drivel. There is nothing fundamentally different about a "modern workstation" that makes X not workable. Unless you mean that most modern proprietary software is malware, in which case, again, you avoid or sandbox that malware.
> When the fundamental model the entire code base is built on no longer makes sense for what it's being used for, even if it sort-of works, I think it is.
The fundamental model works just fine and not just sort-of.
> Lmao that's a false equivalence. The problem with Xorg is that the extensions are layered on while leaving in* the old things they obviate. So you have everything you need, but also everything you don't. The whole jungle comes with the banana. Meanwhile, Wayland has a small easy to implement core, and then each DE/WM implements just the protocols they need, so that everything isn't massively overcomplicated, but composable and customizable to the needs of each. Isn't that what Unix people like?
And Wayland also comes with Xwayland. And you are seriously naieve if you don't think Wayland will look different once it is actually able to satisfy all desktop requirements.
I think at worst we simply have different preferences for how our free desktops should approach security, not that I "don't want a free OS," and I'm extremely tired of people like you dimissing people that disagree with you about how a free desktop operating system should work as simply not being true Scotsman — not wanting "true freedom" or something — it's very frustrating and it makes nobody want to deal with you.
I want programs on my computer to ask for my consent for access to anything that might be nefarious or personal. I don't want to have to rely on a small group of people who have decided they are qualified to choose what software is safe to run and insert themselves between me and the people who developed the software I actually use to introduce arbitrary patches and remove or add arbitrary features. This is a big part of why I refuse to use Debian ever. Instead, I want a system that is self-sufficiently secure.
You want programs to have access to absolutely everything on your computer by default, except the random selection of largely not relevant tasks allocated to the root user, and want to go through the effort of sandboxing manually when you don't trust something. You're fine with relying on a small group of maintainers deciding what software is and isn't safe for you to install and protect you from upstream bad features.
I want a system that is secure by default and has good defaults for that security, and you want a system that requires you to go through extra hoops to make things secure if you want them and you'll probably never actually do that because it's so inconvenient and manual to actually make things secure.
These seem not like on the one hand the requirements for an appliance and on the other hand the requirements for a free desktop and more like different preferences for a free desktop environment.
> A) no it doesn't
Then you are living in fantasy land. I would prefer my desktop operating systems to actually be useful in the real world. I fundamentally do not understand and reject this idea that on a free desktop offering system, somehow by virtue of being free software, you'll only be running open to our software or software you trust ever, and that somehow by virtue of being an appliance, that suddenly means people will run untrusted software. Those things aren't inherently related and it doesn't make sense to pretend they are.
> Also the companies paying those developers (mainly Red-Hat) would very much like to sell you an appliance rather than a desktop OS.
Ah, I see you're one of those conspiracy theorists. I think I'll back out of this discussion now — I've had one too many experiences with such.
I second this. I'm so happy I switched to LibreWolf a few years ago. I get all of the benefits of the arkenfox user script, plus even more without having to install or maintain it myself, and in addition to that I get Pocket and various hardcoded telemetry, etc, being stripped out — I can trust them to turn Firefox into an actually good focused browser no matter what Mozilla does upstream.
Plus it doesn't go as far as Mulvad, which explicitly states that they intend down the road to start ignoring user's configuration settings in an effort to prevent users from making their browser more fingerprintable, instead of letting users decide what balance of usability and privacy they want (for instance, I still use Firefox Sync). That's fine for them to do, and I wish them the best to block, because they're not really taking away user freedom since someone can just use an alternative browser, but that's not something I want to use personally. LibreWolf lets me choose.
Yeah, wouldn't it be great if every application I had open could read my entire screen and act as a key logger to collect all my passwords and personal information? Obviously, since I installed the app, that means I have to trust it completely, and not trusting it completely is just silly!
Yes it really would be. It's the reason I use Linux in the first place, to have freedom to do whatever I want. I don't need linux to protect me from Windows Recall. I chose linux because it already doesn't have stuff like that. And the system (used to) treat me like an adult.
it's where the security boundary is. The system should protect me from unwanted software getting on the system. Once a piece of software starts running, I do want to give it full access to the system. If not, I'll run it in a container. All the protections wayland offers are to protect against a piece of software someone had to already have access to install. If you are that paranoid, set up selinux properly. Which nobody does, cos it's a pita. Enforcing permissions for everything on everyone is a similar pain in the ass.
If non-corporeal entities could move within my home invisibly and observe my activities silently or change things in my environment at will, I’d definitely consider it.
If it was practical to have some way to a priori prevent the appliances in my home from seeing me or listening to what I do, while still being able to use them for their intended purpose, then I would certainly use it. Since there is a practical way to do that on a computer, then I'm going to use that if I can. In the same way that I use live narrowing fuzzy search for almost all of my interfaces with the computer and would certainly use that if it were physically possible for physical objects as well, but it just isn't. There are many things that we can do on the computer that we can't do in real life and thus we request that the computer do them.
Furthermore, in fact, to the extent that it is possible, I do in fact do this: I flat out refuse to install appliances in my house that would have the capability of passively listening to every word I say or watching every move I make with microphones or cameras — no Alexas or Google Homes or Nest security cameras or smart toasters or anything of the sort. Whereas installing applications under Xorg is essentially the equivalent of having every appliance in your entire house come with microphone and camera that is always on, and just having to trust that they don't actually do anything with that data. Every application installed under XROG essentially has the capability to surveil you and simply choose as not to, whereas I would prefer the digital equivalent of only having appliances in my house that do not have microphones or cameras, or must explicitly ask my permission to use them — Wayland.
This is exactly why SpectrumOS (not in a useable state yet) is intriguing to me, as well as qubes OS’s very recent efforts on practical gpu acceleration.
The thing is that Qubes OS uses child Xorg servers per application to make it so that applications can't read the screen or the keyboard from other applications, whereas Wayland simply builds that into the protocol level so that you don't need that horrible hack. Likewise, it needs VMs to isolate each application or environment from each other and the host, and to make the host immutable and reset on reboot. And we can do all of that now with containers and sandboxes and immutable image-based distros. Not as securely, but at great benefit to performance and interoperability. So personally, I think while Qubes is still the gold standard if all you care about is security, if you want a good balance of security and everyday usability, Fedora Silverblue with distrobox and Flatpaks and a Wayland DE/WM is acceptable enough, as long as you harden the polkit permissions and a few other things like that. And yes, yes, I know the FUD about Flatpak *not being a sandbox" lol
That only determines who/what can connect to the X server at all, it's either a host/user/client with a cookie can connect to the X server or it can't at all; that has no bearing on me wanting to be able to use graphical applications that are able to connect to the display server without having each one of the graphical applications so connected to be able to read all my keystrokes and the output of my entire screen.
Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.