GIMP's GTK3 port was finished several months ago. What remains to be done for GIMP 3.0 is bug-fixing and porting to the new Plug-in API.

The best way to upgrade to GTK4 is to upgrade to GTK3 first. There was some talk about working on GTK4 soon after GIMP 3.0 is out, but whether that will happen or not is uncertain.

It's the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

Anything that isn't Arch.

• Ubuntu's package managers won't stop fighting with each other so I can't complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don't feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
• Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don't like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
• openSUSE is great, but the package managers won't stop fighting with each other and it's lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
• Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
• Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
• Debian's packages are too old.
• Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
• The packages I want aren't in Solus. Is this distro even still around?

And for distros I won't consider trying:

• Gentoo is too much work.
• Qubes is too much work and I can't play games on it.
• I don't like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.

pushed useless crap like the activity view to people

This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.

slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.

Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?

They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).

They removed it because nobody wanted to maintain the code, which was generally agreed to be subpar, and it was blocking development elsewhere in Nautilus. They acknowledge it was a dumb idea to implement this functionality inside of Nautilus in the first place when they should have done it in the shell. They realized they were leaving users in the lurch here, so offered a few solutions like installing Nemo Desktop. They even developed a GNOME shell extension prototype before removing it that users could move straight to.

Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?

It wasn't part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.

Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.

It took an hour or two to compile and takes up about 5GB of space. The only program I'm really interested in is Xcode, which doesn't work at the moment.

Did your opinion of the teacher change at all after that?

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. [...] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what "open source" means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as "open source", but it's unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn't be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn't want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can't imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.

how this? through Firefox I experience ms websites the same as with edge. google websites? experience is full of small differences from chrome

Firefox is my main browser. In my experience, Microsoft services don't work at all on Firefox. I can't say I use much of either company's services, but Google tends to be more lax in some departments. For example, the Google Pixel is the only Android device that allows you to securely unlock the bootloader and install another operating system on it, rather than forcing you to root the device.

I'm not a fan of either company, but I get the impression Google is less actively hostile toward their customers than Microsoft. For the most part.

Oh, cool! Since when? I always thought that was something the user shouldn't need to remember and that Pacman should automatically prioritize it.

This is exactly why I love making these kinds of comments. Someone always comes along to teach me something new!

If you're using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit "Add [Search Engine]". And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.

So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.

It's especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it's also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you're using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn't really something you can do (yet).

I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2

Pros for Brave Search:

• (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other "search engines" listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
• Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher's interests.

Cons for Brave Search:

• Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You'll have to correct me on this one.
• Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
• Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.

Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don't even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it's cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the "smaller web" and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html

Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I've had with them. I just don't have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.

Lastly, I've learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don't use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html