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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Barrier has been abandoned quite awhile ago. Its successor is supposed to be InputLeap, and although their GitHub repo is very active, they have yet to make a release.

    I didn’t even know that Synergy provided a “community” version of their app until very recently. I’ve paid for a license many years ago, so I’ve been using their 1.1x versions, which for better or worse, are still maintained along with the 3.x branch (which I’ve tried using but could never make it work, which is for the best because the fact they pivoted their UI to electron-based also left a bad taste in my mouth).

    Edit: also, if I understand correctly, Synergy’s latest versions on the 1.x branch borrows a lot from InputLeap.



  • Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.

    Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.

    One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.


  • and do you think there were repercussions before?

    For X? Sure, that’s why they’re leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge’s orders, they’d surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they’re adding gasoline to the burning world.

    The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.



  • I don’t actually care about the drama per se at this point either. I mentioned it because, along with the fact that:

    • development is not very open (in that only that one guy commits and releases stuff)
    • release cadence is very erratic and often lags behind upstream chromium, which is a direct consequence of the previous point
    • you mentioned about the guys absence - the first time was some time ago and he was inpatient in the hospital for (IIRC) alcohol abuse, and this absence actually coincided with the drama over the furry and the other stuff, so it took awhile for it to be addressed, which only added more fuel to the fire. The second was just this last couple of months were he was house sitting for his parents (mentioned on the release notes I linked before)

    All of this paints a bleak outlook for the long term health of this project, IMO. Which is too bad , because I still think it’s one of the better forks of chromium.





  • I’m very torn on disco. Season 2 is probably the best (due in no small part that it sets up SNW), but the rest are a chore to watch. Most of them have some neat ideas, but they’re badly executed more often than not. They also were too heavy handed with each season arcs serialization, most episodes don’t stand on their own, and the writing and consistency is just bad. I just finished the final season, and I’m glad they’re done with it so they can put more money on good Trek like SNW - hopefully they don’t screw it up eventually.





  • Apparently it’s not that the software is broken, it’s that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

    As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it’ll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft’s rationale here. They can’t be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it’s known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

    In the last few decades that I’ve been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I’m more frustrated at Microsoft that I’m forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.




  • This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

    As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

    The key point is this:

    […] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

    Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

    We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.



  • Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

    Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.