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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox

    Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.

    My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it’s just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it’s performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla’s choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.

    I know I’ll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.


  • There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.

    What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won’t be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you’d need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That’s not great UX.

    Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn’t necessarily be expensive, but wouldn’t be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don’t see a hint of it happening.

    All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?

    I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn’t want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I’ll have to.


  • What? Macos Sonoma is compatible with MacBooks from 2017. Hackintoshes are absolutely still possible on Intel, and from a cursory googling it appears they’re out there. Apple will eventually cut off support for Intel Macs on some future (major) release, sure, but there’s probably a few more years until that happens.

    With that said, hackintoshes are a suboptimal solution to OPs problem. Ideally they should really move to other applications properly supported on multiple platforms.




  • Not the guy you’re replying to, but I have been using Thorium for the past couple of weeks. It’s pretty nice, kinda like what Edge was before going to shit for the past year or so. But being a Chromium browser, it eventually will be hit with the ManifestV2-no-more hammer. The maintainer said the best he’ll be able to do is use some patches to keep ManifestV2 active through enterprise group policies, but it’s expected google will eventually remove the ManifestV2 code entirely, at which point he said he’s not going to be able to maintain a fork to keep ManifestV2 in.

    I dislike Brave for some of its sketchyness in the past, and the other Chromium forks haven’t made clear guidelines on what they’re going to do when ManifestV3 is made the default, so I’m bracing because I think I’m going to be forced to go back to Firefox because of AdBlock shenanigans.



  • I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn’t age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.

    I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.

    And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.


  • Actually, we just entered spring, on late September. And we did so in the midst of a heatwave that broke heat records for this year - we had days with 37C, which is high even for summer, and it won’t be summer here until December.

    Yes, I’m scared af as well. My family is sort of ignoring my warnings and actually planning to move to the coast (Santos), which is even hotter.

    Some guys here in the comments said about migrating to the north, and that’s something that has been on my mind as well as a long term plan, although I find it unlikely I can move to North America in the short term, so I’m thinking more realistically maybe southern Argentina?



  • Just FYI, Barrier has been abandoned / unsupported for awhile. Although the last release mostly works, don’t expect future support.

    Its successor is https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap, and although there have been some coy maintainance on it, they have yet to provide an installable release, due to “reasons”.

    I use Synergy myself, which is the ancestor of both of the above. Although it started as open source, it has been turned into a commercial product a long time ago, which is why I’m not providing the link here. It’s still maintained, for better or for worse, but in the latest release-to-be they revamped the UI and for some reason I couldn’t get it to work at all on my setup - it seems to rely on some auto configuration / autodetection gimmickry which simply is not working here. To make matters worse, the new UI is essentially an electron app, which means it has become a lot more bloated. And then there’s also the telemetry thing. I’ve been using the old 1.1 legacy version, holding out hope that input-leap eventually lifts off.