Alibaba Cloud is joining the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1 million a year for three years! That’s a $3 million commitment, matching DigitalOcean’s backing, to the development,…
It’s strange that they’re investing so much in a niche product that has always failed to gain mindshare outside of LARPers. The DIY people who make their own desktop from scratch aren’t going to bite into a pre-made carnival of slop.
They’re going to gain a ton of users fast but they’re all going to drop off in a year or so when people realize having a calculator app that looks like the rest of the computer is something they want and their eyes get tired of seeing the same fake neon cyberpunk aesthetic.
I suspect that this genre of “ultra customizable unbloated leet hacker desktop” is going to die out as soon as KDE finishes their unified theming engine and you can fully larp as a windows XP user with KDE.
Okay I have to say it: I’ve never understood the drive to theme your linux DE like fuckin’ Windows. I know there’s nostalgia for the gray 9x window decorations, but the infinite fondness for Luna or Aero baffles me. LARPing as an infinitely shittier OS…
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Absolute Nostalgia Bait. Or maybe it’s a kink thing knowing that you’re safe within the confines of KDE . It’s Windows’ fault for adopting a new design language every single release to sell people the same computer with more ads.
Nostalgia is really powerful sometimes. I also don’t get why people go to such lengths to make it look like Windows, at least modern Windows that is, I get the appeal of older Windows to a certain degree. You can do so much in terms of customization on Linux that it feels wrong to want to settle for so little with just copying Windows.
I want to say that’s harsh and inaccurate, but, uh… my desktop has a Luna theme, so… yeah. I guess Windows XP themes are indeed pretty popular as far as Linux desktops that people are actually using, based on how easy Luna themes of varying quality for different DEs can be found…
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Linux is already fairly corporate. It’s funded by corporate funding, which is not a conspiracy, it’s just because every tech company relies on Linux and therefore has a vested interest in its development and robustness. It’s not some small indie kernel; it’s the biggest FOSS project in the world.
I guess if you want a non-corporate option, Plan9 and the BSDs are always there.
We are 100% seeing this happen as time goes on. Nothing popular can be good. Not because it’s popular, but because big money will come and start to monopolise and enshittify it.
Under capitalism any community commons, even highly incomplete ones that still have plenty of corporate involvement, eventually become a target for enclosure and extraction or a target for destruction.
This is one of the limitations of viewing parallel social systems as a sufficient project. Like mutual aid groups that are basically just charities or making your own “commune” (10 people living in a house). They are not actively bad. They can do very good things. But they’ll never survive a round of primitive accumulation. This is why we distinguish them from socialist organizing, where the goal is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Just as a side note both mutual aid and communal living can build and be part of socialist projects and the struggle for revolution, they just have to be actually building towards that rather than reinforcing the liberal order (e.g. the tendency for a mutual aid group to become a non-profit funded by genocidaires).
Selfishly, I worry that the more popular Linux gets the more corporate shenanigans will sabotage it
It’s strange that they’re investing so much in a niche product that has always failed to gain mindshare outside of LARPers. The DIY people who make their own desktop from scratch aren’t going to bite into a pre-made carnival of slop.
They’re going to gain a ton of users fast but they’re all going to drop off in a year or so when people realize having a calculator app that looks like the rest of the computer is something they want and their eyes get tired of seeing the same fake neon cyberpunk aesthetic.
I suspect that this genre of “ultra customizable unbloated leet hacker desktop” is going to die out as soon as KDE finishes their unified theming engine and you can fully larp as a windows XP user with KDE.
Okay I have to say it: I’ve never understood the drive to theme your linux DE like fuckin’ Windows. I know there’s nostalgia for the gray 9x window decorations, but the infinite fondness for Luna or Aero baffles me. LARPing as an infinitely shittier OS…
ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!
Absolute Nostalgia Bait. Or maybe it’s a kink thing knowing that you’re safe within the confines of KDE
. It’s Windows’ fault for adopting a new design language every single release to sell people the same computer with more ads.
This is how I’m gonna see it for the rest of my life
lmao. Also at least you could tell W7 to larp 9x, that was kinda worthwhile…
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Nostalgia is really powerful sometimes. I also don’t get why people go to such lengths to make it look like Windows, at least modern Windows that is, I get the appeal of older Windows to a certain degree. You can do so much in terms of customization on Linux that it feels wrong to want to settle for so little with just copying Windows.
Ikr, especially because I used to spend to much of my time in Windows trying to customise it to be usable… Default KDE is preferable imo.
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I pulled up screenshots of Tron and pulled the color palettes from that. Why would you want to be windows when you can be cool?
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I’ll give GNOME 1.x users a pass on aping windows themes because well… look at it.
This one?
I kinda like it more than 9x honestly.
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Looking at this screenshot makes me realize how much GNOME has evolved (for the better).
The web search menubar option would not fly nowadays.
Yeah
I want to say that’s harsh and inaccurate, but, uh… my desktop has a Luna theme, so… yeah. I guess Windows XP themes are indeed pretty popular as far as Linux desktops that people are actually using, based on how easy Luna themes of varying quality for different DEs can be found…
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I’m going full Windows 8 (not 8.1)
is this a safe space to say i liked metro back when it came out
Linux is already fairly corporate. It’s funded by corporate funding, which is not a conspiracy, it’s just because every tech company relies on Linux and therefore has a vested interest in its development and robustness. It’s not some small indie kernel; it’s the biggest FOSS project in the world.
I guess if you want a non-corporate option, Plan9 and the BSDs are always there.
We are 100% seeing this happen as time goes on. Nothing popular can be good. Not because it’s popular, but because big money will come and start to monopolise and enshittify it.
Under capitalism any community commons, even highly incomplete ones that still have plenty of corporate involvement, eventually become a target for enclosure and extraction or a target for destruction.
This is one of the limitations of viewing parallel social systems as a sufficient project. Like mutual aid groups that are basically just charities or making your own “commune” (10 people living in a house). They are not actively bad. They can do very good things. But they’ll never survive a round of primitive accumulation. This is why we distinguish them from socialist organizing, where the goal is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Just as a side note both mutual aid and communal living can build and be part of socialist projects and the struggle for revolution, they just have to be actually building towards that rather than reinforcing the liberal order (e.g. the tendency for a mutual aid group to become a non-profit funded by genocidaires).