Baldur Nil @ balder1993 @programming.dev

Mobile software engineer.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have to consider things in the bigger perspective.

Some protects are very complex and require multiple teams of developers to maintain. That’s different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.

So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need some sort of funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).

In practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.

Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users

That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.

Yeah, saying “most GitHub users can’t live without a commercial entity” is such a nonsense. GitHub is successful while it works well. The moment it doesn’t, there will be other services.

At the same time, I feel like nowadays there's less forums or places people can ask help with, although today ChatGPT can be a good help with newbie questions.

You’re right, but that’s not the point. The other poster said it’s a skill issue. Sure, if the person can’t run commands in a terminal or doesn’t know what’s an executable that’s a skill issue.

Getting stuck because the game is having weird glitches that show off once in a while and you need classes on computer graphics to debug isn’t skill issues imo. Otherwise are all gonna establish that Linux isn’t for non programmers then?

Another option is to have enough people in the company interested in using that to justify it.

In my company (a large bank) Linux is now being rolled out to selected people as test because there was enough interest from a lot of the backend crowd.

It’s a good concept, I just have to look it up and understand exactly what it is doing before I start using it.

That’s what I do, except I straight up create the python venv in a folder, activate it and then do pip install yt-dlp. No messing up with my system.

This is at the very least super interesting.

This is very good.

It seems that it is based on Qt, so there might be a easy way to fix this unless they’re creating their controls from scratch. I know QML can be used as a canvas to draw custom controls, so it depends on the code.

I’m not sure how that could even be done, maybe a way to control the GUI with commands that you’d then be able to script, like Selenium on browsers?

That would probably look terrible though.

I think it’s easy to make a generic YAML editor that all you need to do is to pass a “definitions” file that says all the possible options to show as a drop down or toggle etc.

That would be useful for many projects.

Certainly one of the things is to keep building stuff. I’ve recently decided to write a small app (I went for a clone app because I don’t want to deal with designing it) and it has really forced me to learn SwiftUI (I’ve only used UIKit professionally), while previously I’d read articles without much reason to hold on to them.

So if you want to learn something, find a project that will force you to learn that thing, but if the purpose is to learn, don’t try to make it an “original idea” or something like that. It would only lead to procrastination. Find an existing tool that makes use of what you want to learn and try to implement it yourself.

TumbleOS

The problem with Sublime is that it’s a paid one, and not everybody wants to pay for something that is perceived by the community as something that should be free and open source.

Yeah, I guess the idea of VSCode isn’t to be a “ready to use” IDE, but to be configurable — which it is.

The main thing that makes it popular nowadays is the ecosystem of plugins around it. Ex: when Copilot was released, I believe the VSCode plugin was the best one.

Also many frameworks docs have instructions on how to use it with VSCode and which plugins to install, such as some web frameworks and Flutter.

They didn’t even bother to do a gradual rollout, like even small apps do.

The level of company-wide incompetence is astounding, but considering how organizations work and disregard technical people’s concerns, I’m never surprised when these things happen. It’s a social problem more than a technical one.

This is the right answer. To complement it, I’d just say I’ve read someone before say that at Microsoft there’s no incentive to squeeze performance, so why bother if it won’t help you get promoted or get a bonus? All these things add up over time to make Windows only care about it when there is actually a huge bottleneck.

It’s also worth noting (for non programmers out there) that speed has no correlation with the amount of code. Often it’s actually the opposite: things start simple and begin to grow in complexity and amount of code exactly to squeeze more optimizations for specific use-cases.