I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality

Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.

Content is also getting heavier, but both things aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s more objective to compare modern software, instead of older and newer ones. Before reddit created obstacles for third-party apps, they were famous for being much lighter than the official one, while doing the same (some even had more features). Now, if we compare lemmy to reddit, it’s also much lighter, while providing a very similar experience. Telegram has a desktop app that does everything the web version does, and more, while lighter on resources. Most linux distros will work fine with far less hardware resources than windows. If you install lineageos on an older phone, it will perform better than the stock rom, even while using a newer aosp version. If you play a video on youtube, and the same one on vlc, vlc will do the same with less resources. If you use most sites with and without content blockers, the second one will be lighter, while not losing anything important.

I could go on and on, but that’s enough examples. There is a bloat component to software getting heavier, and not everything can be explained by heavier content and more features.

That’s not bloat, that’s people running more apps than ever.

Not necessarily. People used to write text documents while looking for references on the internet, listening to music and chatting with friends at the same time in 2010, and even earlier, but the same use case (office suite+browser+music payer+chat app) takes much more resources today, with just a small increase in usability and features.

Bloat is a complicated thing to discuss, because there’s no hard definition of it, and each person will think about it in a different way, so what someone can consider bloat, someone else may not, and we end up talking about different things. You’re right that hardware resources have been increasing in a slower rate, and it may force some more optimizations, but a lot of software are still getting heavier, without bringing new functionalities.

First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket

People don’t run just a single app in their machines. If we triple ram usage of several apps, it results in a massive increase. That’s how bloat happens, it’s a cumulative increase on everything. If we analyze single cases, we could say that they’re not that bad individually, but the end result is the necessity for a constant and fast increase in hardware resources.

It sure is. I’m running ferdium at this very moment with 3 chat apps open, and it consumes almost a gigabyte for something that could take just a few megabytes.

Now let me present you the laptops with 2GB of RAM still being sold here in Brazil: https://www.zoom.com.br/notebook/notebook-multilaser-legacy-cloud-pc132-intel-atom-x5-z8350-14-2gb-windows-10-bluetooth

Do you have access to a computer with an sd card reader? I believe the best and safest thing to do is to connect it to a computer, create disk image from it and try ro use a data recovery tool in the image file.

Edit: if you only have the phone, maybe you could try looking for apps to copy a disk image from the sd card and to recover data or try using some terminal emulator or one of those apps that install a linux distro inside android to use the dd command and then use testdisk and photorec tools. I recommend the second option, because the tools are open sourc and well tested

I expected to see risc v processors first in embedded devices, like routers and cameras, then moving to smart devices, like tvs and smartwatches, then to phones and then desktops. But looks like there won’t be a clear line, and things will come concurrently.

One of the great advantages of software distributed with the source code is the flexibility to move to different platforms and architectures. I wonder if moving to a snap/flatpak model will change this flexibility in the future.

At least Reddit is searchable

How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?

You can replace in the sense of making new releases on the gpl license. The mit license only requires to keep the original copyright notice. I changed the original comment to avoid this confusion, thanks for pointing that out.

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The original code never stops being free, but the code incorporated into a new project will be, so it’s a misleading term to people unfamiliar with open source licensing, that may think the license somehow expires. Even the fsf doesn’t use such terminology. They use reciprocal and nonreciprocal, because it translates the idea that gpl-like licenses create a relationship of reciprocity, and bsd-like ones create a relationship of non reciprocity.

Thats really interesting, I didn’t know that concept existed in foss licenses.

Temporarily free gives the idea that the code will stop being free at some point and may cause misunderstandings. It would be better to use nonreciprocal.

What are the advantages of apache over mit?

You can use the gpl license in newer versions of your software, but keep in mind, in order to avoid future misunderstandings, that you can only do that because the upstream project uses the mit license. If the project used a reciprocal license like the gpl, you’d need to stick to it or use a compatible one. You can’t, for example, take a upstream gpl project and use a mit license

It’s a common scenario in software. We think some things like ui designs and workflows are “natural”, but they’re quire arbitrary, and people just got used to them. Then people who are used to it will feel lost with any different workflow, and people who first learned the different ones may feel at home.

A nice example is the windows ui, that a lot of people who grew up with it feel like the most straightforward way to use a computer, but people who grew up with smartphones usually struggle with it and find something like the gnome ui more straightforward.

Most users? You can’t just make statistical claims without actual data. It’s fine to dislike something, but you don’t have to force your opinions on others. Gimp has its flaws and lack features a lot of professionals need, but a lot of people happily use it daily for their tasks. I agree that we need more open source software in this field, but that doesn’t mean gimp can’t coexist.