I do like the YouTube integration. A good chunk of them have a link to a main long form video which is nice when you don't want to watch a video in 50 parts. You can scroll and be like, that's a cool project let me watch the full 30 mins video.
I wish we went the other way around: build for native and compile to HTML/CSS/WASM.
For me the disadvantage of Electron is well, it doesn't have any advantage or performance improvement over the browser version for 99% of use cases, and when you shove that on a mobile phone it performs as horribly as the web version.
People already use higher level components that ends up shitting out HTML and CSS anyway, why not skip the middleman and just render the box optimally from the start? Web browsers have become good, but if you can skip parsing HTML and CSS entirely and also skip maintaining their state, that's even better.
I had the misfortune of developing a React Native app, and I'd say thinking in terms of rows and columns and boxes was nice. Most of RN's problems are because they still run JS and so you have to bundle node and have the native messaging bridge, and of course that it's tied to the turd that is React. But zero complains about the UI part when it doesn't involve the bridge: very smooth and snappy, much more than the browser. And the browser version was no different than standard React in performance.
I like that it's not yet another Chromium one at least.
A lot of these are partial bans. Canada for example only bans it for government issued phones which makes sense, there shouldn't be any apps let alone social media apps on those devices.
Probably move on to YouTube Shorts or Instagram reels. I don't have Instagram but the YT Shorts are basically just TikTok crossposts anyway.
Ideally Pixelfed would win but that's very hopeful, a lot of the creators are expecting to be paid.
There's too much money to be made with the format for it to die yet.
It'll depend a lot on your experience. I can just install Arch without reading the wiki at all in about 5 minutes for something fairly vanilla. If you're comfortable with Linux then following the wiki won't be too hard, took me maybe 2-3 hours on my first install before I had my DE and everything all set up (12 years ago). If you've never used Linux before and take the deep dive then it could take hours and days depending on how fast you can absorb all that information.
"Easy" is very subjective, there's stuff that's so dumbed down for the sake of "easy" that it makes my life harder when I need to do more complex stuff. I know people for whom linear algebra in 11 dimensions is easy for them to do and solve. Easy is relative to your own personal experience level and what you're trying to accomplish.
Install it in a VM as a test run, you'll see by yourself.
No, simply because even with pure CSS and even pure HTML you can find ways to leak some information about the browser. For example, a background image that only loads on 1920x1080, another for 2560x1440, and so on. Make hundreds of those for every possible resolution (they can be the same file on the server but at a different path), and there you go, you now figured that the client downloaded img/background/2448x1280.png from the server logs. You can use the same trick for fonts as well, you just apply the same trick on a box on the page that is sized based on text content. Repeat for every font you want to test for.
There's just a ton of those little features that are for performance optimizations because loading a 4K background on a 480p phone is a bad experience for everyone involved. Sometimes you need to know the size of some elements to position other elements relative to it. You need the mouse cursor position to open popups at the right place. You need the window size to realign popups and modals. You'd have to go back to text based only sites like it's the 80s and 90s to avoid that kind of fingerprinting.
And thus Tor's solution: everyone's got the same window size, same fonts and everything.
That's the smart way to do math. I mean not with such small numbers but you'd do the same thing adding up large numbers, you break down the numbers and rearrange them in a way that's easier to compute.
Algebra probably feels intuitive to you.
They're also trying to teach that in math classes (it gets called "new" math) but the boomers are freaking out because "why can't they just do normal additions like we used to, this is so complicated". And the answer to that is, 99% of the time you'll be doing algebra because we literally all carry a calculator in our pockets and sometimes on our wrists at all times and we never need to just do a long division. And that kind of thinking really makes it easy to break down formulas because your brain thinks in terms of moving stuff around in an equation.
And since when have you known any computer to be problem-free?
Software that's not made from overworked engineers working 80 hours a week pressured to work even faster to complete this week's sprint.
I'm so tired of "computers are buggy and everyone accepts that". No! Computers don't have to be buggy, you just have to not shove trash software on it made by morons doing the bare minimum.
I have software that's been running on servers for literal years, not a single bug. The hardware's been sized appropriately and I wrote good, sustainable and maintainable code. My computers all can easily do weeks and months of uptime. I pick up my laptop and open the lid and 100% of the time it wakes up from sleep and it's ready to go.
The overwhelming majority of "production" and "enterprise quality" code I work with is total garbage that should never have been written and its author never hired in the tech space. We repeatedly get reports on how X car manufacturer was pwned for not following best practices that are a decade or two old.
Corporate greed makes EVs suck because it's developed for as cheap as possible and the target is "good enough customers tolerate it". Shit barely works properly when going through the happy path and the error path just... usually crashes your car.
I've had to reboot my car at red lights way too fucking often and it's not even an EV. 2020 model and the infotainment reliably crashes if I have a Slack or Zoom call going because it tries to read the phone number off my phone over Bluetooth and doesn't know how to handle a null phone number = the radio crashes.
It's not fucking rocket science.
Indicates to me the decision to do ActivityPub was bolted on very late in the project's lifecycle, probably rushed to try to take the users flocking away from Twitter.
Because a lot of those limitations makes zero sense.
For the end user, its main weakness is that complex pages can be pretty slow to render if not coded well. It's not that bad either. You wouldn't be like "oh this is a React site, yuck", they're all like that these days for the reasons you'd expect.
As for React Native, its main issue is the communication between the JavaScript browser-ish environment and the Java/Kotlin native environment that can be costly because every has to be serialized (meaning, converted to some type of data structure both sides can understand) and deserialized, so complex screen updates don't scale too well.
It's easy for developers to accidentally trigger much bigger and much more expensive rerenders than expected. If you see whole second long page hangs on some websites as new content loads in that's usually what happened.
For developers, it's complicated, you kind of need to experience it to understand the footguns.
React was born to solve one particular problem at Facebook: how can we make it so any developer can jump on any part of the UI code and add features without breaking everything. One of the most complicated aspects of a website is state management, in other words, making sure every part of the page are updated when something changes. For example, if you read a message in your inbox, the unread count needs to update a couple places on the page. That's hard because you need to make sure everything that can change that count is in agreement with everything that displays that count.
React solves that problem by hiding it away from you. Its model is simple: given a set of inputs, you have a function that outputs how to display that. Every time the value changes, React re-renders every component that used that value, compares it with the previous result, and then modifies the page with the updated data. That's why it's called React, it reacts to changes and actions.
The downside of that is if you're not very careful, you can place something in a non-ideal spot that can cascade into re-rendering the entire page every time that thing updates. At scale, it usually works out relatively okay, and it's not like rendering the whole page is that expensive. There's an upper cap on how bad it can be, it won't let you do re-render loops, but it can be slow.
I regularly see startups with 25MB of JavaScript caused by React abuse and favoring new features over tracking down excessive renders. Loads the same data 5 times because "this should only render once" and that turned out to be false, but it displays correctly. I commonly see entire forms being re-rendered every character you type because the data is stored in the form's state, so it has to re-render that entire tree.
But it's not that bad. It's entirely possible to make great and snappy sites with React. Arguably its problem isn't React itself but how much it is associated with horrible websites because of how tolerant to bad code it is. It's maybe a little bit too easy to learn, it gives bad developers an undeserved sense of confidence.
E: And we have better solutions to this such as signals which SolidJS, Vue and Svelte make heavy use of. Most of the advantages with less problems.
Anyway, that part wasn't relevant at all why I don't like React. The point is, skip the web, you don't really need the web. React Native skipped the whole HTML part, it's still JSX but for native app styled components for UI building. The web backend worked very well, your boxes became divs with some styles. It pretty much just worked. Do that but entirely in Rust since Rust can run natively on all platforms. Rust gets to skip all the compromises RN needed, and skip the embedded browser entirely. Make it desktop first then make the web version, it'll run just as well and might even generate better code than if a human wrote it. Making the web look native sucks but making native fit web is a lot easier than it looks. Letting go of HTML and CSS was a good call from React Native.