It feels like making a car for an international market that is meant for anybody but is locked into one language in the user interface for no good reason and either can’t be changed without overhauling a big part of the car construction process involving somehow parts of the actual powertrain needing to be changed or it is only a moderately difficult process to begin and they haven’t prioritized it which makes me wonder how they establish priorities for creating a car that is useful to as much of the world as possible in the first place…

I mean I am thankful for useful FOSS software, and having ANY alternative to microsoft office, especially a functional free option is amazing… it is just… come on LibreOffice!!!

Let a cottage community of weird LibreOffice keybinding schemes flourish!!!

Sure they do, but all of the alternatives are not nearly as convenient. But you can absolutely get by without an iPhone or Android phone with Play services.

Effectively, for most people, they don’t.

Most people make a new phone purchase impulsively when involved with negotiating a phone plan at a store or in a rush after they break their old phone and need a new one for life and work almost immediately, the cost benefit analysis for most people simply doesn’t make sense unless they are naturally interested in tech as a hobby or it is related to their career (or are surrounded by friendly people who are).

Wait, isn’t this just a matter of generating a config text file that you could set keybindings with that would specify all the custom keybindings necessary to give a basic degree of commonality in keybindings for a newbie?

Coming from emacs the idea that a program as complex as the Libreoffice suite wouldn’t have a generalized modular way to shift between different keybindings styles is a bit odd to me. Isn’t it just a matter of exposing the keybindings in a text file config format that could easily be imported/loaded into your Libreoffice program?

I don’t have any skin in this game, but I do think that it is worth emphasizing how useful it is to accomodate people who want radically different keyboard shortcut styles, or rather how obviously common sense it is to prioritize this in development. Keep a main keybinding style, specify a config format and then let the weirdos fiddle with alternate keybindings on the side.

Keyboard shortcuts can be dealbreakers especially for someone stressed out and overwhelmed who is having trouble getting momentum in a new software, thus for an open source project this is a natural target for software development focus because it is possibly one of the simplest, most effective and broadly applicable ways to expand the usefulness of a software tool to a bigger audience (who will hopefully eventually become contributors or support the community in some way themselves).

Yeah I know people say “Syncthing is not a file backup tool!” but when I am dealing with 99% text files and I can slam the “keep X amount of previous versions of file” up to 30 well… I mean it still isn’t the way Syncthing was meant to be used but it works, it is minimal and it is simple and that is LITERALLY a lifesaver for me given how much I struggle with executive function.

I hope the people that work on these tools understand that for some they literally have a lifesaving potential, organization is a massive struggle for me and my society provides no social safety net for just being bad at focusing no matter how much people claim to be accomodating and accepting of severe ADHD. I don’t mean this to place undue burden or weight on the developers but to emphasize the work they contribute is real and directly impacts people’s lives for the better in a way they should be proud as fuck about.

Most people who obsess about organizational tools, project management systems and thinking tools have no problem switching from one system to the next, it is almost a hobby for people into this kind of thing. Not me, I find it desperately hard to get myself to commit to even a single system longterm and not just randomly drop the habit and never go back. Critical for my quality of life are open source softwares like Syncthing that just do what they do with no company to become bankrupt and shut down the tool, enshittify the tool, require an account login, have all my organization locked in a proprietary format on cloud servers or any number of other things corporations attach to software tools that make them useless for my condition.

In the software development world “friction” is the thing you introduce to compel people towards your monetization scheme and “attention” is a resource to be harvested, meanwhile I try to use these tools while drowning in internal friction from task switching difficulties and constantly having my attention ripped away by my ADHD from the important things I am trying to get done. This is what I mean when I say open source tools like Syncthing are literally lifesaving for me.

Even other hobbiest DIY filesyncing tools like Nextcloud are mostly useless for me as they require a complex annoying fiddly maintenance of a central server that is a single point of failure, and the idea I will keep that fiddly and fragile of a system going longterm is downright laughable even though I think those tools are cool. With Syncthing I am able to just keep leapfrogging my important files from device to device, there is no central server I have to maintain with focus I don’t have even for the thing I am trying to use the organizational tool to help myself get done in the first place.

<3 devs of Syncthing!!!

edit I would like to add a personal “burn in hell” to the people who run Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive. The entire setup of these services encourages you to get lost creating and uploading a bunch of files, run out of cloud space and then be so totally overwhelmed in trying to manage all the files you have created and uploaded that you just acquiesce and purchase the premium subscription to get more space instead. From my perspective this kind of monetization architecture is blatantly predatory and hurtful and is one of the reasons I see these corporations as enemies trying to hurt and entrap me for profit.

Your understanding of my post and quotes I selected is poor, whiteness is far more than “just” being literally someone with white skin.

Also feel free to try to argue against Ta-Nehisi Coates, you are going to lose, but knock yourself out it will be funny.

Seriously. What’s up with white american evangelicals?

This is whiteness, this is one of the core founding tenets of irrational hate that the US was founded on.

To Trump, Whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried Whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.”

The mind seizes trying to imagine a Black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of White supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, White people (particularly White men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to Black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as White people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as Black people, and even more is possible.

https://colorlines.com/article/read-ta-nehisi-coates-why-trump-first-white-president/

The same exact pattern of racism extends to perceptions of piousness.

Great thanks, what do you win for condescending the humanity of Palestinians at a level that bankrupts your intellectual capacity to empathize with people being slaughtered at a mass indiscriminate scale by your countries weapons, money and diplomatic cover?

What you win is the same future for all of us, fool.

Obsidian seems great and the company seems genuinely very decent. I appreciate that the file format isn’t locked down and that it retains a plaint text philosophy. Do you use Syncthing for sharing Obsidian notes between devices?

We bring our own media coverage, this is the 2020s not the 1980s, mainstream news outlets have collapsed in viewership and our protests are growing fast even though they are already big.

If mainstream news doesn’t want to cover it, they are just signing their own death sentence of irrelevance from the perspective of their core intended audience.

Doesn’t the internet archive relieve that stress?

I think that was probably the real reason for the block, the Internet Archive is too functional, scalable and accessible of a service for reddit’s lame excuses about needing to gatekeep access to the community created content on their website to not make reddit look totally stupid unless they came up with an excuse to block the Internet Archive.

Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine.

Seeing this happen has been one of the saddest most desperate parts about watching the internet dying.

It was obvious what was going to happen years ago, that didn’t stop people from acting like I was a reactionary foolish cynic when I voiced concern about this though.

Seriously FUCK Discord (and Reddit).

That is because you are too cowardly to understand a necessary solidarity between US citizens and Palestinians being slaughtered by primarily US weapons. There is no future for anyone if we cannot drive the wedge of empathy into the machinery of mass death, the Palestinian Genocide is simply a preview of our fates (how many US police departments have trained with the IDF? The answer is a lot) if we do not demand it stop with everything we have.

Shame on you for taking the easy road out and reacting impulsively when the truth is too uncomfortable for you to think about critically.

People will treat you the way you treat others, so let me ask you how do you think people will treat you for being toxic towards people speaking out against a genocide we are complicit in and could stop?

Biden refused to run a campaign and administration that provided any meaningful progressive vision and then he dropped out only after it was too late.

Of course he does.

edit -to be fair to Biden his administration did get a lot of wins, such as some great environmental policies… but I am talking about a broad vision and rhetoric. An actual alternative to Republican visions of catastrophe that challenge the flawed assumptions at the heart of conservatism. Exhibit A) is how Biden and other powerful establishment democrats never really pushed back on Republican narratives about immigration which opened the door further for Trump to dial things up to 11 in his cruelty towards immigrants in his second term

We have seen a massive, historic amount of protests since Trump’s election?

We are FAR past the point that “just following orders” is a valid excuse.

Emacs Org mode (or Logseq) and Syncthing together are probably the only system I have found that works for my chaos, I am very thankful for how these softwares have allowed me to structure my organizational system in a way that is simple and I have direct control over.

Also, it takes years for me to integrate habits deeply into my life with many many many repetitions necessary to lock the habit in, so being able to organize things in plaintext gives me much needed assurance that I won’t have the rug pulled out from under me by the company behind the product enshittifying or going out of business.

Syncthing is critical to my organizational systems because it makes the sharing of notes between devices agnostic of the specific notes system I am using. Syncthing shares a folder and it has some text files in it… those could be .org emacs org mode files or logseq files… it doesn’t matter I can change my notes system and retain the same sharing mechanism.

From the bottom of my heart thank you to everyone who has worked on these tools, I plan to keep donating to and supporting these projects in the future!

What if it was as the name of a large dump next to Ireland tho

You missed England 2.0

Ok so I sounded a bit edgey, you realize we are talking about an ongoing genocide my country is funding, arming and providing diplomatic cover for?

Am I random internet guy (who is virtually powerless save for my voice) being a bit too edgey for your tastes really the thing worth focusing on here?

This is an ongoing genocide, if my tone comes off as childish that is of little concern to the discussion at hand.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war with genocidal aspects, what is happening in Israel is genocide and nothing else. There is no war in Israel, Israel already entirely encloses Gaza and a similar process is occurring in the West Bank, Israel controls basic access to food water electricity medical care… this is in no sense a war, it is wholly an act of genocide.

Save your handwringing about this for someone else who won’t repeatedly post quotes demolishing your ridiculous narrative that the higher ups at Microsoft didn’t have a pretty obvious picture of what was happening.

What, do you think they were are all complete idiots? I don’t think so.