It certainly seems like public opinion changed the tast ten years or so. As an ubuntu user, could you confirm or deny these claims I've seen? One is that firefox is a snap even if you try to install it with apt. Another is that they show ads to get paid ubuntu in the terminal output?
I looked for it on openbsd, but then realized I can just open the source and put the openbsd relevant parts in a script without all the unnecessary parts.
This is a feature to me. I can fix issues and document workarounds, knowing that once it works it will probably continue to work until next release. With rolling or faster moving distros, every day is "I wonder if anything will break today with an update."
Wouldn't it be better to use backports? Testing doesn't always get security updates if a package is problematic and can't migrate from sid for a while.
I think the problem here is the motivation. The techies are scratching their itches because they can, making more tiling wms and such, but few are motivated to work on things they aren't personally interested in, such as user-friendliness etc. So it's either up to us techies to work on systems we don't use ourselves, or it won't happen.
Ok, let's hereby declare that Debian + Gnome is the official Linux. Everyone who wants Linux to have more users must run Debian and Gnome. First, how do we convince everyone to not use their favorite distros?
I am sorry if I misunderstood you. Would you mind explaining the line about evolving? It seemed to imply to me that there is a possible (better?) future state of things?
It would be neat if different front-ends catered to different types of users who wanted different aspects, but that there was an underlying compatibility that also worked better. If I understand it correctly, mastodon has implemented activitypub in a way where each post doesnt hold a reference to the entire thread hierarchy (as lemmy has), so it's difficult for mastodon software to construct hierarchies of replies in the same way, or at least it's more expensive to traverse. There's some differences in how groups are interpreted, as a hash tag or as a community. I'd rather be able to use one account and have the option to view activities in different ways, but now the implementations differ. That's the interoperability I mean that doesn't defeat decentralization.
How do you mean? To me a network is decentralized if there isn't one controlling company or organization. In the fediverse, I can set up my own instance of mastodon/lemmy/honk/whatever. The fact that I can use honk to follow people on mastodon and interact with them in a smooth way is interoperability to me. I don't need both a honk account and a mastodon account. This is a good thing imho. I can choose which software to run, or which home server to join, and still interact with people using different servers.
Could this be an XY problem? Maybe instead of having several accounts and a way to log in everywhere easily, the problem is lacking interoperability? It's hard to follow lemmy from mastodon, for example, but what if that was easy? Then you wouldn't need both a lemmy account and a mastodon account, one would be enough to use different aspects of the fediverse.
The words stable and reliable should have formal definitions.