A fool for expecting it to clear up

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  • 20 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2025

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  • I find this happening on iOS and it makes me put my phone down in a visually obstructive spot more since I’m not into my camera being active when I didn’t ask it to be. Unfortunately, the more you learn and live, the more you realize the paranoid delusions people used to call “crazy schizo shit” are actually probably true… to varying degrees of course.

    iOS sends, what, 11MB of telemetry a day on average? Surely that can include audio and video compressed with those overpowered CPUs it runs on.


  • All I can offer you is what I’d consider vibes. GIMP looks ‘old’. I don’t mind programs looking dated, but I absolutely mind them looking ‘old’ since that, to me, implies a worse experience compared to ‘dated’. It looks like it crawled out of the education software setting intended for mass adoption and only barely did so.

    To be more specific, things like proper spacing between UI elements & UI and text spacing go a longer way than I think most FOSS developers that don’t work with UI expect. Everything feels cramped, like it is pressuring me to know what to do. Basic features are also somewhat unintuitive; when I go to drag a slider for opacity, for example, as an end user I don’t think that single clicking and dragging will select the actual numerical value of the slider. I expect to have to double click, otherwise I expect the slider to simply do what I want it to when I left click and drag it left or right.

    I don’t think anyone reasonable expects to pick up heavily featured photo manipulation software and simply know exactly how to do as they please, but there are some surefire ways GIMP contributors can clean up GIMP’s UI and UX. I mean no ill will by this, because people who contribute to FOSS do so with their free time and money, but I feel like a lot of software developers and highly computer-literate users think ‘good enough to use for everyone I talk to’ means ‘ready for everyone to use’ and this simply is not true. Talk to any ‘normal person’ in a corporate design environment, for example, and they’ll probably scoff at you if you suggest GIMP measures up to anything Affinity or Adobe. Those people are dicks, but their attitude often comes from a place of valuable opinion. It is not keybindings or solid basic features that they feel is missing, it’s… polish, I suppose? ‘Completeness’? I’m unsure of the right word to use but something about GIMP just feels half baked, visually and feeling-wise at least.










  • It’s actually a valid thing to need. If nothing else, circular masks are much easier to do when you don’t have to go and search for a png of a circle for a task that should’ve been over by the time you hit enter in the search bar. I understand GIMP is made with entirely volunteer work, and people shouldn’t be hostile towards anything FOSS unless given good reason, but there are very good reasons people cannot switch to GIMP.




  • Thank you, this is a really helpful answer and string of replies. I do not work in computer science, nor do I have any prerequisite knowledge on how security on Linux is typically handled, but this got me a little closer to understanding things and I appreciate it.

    Sorta kinda not really related- I appreciated your less-than-topical section a lot, maybe for slightly different reasons than assumed. As someone trying to learn how to tinker with computers and self-host services ‘the right way’, I have been trying to comb through a lot of information written by folks with years and years of experience. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt like the weirdo when I am told to ‘just do X’, so I try to ‘just do X’, and I’m expected to have a job doing this stuff to understand what ‘X’ even is and how it works.

    It’s a massive turn-off from learning anything, especially when those knowledgeable people suggest only the most jargon-laden explanations and pointers, and then shut down others who suggest forgoing their methods altogether. Maybe my problems arise from appending ‘reddit’ onto most of my searches, but that’s about the only place I know I can see (what looks like) actual people interacting, and more specifically, people asking newbie questions. Stack overflow is hell to find good answers with, I find…

    I posted this both because I feel like Lemmy benefits from people posting engaging questions like this in its’ current state, and mainly because I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone when I was wondering why people were trashing on SELinux so often. I want to do things the right way! I deeply value security and doing things ‘correctly’, but I’ve not the experience, knowledge, or time required to do things ‘the right way’ as it exists in others’ eyes. I’m not you, dude! I just want to learn how to host Jellyfin in my bedroom; it’s hurricane season and I need YouTube videos to play while I do things, and I’m aware anything to do with networking should be handled carefully. I don’t care about stuff like leaving SELinux enabled, because I don’t understand why I should. Help me care instead of being a dick and/or unaware of how much you actually know and can do yourself.

    Arrrgh. Hopefully that was coherent. (Also, if I get told to use an LLM again, I’ll lose my mind! I’m learning, I don’t need the hallucinating plagiarism machine as a teacher!)







  • I am with you, but also kinda not; there is a middle ground that is stupidly easy to find, and Linus hasn’t. I understand that the ‘average user’ coming from Windows is gonna be very clueless but I (maybe unfortunately) have faith that someone determined enough to figure out how to install Linux is going to be determined enough to, like, search for things more than that, you know? I’ve met a few folks who have no idea what they’re doing in a browser, of course, but those people are not going to try to install Linux…

    I do agree that Linux nerds should be much kinder and listen. No shame to tech-illiterate folks, pleeeeease. I wish people would have more faith in others’ ability to figure shit out, people aren’t just mindless apes pressing buttons.