Public key cryptography and signatures are common technologies nowadays.

It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.

I‘m already exploring Linux. Both GNOME and KDE actually have sensible UI design and consistency in their own way.

I‘m starting to lose hope that this will become better. They have been stuffing macOS and iOS with endless features and their UI design is optimized for nice looking screenshots, not actual use.

The worst is everybody else is still copying Apple‘s UI design trends.

Photos.app has never reached the usability of iPhoto, that it replaced. System Settings is a convoluted pile of over engineering.

The hoops you to jumpt through to run software I download from a website have reached infuriating levels.

Even Meta isn’t very successful with their much cheaper Meta Quest Series. VR Headsets are mostly toys.

Spotlight has been getting worse for years.

Lots of crap in the results. It can’t even find files anymore, I know exist.

Spotlight was great when it came out in 10.3 or 10.4.

I have an iPad myself and try to use it to work every now and then. I always run into pretty basic limitations on iPadOS very quickly. For example working with large file on a network share is painful. The file manage is a slow toy compared to the Finder. The limited RAM and no swap means app will lose state regularly. Transferring data between applications is still cumbersome.

they were constantly talking about the push to unify macOS and iOS UI

They made several attempts at it and none succeeded. There’s lots of shared frameworks, Mac Catalyst, and Swift UI. None of them work consistently or are particularly good.

iOS and iPadOS have fundamental limitations baked into the design that severely limit it.

Making a unified mobile, tablet, touch, and desktop OS was also tried by Microsoft and Ubuntu and the results were weak to mixed.

What Apple really needs is a new paradigm. For that they need a vision, which they don’t have since Steve Jobs died.

I think the new Liquid Glass UI is meant to better support the rumored upcoming MacBooks with touch screens. The Mac’s UI has been wasting more and more space over the years, I think with this target in mind.

What country did you select?

r/popular can be set to a country. For the US, it’s pretty similar to r/all for any other country, it’s distinct and boosts local subreddits and language.

For streaming https://yarrlist.net/

Sure, that’s the theory. In practice code review often looks like this:

• a quick glance to see if the code plausibly does what it claims for longer patches
• A long argument about some stylistic choice for short patches

In other words – people were barely reading merge requests before. Code reviews have limited effects as well. You won’t catch all bugs or see if it actually works just by looking at the code. Code reviews mainly serve to spread knowledge about the code among the team. The more code exists in a project, the harder it is to understand. You don’t want huge areas of code, that only one person has ever seen.

Project managers don’t necessarily talk to angry customers directly. They might also choose to chase more features instead of allocating resources to fixing bugs. It depends on what the bosses prioritize. If they want AI and lots of new features, that‘s what they will get. Fixing bugs, improved stability, better performance, etc. are rarely the priority.

Realistically what happens is the code review is done under time pressure and not very thoroughly.

sh.itjust.works

or go to piefed

All valid points. It is still popular.

toxic kingdoms

Exist here too.

Make real backups. Ideally make two or more

• a full disk backup with SuperSuper
• A Time Machine Backup on an external drive

The likelihood of making your machine unusable for a while is non negligible.

Mac

If you want to dual boot with macOS, do some research. Boot loaders and EFI can be tricky.

Holding alt after pressing the power button gives you the option to choose the drive to boot from. Holding cmd + R after pressing the power button allows booting into recovery mode. It allows you to partition and format your internal drive and reinstall macOS.

You can install a newer version of macOS than is officially supported using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

FOSS principles

Intel Macs often have Broadcom WiFi chips, that need proprietary software to work. As a noob, you should got with a distro that makes it easy to install these or does it automatically for you.

You likely also want to play some video files, so you will need nonfree stuff.

Distro hopping

Install to an external drive or Virtual Machine. You can do that on your existing macOS with VirtualBox for example.

similar to Windows, macOS, customizable

Even the desktop environments, who claim to be macOS like (Endeavour, GNOME), have at best a superficial similarity. Don’t expect a macOS replacement. All desktop environments are different from macOS.

beginner distro

Fedora and SuSE are not beginner friendly. Lots of Linux distros use the same marketing terms of easy to use, powerful, efficient, etc.

Start with Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu like Mint.

Cinnamon, KDE, and Gnome are all good desktop environments for beginners.

Zulip integrates with Jitsi, Zoom, and Bigbluebutton for voice and video chat. Looks like a sensible solution.

Not bad is a good description. It’s not fun to use compared to other chat software.

Call them cretins all you want, Discord in a great piece of software and very powerful. The usability is better than most others.

Yes, enshittification of Discord has started a while ago, and it’s becoming worse.