Nostr notes by early_riser

Happened to me once. I did not know who he was in told him so. ...

2026-06-03T11:08:29Z

Happened to me once. I did not know who he was in told him so. It's possible the guy was bluffing. He claimed to be some state senator.

My old copy of SMB deluxe on the game boy color was my latest ...

2026-04-16T23:07:29Z

My old copy of SMB deluxe on the game boy color was my latest subject for battery replacement. Shame the file got wiped, as IIRC it had stickers or stationary or something that you could write messages on that middle school me probably messed around with.

edit: also this is in fact my original GBA from 2001. Yay for AA batteries!

A huge upshot to using a laptop is you have a built-in UPS and ...

2026-04-07T23:46:21Z

A huge upshot to using a laptop is you have a built-in UPS and KVM.

Nostr event nevent1qqsp0n8m04g32lr8nau9fa0ru530ckq0z8jtzgxcwu8k5ppxec9cudczyqtkj8c4w6ngm0h5euprt5d98xech2tz9vzg4arsn0cf9kj8tjtgjh5q3aa

2026-04-02T11:00:00Z

I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but ...

2026-03-17T17:19:20Z

I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but let's not pretend it doesn't have its own issues. UX and accessibility are two I whine about regularly, but another big one is project abandonment.

I can't tell you how many old forum/reddit posts I've run across of a lone developer hyping up their latest project, only for me to go to the github page and notice the last commit was 7 years ago.

If you're not familiar with the Gemini protocol, it's an updated alternative to Gopher, which in turn was an early competitor to the WWW back in the 90s. Gemini itself I can't speak to, but if you go down the list of gemini servers and clients on [geminiprotocol.net](https://geminiprotocol.net/), you'll see 404s, broken links, and expired certs galore. There was a flood of developer interest 5 or 6 years ago when the protocol was new, but everyone wandered away once the shiny wore off.

My recent foray into wiki software has turned up a few corpses as well. Wiki.js development seems to have stalled, and Pepperminty wiki has been abandoned for three years now.

And yes, I know this is because FOSS devs are often doing this on their own time for little to no money, so passion is the only thing driving them, but passion can only get you so far.

Besides loss of developer interest, community schisms can cause a project to sink. Remember what happened to Audacity? I think it ended up surviving but there was a real concern for a while that the forks wouldn't be as well supported.

All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are "too big to fail" have big corporate support, like the Linux kernel.

I'm guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don't have that luxury. That's why they use proprietary software.

And don't say beans or I'll reach through the internet ...

2026-02-19T21:39:09Z

And don't say beans or I'll reach through the internet and punch you in the face.

TL;DR: Is my statement below incorrect? Are there in fact ...

2026-01-20T19:44:52Z

TL;DR: Is my statement below incorrect? Are there in fact meaningful efforts to improve accessibility on Linux? Are there distros _that people have actually used practically_ that make an effort to be accessible?

I have used desktop Linux on and off since 2009, mostly flavors of Ubuntu with occasional detours into things like Arch or CentOS (RIP).

I currently have Mint installed on a separate drive but I can't fully break away from Windows because as a blind user the experience is not only unsatisfactory it has gotten worse in the years I've been using it. Orca hasn't improved at all, and the magnifier has actually lost functionality at some point, my guess is the move away from GNOME 2. Among other things you used to be able to assign arbitrary modifier keys to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel but this is no longer the case.

I have little faith that things will improve. Any given Linux distro isn't one product, it's a bunch of different projects. One group makes the kernel, another makes the shell, another the window manager, yet another makes the desktop environment, audio, bluetooth, graphics drivers etc. All these make the assumption that the user is able-bodied, and bolting accessibility on top of all these disparate systems after the fact is very difficult. It's no accident that MacOS and iOS are frequently cited as the most accessible platforms. Apple controls the entire stack from hardware to UI and even many of the apps and has the resources to devote to serving a comparatively tiny portion of their userbase.

Civ VI would only use one controller and you had to pass it ...

2026-01-14T20:41:29Z

Civ VI would only use one controller and you had to pass it around. That's annoying.