Polarization is causing a lot of people to doubt that the collective money actually will be put to good use. In a lot of places (like my country, Israel) they're damn right, it's not.
I guess each country might have its own laws about this. Many countries have agreements (I forgot the term for this) where they would send each other's wanted criminals back so they can be tried where they committed the crime.
Just yesterday I joined a Discord server and one of the rules is:
II. There Will Be No Tolerance For Intolerance
SKG enforces a zero-tolerance policy towards hate speech or discriminatory behavior based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or any other protected characteristic. Any use of slurs or language intended to demean or dehumanize an individual or group is prohibited. Violation of this rule may result in immediate removal from the server.
I thought "no tolerance for intolerance" is kinda funny, especially when phrased that way, but obviously I think the policy is good. Just an amusing little oxymoron.
Sorry for going 100% off topic but since it came up, please everyone in the European Union go and sign the Stop Killing Games initiative: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ the deadline is coming up and the goal is to reach at least 1,500,000 signatures! It's looking like it's doable, every signature counts!
I think SQLite is a great middle ground. It saves the database as a single .db file, and can do everything an SQL database can do. Querying for data is a lot more flexible and a lot faster. The tools for manipulating the data in any way you want are very good and very robust.
However, I'm not sure how it would affect file size. It might be smaller because JSON/YAML wastes a lot of characters on redundant information (field names) and storing numbers as text, which the database would store as binary data in a defined structure. On the other hand, extra space is used to make common SQL operations happen much faster using fancy data structures. I don't know which effect is greater so file size could be bigger or smaller.
I love that you look at this and say "woah, that's way too much, I prefer less"
That's true for a lot of people, but I truly believe a very significant number of people are being exposed to Linux this way and will stick with it long-term. It will be a while until we see that reflected in the desktop and laptop statistics.
I haven't used SteamOS (or even seen many videos of it), but from what I've heard it's not shy about being a desktop operating system. Even the Steam Deck, which is marketed as a console like you said, lets you use it in desktop mode and run any Linux software without having to jump through any hoops. This isn't like Android which is technically Linux deep under the hood but effectively completely detached from the Linux ecosystem. SteamOS is part of the Linux desktop ecosystem, and it's proud of it.
Me neither. But I also never watched porn on desktop. I watch porn exclusively on Nintendo 2DS. Isn't that what everybody does?
Man, that guy sure knows how to ruin the mood!
Joking, of course. Keep pushing through!
To add to what others have said, I think Steam OS is making huge waves and that's a really strong force.
Linux Mint is exactly as easy to use as Windows, if not easier. In Windows you also needed to google every day basic functions, but I guess for you personally that was so long ago that you don't remember. On Windows you also need to use the terminal for some things, like removing some of their bloatware (xbox bullshit, for example).
There are some specific points I kind of agree with you about, but I don't agree with your general sentiment. Linux is easier to use than ever.
What do you mean? It's a massive mainstream operating system used by the majority of phones in the world.
I'm in the middle east in case that helps narrow it down. Very hot few days probably have something to do with it.
Where are they coming from? Are they hiding somewhere in my apartment? They seem to be flightless. They are all the same size and very small, here's one on my finger for scale:
Kind of an update from my previous post. The Proton Drive app on Android utterly failed to back up my photos and videos. I've now got a glimpse to a possible reason why.
I realized that it was doing fine with photos and small videos but was struggling with large files, so as a temporary measure, I moved all the files bigger than 1GB to a different folder on my phone. I then had to wipe the app's data and log back in because it was just hanging or looping repeatedly otherwise. After logging back in, it successfully backed up all the remaining files over many hours. At least, I think it did - I'd have to go one by one to find out and I'm really not feeling too confident about it. But if it didn't get all of them, it got almost all of them.
Then I added back in the files that were between 1GB and 2GB. It managed this fine. The app's data usage grew to about 4GB at some points but that is fine as it needs to create encrypted copies of the file it's backing up and it might be doing a few files in parallel. At the end, the data usage went back down to <1GB.
Then I tried to add back the files between 2GB and 5GB. There were four of them: 2.25GB, 2.50GB, 3.86GB, and 4.12GB. Total size: approximately 12.73 GB. After setting the app running, its data usage grew to upwards of 60GB and I had to halt it. As before, there was no way to get the app to behave again after that besides wiping data and logging back in again. The "clear local cache" button in the app's settings did seemingly nothing. I moved the big files back to the temporary folder.
Next I tried to move the files one at a time, starting from the smallest one. So one 2.25 GB video file. Turns out my phone shows base-10-based file sizes, so it's actually 2.091 GiB. The app misbehaves a little bit in vague ways that I didn't quite comprehend and can't explain, e.g. it got stuck at "3 files remaining" even though I only added 1 file, so I needed to wipe its memory again, but eventually it uploaded the dang file. I don't remember exactly how much data it used in the process, but the important thing is it worked. And then I looked at the file through the Proton Drive web interface and checked its details, where I saw what's in the picture:
Size: 2.09 GB
Original size: -2049486257 bytes
The original file size is stored as a 32-bit signed integer! Is this only in the web frontend, or is it also like that behind the scenes? What happens when the file size exceeds 4GiB? Does this only affect photos/videos or does it happens for the general-purpose Drive as well? Is this why big files have been failing for me?
I'll keep you guys updated... And I hope these bugs are fixed. I still believe in Proton.
Edit: the four files, added one by one, uploaded successfully. Now moving on to a 6.10GB file. This is bigger in bytes than 32 bits can represent. Wish me luck.
Edit next day: the 6.10 GB file failed to upload. It's perpetually stuck at "1 item left" after giving it more than enough time overnight. The app is also taking up some 15GB of space - much more than it should. While uploading previous files, it gree to marginally larger than the file being uploaded. Now it's well over 2x that. So my conclusion is that Proton Drive for Android can't back up videos larger than 4GB, and fails catastrophically when attempting to do so.
I'm already in contact with Proton support. I'm not sure I've quit convinced them of the severity of this bug yet (or multiple bugs) but they acknowledged that there are issues and suggested that the current beta version 2.4.0 of the app has mitigations regarding storage usage, and they gave me instructions for trying to access it.
True (in most contexts, probably including this one), but I think that only makes the case for SQLite stronger. What people do still care about is a good flexible, usable and reliable interface. I'm not sure how to get that with YAML.