I'm not sure you can say that Qt doesn't see much use, when there are hundreds, probably thousands, of well-known commercial apps using it, and it's in millions upon millions of embedded systems. And obviously KDE as well.
It's just it's largely invisible. It works, it does exactly the job it's meant to do, and it does it well.
You can get surprisingly good results from cheap laptop hardware (as well as fancier hardware like an MBP) using software DSP techniques. One of the things I'm pleased about is that quite a bit of Asahi's audio work is just as applicable to generic laptops as it is to Macs.
I already use the Bankstown bass harmonics synthesis plugin developed for Asahi and a convolution EQ on a cheap HP laptop, with startlingly impressive results, using the Pipewire plugin chain autoload feature also developed for Asahi.
I suspect there are quite a few use cases for this beamformer outside of the Asahi ecosystem as well.
The Gemini Assistant is pretty close to feature parity now with the old Assistant, it got a lot better very quickly. And obviously it's a lot better at conversations.
If all you do is write Python then sure, but for the rest of us that have to run code written in 7 different languages within our project, written by 7 different teams, playing nicely with asdf is non-negotiable.
I've had it with version managers that only target a single language or tool, the cognitive load is too high if there's more than a couple of languages in the mix.
What would be really nice is an asdf-like single package manager with language-specific plugins. That would save me a bunch of headaches.
It's aerodynamics, pure and simple. The Model 3 coefficient of drag is very low. It's one of the reasons the Model 3 looks a little weird.
It's pretty easy to replicate by other manufacturers, but aerodynamics is just one factor in a large number of tradeoffs made by a manufacturer when designing a car.
I don't think the post specifies it has to be a technical problem. Besides, it's not a social-political problem until someone does the technical work. Does anyone have a proof-of-concept implementation for Firefox or Chromium yet? No.
it's a social problem, and the only way i believe we can ultimately solve it is by teaching everyone to be better people. until we do that there will always be people who will try to take advantage and become a bad actor.
teaching people to be better is the only way to avoid oppressive technical measures. because most technical measures will end up being oppresive at least for some minority or corner cases that don't fit the expectations.
i also fear that technical measures have a tendency to get in the way of diversity as they force the same behavior on everyone and punish or prevent people doing things differently.
...but mere education doesn't work (not against those who want to be a "bad actor") ... if anything, more education makes it possible for more people to be "bad actors"
you are right, mere STEM education could help enable bad actors. but children are not born wanting to be bad actors.
part of the education needs to be moral education, starting from childhood, about what is good and bad behavior. good rolemodels, etc. we will never completely eliminate bad behavior but we can reduce the likelihood of it occurring by teaching everyone about good behavior.
Modern WMs and desktop shells use way more memory because they cache more bitmaps (we now render text as bitmaps and composite them, and the drawing styles/themes are now much more than flat gray fill with the odd non-antialiased line), and because the bitmaps are far larger due to much higher resolutions and bit depths.
A single uncompressed 1080p 32-bit (24-bit with 8-bit alpha) wallpaper is 66MB of RAM. A similar single 4k wallpaper takes 265MB RAM. All those fancy-looking high-res 32-bit icons also take huge amounts of RAM.
I'm an idiot, you're right. There, it's on record. I claim under-caffeination. Still, the basic point still stands, even if my numbers need to be divided by 8. Desktops use more memory because, as users, we demand fancy true-color graphics, high resolutions, and anti-aliasing that we didn't have in the Windows 9x era.
My Ubuntu KDE installation uses ~700MB RAM at idle with a fresh login and I've been using it with Wayland for years now without the problems the author describes.
My Steam Deck KDE uses ~1.3GB, more than half of which is taken by the baloo_file_extractor process.
Apparently doing background indexing of file contents gobbles RAM. Not sure if that's the problem with the author's setup?
He's included screenshots of top. It appears he has akonadi installed which from my experience is a huge memory consumer. It's the first thing I uninstall on new builds.
Ah, I missed the zip file with the screenshots in. Yes, Akonadi loves RAM. I'm a bit confused as to why it's installed and running by default in this case - is this a Fedora-ism? I don't think Kubuntu or Arch install it by default, it's only installed as a dependency if you install elements of the KDEPIM suite.
FWIW, after baloo_file_extractor finished indexing new files on my Steam Deck, it exited, and KDE RAM usage was down to ~600MB.
Yeah, it's a bit old fashioned IMO. It comes with CD/DVD ripping software and an Office suite for example. It seems to be aimed towards Office users rather then home users. I always uninstall most of the default software.
No more than Toyota having a factory in the US is "stealing" Toyota.
Manufacturers in almost all sectors, including silicon foundries, have had manufacturing operations worldwide for decades. Centuries even. For all sorts of economic, customer, and government reasons, as well as simple diversification.
Taiwan is still going to be TSMC's home base.
Besides, if TSMC didn't open a US foundry then the US government would just throw money at Intel's foundry operation until they caught up. They're not that far behind. To be honest that's probably going to happen anyway.
It's just it's largely invisible. It works, it does exactly the job it's meant to do, and it does it well.