I love the way you think.

nice! how to you assess if the old appliance is likely to be salvagable or not? either when viewing online, or in person at their place?

these are examples some of some fair criticism of geany

not customizable

themes, plugins, ridiculously easy custom configurations/build commands etc you can even control the window manager from config files if you want to, its insanely customisable

lacks support for a lot of things

edit: trying to sound less snarky, but do you have a lot of examples?

i could see these criticisms arising from a quick glance. or we may have slightly different definitions of these terms. which is fair enough.

imo geany's ratio of features to weight is remarkable, perhaps singularly so?

hashing is still a form of snooping tbh. especially when paired with other metadata

but ofc its not as direct

it's hardly a conflation, this hostile modus operandi is baked into the windows product itself with malicious and intrusive features. i'm not sure if this is news to anyone, but those user-hostile features were added to windows by microsoft. and the best defense offered thus far for that is basically "most or all tech giants do it too" - yes, thankyou that's exactly our point. the fact that shipping this kind of abusive software has been normalised is part of the problem too.

i agree in as much as not everything about windows is bad. and it can be useful sometimes out of necessity. though its worth remembering that necessity may often be the result of hostility on microsoft's part, either past or present. so it's not really possible to have an honest conversation about what windows is, without an awareness of how microsoft has maliciously managed our perception of desktop operating systems in general. happy to explain what i mean by this in more detail if anyone's interested.

and also agreed, i'd never pay for it.

If ads are a form of payment, then unsolicited ads are theft

brilliantly put, love it!!

i suspect that's a big part of ops point. without proper transport alternatives (eg. bus, bike etc) you're fucked.

and how just by buying gas you are automagically a ‘more important’ road user than anyone else.

i get that as a general optimisation, the avg speed of vehicles should be considered from a routing perspective.

but its been entirely normalised that cars are "important" and everything else is inherently secondary to them. which is ofc pure bs, but most people assume it by default.

and we seemingly need endless war to keep getting it out of the ground

i like

free speech ≠ hate speech

Be warned. The erroneous belief that "free speech" is a right wing concept is exactly the lie right wing lunatics want you to believe. it suits them very nicely.

right wing loonies have a long history of hijacking and destroying empathetic terms like this.

if they believed in freedom or free speech, why is it always them who are burning and banning books? why are they always the ones trying to control other people's bodies? when they talk about freedom, they mean their freedom to take yours away.

should we let them kill yet another canary of a healthy society? that's a different discussion. but it would be a substantial error to assume anyone who won't let them hijack it are actually right wing.