There are a lot of comments here about which launchers are “close enough” to the Nova feature set, but very few people are talking about specific features and the alternatives that support them. I really just use two, and everything else is a cherry on top that I can do without if push comes to shove.

1. Icons that open a folder if you swipe them, but launch the first app in the folder if you tap them. That way my apps all pull double-duty as both the one-tap app AND the list of alternatives I use less often.
2. Google Now integration that swipes in from the left.

Action Launcher used to be my go-to, and it’s still the best implementation of #1 because of the little indicators it adds to let you know if something is a “cover” (folder when you swipe) or “shutter” (widget when you swipe). Sadly it’s gotten rather bloated over the years and spends more time force-closing from one glitch or another than it does actually running properly. Nova was my backup because it added “covers” a few years ago and I remembered enjoying the app about a decade ago. Now what?

Good point, and we should probably tease apart that distinction between funding models and project intent/scope. For me, I’ve always seen apps like Boost, Sync, Infinity, and Jerboa as being “indie passion projects” regardless of how they pay their devs because of things like the project’s scope, the dev team size, and their community involvement. They just don’t strike me as the kind of apps you build for their “explosive growth and profit potential,” you know? So by extension, I’ve got to assume anyone who builds one is doing it because they love lemmy, wish it was better, and happen to have a little coding knowledge to do something about it. That’s a mission I can get behind.

Funding, on the other hand, is something that everyone needs but no one has actually figured out. So as long as it looks like a dev is experimenting with their options in good faith and honestly engaging with the community to figure out what’s best, I can’t really fault them for going with one model over another. I’ve got my own preference for open-source community-funded projects of course, but I’m not going to begrudge a dev for seeing it differently.

With Boost, there’s an ad-free and privacy-respecting option, and then there’s an Admob version. Those are the two most common funding methods out there, and I’m not surprised in the slightest by any dev who reaches for them as off-the-shelf answers. Lemmy has an open-source vibe, sure, but Boost started as a reddit app. Go with what you know. I might be wrong, but it doesn’t feel like the ad supported one is being built to harvest data - it’s just a drop-in advertising space like websites have used since the beginning of time. And if I’m really that concerned about it, I can pay for ad-free. Do I wish that it was open-source, patreon supported, and community built? Sure. But this ticks enough of my boxes to say “sure, why not,” and then casually watch how the conversation about funding plays out in the comments. Who knows, maybe the dev will open things up or add a donation-ware version based on feedback, and I can upvote the Lemmings who suggest it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the project feels genuine and in a spirit that I can support. The foundation is solid. Everything else is just details, and I’ll happily tag along for the ride as the developer, the community, and Lemmy as a platform figure out what that means.

Look, I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a difference between a $965B corporation whose sole purpose is to harvest your personal info for ads, and a solo dev who just wants to make their (and your) Lemmy browsing a bit less painful. They’re putting in a hellofa lot of time and effort into this thing, which means a hellofa lot of time not spent making money at a regular job. I’m more than happy to kick a few bucks here and there to keep something like that afloat, especially given how apps like Boost and Sync make me actually want to spend time on Lemmy. Encouraging fediverse adoption is a win for the whole ecosystem. You don’t have to use Boost, and if you do choose to install it, you don’t have to pay. There’s an inexpensive ad-free version alongside the ad-supported one for exactly that reason. But complaining about Boost because you hate “social media apps” is like yelling “Fuck Nestle” at the 12-year-old selling lemonade from their driveway. Different scale, different purpose.

It’s fine to not pay, but I’m glad that some people do support indie devs when they can. The world would be a lot bleaker without little passion projects like this dotting the landscape and filling in the gaps to help bigger projects like Lemmy take off.

Yes, which is why turning a hospital or refugee camp into a command post is a war crime. But it also means that attacking a hospital or refugee camp, whether they’re being used as shields for military targets or not, should also not be done lightly. Iron-clad case made beforehand that it is a military target, rigorous scrutiny of the claim evaluated by an independent body after the fact, and the military action against the target has to prioritize the civilians as much as possible. They’re people. Men, women, and children who have nothing to do with the conflict and are simply caught in the crossfire. One side showing a disregard for the life of innocents does not justify the other side doubling down on the same.

Holy whataboutism, Batman, no one is arguing that Hamas is in the right here. What are you even trying to say with this? “Hamas ‘fucks civilians’ which makes them evil… so Israel might as well join in and ‘fuck civilians’ too”?

Can’t we all just agree that no one should be “fucking civilians” for any reason, because you know, they’re civilians?

Anyone with insurance. If they’re charging your insurance provider $1,400, then you’ll either see that cost passed directly on to you when you get COVID, or see it as an increase in everyone’s monthly insurance cost as they spread out what they’re paying across their whole customer base. The money’s got to come from somewhere. Granted, insurance companies will likely negotiate on the price and not pay that full amount, but it’s not exactly a good-faith negotiation if their starting offer is a 10,000% markup.

Also, 2028 is less than 5 years away and COVID is set to be a persistent staple of society like the yearly flu indefinitely. They’re basically saying that anyone who gets it while committing the heinous crime of being poor is SOL, even though it costs them almost nothing to produce and was developed using our tax dollars to start with.

Everyone here keeps talking about how the UI is amazing, so maybe this is the right place to ask: is there an FOSS office suite that has a command pallet like coding editors and GSuite do, where you can tap a hotkey and type the tool name without having to dig through menus?

Sounds like a pretty good excuse to me. The code is viewable, which speaks to the privacy and accountability crowd. He allows personal modification, which appeases the tinkerers. The only group it doesn’t benefit are the ones trying to make money off of his work by degrading the user experience with ads. Are there better licenses he could have picked to accomplish his goal? Yes. Am I going to go on a Lemmy rant over a dev’s choice of license when he’s already done so much right? Hell no. It’s a win. Take the W and uninstall later if he changes his tune, just like with any other app whether open or closed.

I do agree that true open source is better for everyone as it allows the community to truly own, improve, and evolve the app into the best version of itself. But this is the Privacy group, not the FOSS one. As far as my money is concerned, it ticks the boxes and earned my install. We’ll see where it goes from here.

I migrated my daily driver from Ubuntu > Kubuntu > Nobara (based on Fedora), and I understand that fear of switching away from Debian after investing years into its ecosystem. Even still, Nobara has been wonderful and you might end up enjoying it (or another Fedora distro) just as much as I do. Like with Ubuntu/Debian, most apps are pre-packaged for Fedora, and the switch from one to the other is often as simple as trading sudo apt install for sudo dnf install.

If your shoes, the thing I’d be more worried about is the transition from Kubuntu (with its built-in tweaks that smooth out the rough edges of Linux and offer an “it just works” experience) to bare-bones Debian. Love 'em or hate 'em, Canonical put a lot of work into their distro and it became the go-to for a reason. That’s actually how I found myself on Nobara - the promise of pre-applied usability tweaks. I’m not a gamer, but I love that media players, graphics packages, OBS Studio (which I use for Zoom meetings at work), and my condenser microphone all work out of the box. And then there’s the gaming stuff as a cherry on top.

I’m on KDE as well, but you’ve got to admit that the way Gnome’s overview, virtual desktops, app menu, and search interface all work so seamlessly and logically together is a thing of beauty. Tap “Meta” one time and you can see all of your running programs, drag them between desktops, scroll to switch desktops, start typing to open apps and files… it just works. Meanwhile on KDE, it’s a relative pain to remap the “Meta” key and moving windows between desktops still feels clunky even in the overview.

All of that said, I still prefer KDE. Plasma 6 is set to integrate many of the Gnome features above, and KDE’s design philosophy as a whole is much more flexible. For example, I use two side-by-side monitors and it makes logical sense to imagine my virtual desktops as being sets of monitors directly above/below my physical ones that I can vertically scroll between. On KDE, it’s easy to set my grid of virtual spaces to be one column with many rows and be done with it, or for someone else to pick the opposite, or for them to go with a full grid of spaces if they so choose. But on Gnome, even though the vertical layout used to be the default, their newly dogmatic insistence that we only slide sideways means I’m dealing with multiple plugins that often glitch or conflict with other parts of the UI.

Both systems have their merits and deserve a place. (But I’ll gladly fight with anyone who denies that KDE is the obvious king)

Friendly reminder that, on the whole, there’s nothing “friendly” about the frankly horrifying Chinese and Russian human rights records, so “friendly” Lemmings begging us to focus on the single cherry-picked tree instead of the forest of atrocities might not be as “friendly” as they claim.

There are many shortcomings and worrying trends in the EU and the United States, but let’s hold off on the false equivalencies to countries that engage in genocide, jail or “disappear” dissent, and (until recently) engaged in forced sterilization and/or abortion for women against their will as part of the One-Child policy. So yes, China is very “friendly” and “progressive” /s. As for modern Russia (since you’re only mentioning the USSR), abortion is only legal as an elective procedure through the 12th week, requires a 2 to 7 day waiting period, and can be refused by the doctor against the patient’s wishes. When you talk smack about countries in the EU despite praising Russia for the exact same thing, it doesn’t exactly feel like you’re conversing in good faith.

Ideally this would be baked into ActivityPub, true, as would a distinction between porn, gore, and other sensitive topics for easy filtering by flair. But in the meantime, I’m relatively satisfied with the (admittedly hacked together) approach we have now. We already spend a couple minutes playing around with the look and feel of any new client we download, and filters are just part of that “settling in” process. If we had a bunch of them to set, it’d be one thing. But porn filtering really is just a matter of tagging one or two instances to cover 99% of the content out there. And the best part is that you’re not even digging through the settings, you’re tapping 3 buttons (max) on posts if you see them at all. As far as inconveniences go when switching apps, that one’s pretty minor.

As for being “locked in” and beholden to a particular client, are you really locked in if all of them let you do the same things (albeit in their own ways)?

Many of the Android apps let you filter instances, as well as individual communities or users. Most instances don’t host porn because of the legal headache, so blocking the only two that specialize in it should (mostly) do the trick: lemmynsfw and pornlemmy. On Sync for Lemmy, tap the overflow button on an offending post > filter > filter instance

The clipboard history app is great, but I still wish it let you pin/bookmark things you don’t want it to auto-delete. There was a pull request to add it in a while ago, but it was nixed because it would make the tool “too competent” and app-like. Except that it’s a pretty standard feature of clipboard managers, wouldn’t make things any more complicated for those who feel like ignoring it, and none of the alternative apps work with global shortcuts on Wayland!