We’re getting to the point where as a tech company all you have to do is not be fascist or actively sabotage your own product with AI bullshit. You don’t even have to be good, you just have to not actively be bad

@danirabbit Thank you for putting into words the very thought that's been bouncing around my brain for ages.

@danirabbit My morning: my partner and I were talking about SMS apps, because no one else in our family will use Signal, and I've just been reading about RCS. I thought it was significant that Samsung was the first to release an RCS app, but pulled it, in Google's favor. Also, RCS is blocked on phones that have been rooted or have alternate OSes, for "security".

It's either Google enforcing monopoly, or collaborating with state agencies, but I'm not sure those are different things anymore.

@danirabbit https://www.androidauthority.com/google-silently-blocking-rcs-rooted-android-phones-custom-roms-3421652/

@danirabbit

I sometimes wonder if the folks at Brother are continually confused about the fact that they are somehow considered among the most beloved tech companies while doing nothing more than making the same product that they've made for years without significant change in the most hated line of products in the industry (printers).

@foolishowl @danirabbit correct I have researching RCS too but it feels a lot like the google version of what's app. When you can only use it if you use there services. Not really an open standard like SMS or signal. Sigh I wish we could go back to open standards I miss those days.

@gabrielmarkley @danirabbit My rule these days is that it's better to use an open source app that doesn't pretend to be secure and not to use it as if it were secure, than it is to implicitly encourage trust in a proprietary app from a company that's almost certainly lying to us.

@danirabbit @scream
AAA

@EndlessMason AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

@danirabbit Then @Tutanota will surprise you. They are not only NOT actively bad, they are actually actively good. @kde too.

@Azarilh @danirabbit @kde And you are both right, this development is truly sad to see.

@danirabbit

Like DC Comics has decided.

https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge

I happen to own a little open source software company that is expressly anti-fascist, has a “No AI” policy, and has recently been called “aggressively queer” in case you’re interested in supporting tech companies like that:

https://elementary.io

@danirabbit oh so the same bar for being a dude

@danirabbit I used to use this distribution. However, I stopped using it because it had some issues that really annoyed me. That was a long time ago. I hope it's improved now, because the system really had potential. Maybe I should test it again sometime? In any case, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for further development - ​​I really appreciate the policy

@danirabbit Wow this looks amazing. How didn’t I hear about it until now. Have to try it, thank you for sharing.

Apparently Mastodon really liked this and I’m waking up this morning to my follower count back to where it was when I left Twitter. Vindicated AF. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t succeed while sticking to your principles 🩷

@buherator @danirabbit Not really. There's a general problem that it can be difficult to persuade people to use a newcommunication tool, even when doing so genuinely solves a problem, and I don't fully understand it. I keep trying out new ones, but I seem to be an outlier in that respect.

@danirabbit meadow computer will be like this

@danirabbit just purchased my first copy and downloading now!

@mbrdev @danirabbit buying an optionally free product is so based

@danirabbit Dani, how much would you recommend Elementary for someone who does not want to fiddle with OS and just want a “platform” to experiment/play with AI workloads (not LLM, real PyTorch, Tensor old school AI)

@Prozak @danirabbit this sounds like what elementary os is for (it basically does not let you do anything other than install and use software)

@danirabbit There's no money in not being actively bad.

@khleedril this is why I will remain poor forever lol

@danirabbit i dunno - as we saw with Google, the hard bit appears to be *staying* not actively bad

@leahjet @danirabbit my guess is the biggest trick for that is not accepting VC funding
And then the hard part is just staying a company

@danirabbit "Our brand differentiator is that we're not hot garbage!"

@danirabbit Do you happen to have any stickers for sale? I’m a longtime GitHub sponsor but would love to support some more and cover up this logo on my Framework laptop. An elementary OS sticker sounds like a 2 birds 1 stone solution to those problems.

@danirabbit 2 part question: are you hiring and do you need any devops or other infrastructure or platform engineering? I’m looking for the ethical companies to apply to :)

@cobweb sorry, we’re not hiring right now! Funding is an eternal battle 😅

@danirabbit Are there some companies like that or are you saying it would be nice if there were?

@danirabbit We need to make a list of tech companies that are neither fascist nor involve AI with everything... would make our lives easier

@starstorm_x1 @danirabbit Info graphics! Infographics!! Like that one about avoiding Adobe products or whatever

@danirabbit thats been a thing in the gaming space for ages now
steam isnt amazing
It's just not being bad and not shooting itself in the foot that often

@danirabbit Bonus points for providing basic customer support that actually helps customers in a nice, fast and easy way, with supporters being kind and patient with customers. Anyone else remembers those good old days?

@4censord @danirabbit (I'm still angry they don't sell you the actual fucking game tho. It's a digital licence or something. Non-lawyer, but w/e.)
Also GOG is good.

@danirabbit imo you can be actively bad, as long as you're not as bad as the median. look at steam/valve for example. they both own a casino & control an entire securities market, manipulating it to increase their revenue at the expense of children, fans, and gambling addicts.

people love steam

@Roucan @danirabbit and this is exactly why they keep being worse and worse, because they can always get away with being the lesser evil or lying to people that they are :/ but if we all decided to say fuck that, build up co-ops and nonprofits, and make the most ethical choices we're capable of in our support (or lack thereof), perhaps we could push the lesser evil a little bit further from evil and closer to less?

@danirabbit „Don’t be evil“ - Google (2004-2015)

@danirabbit Sounds easy, until you sit down with your investors to talk about your road map.

@DaveMWilburn @danirabbit Yup. Just stuffed an Amazon toner into a Brother. Popped up "Non-Brother Toner. OK?" [Yes] and it worked. No further problems.

@danirabbit and yet they are acting like it’s impossible. I have been struggling to find a tech company I feel okay taking on as a client for my agency these days.

They talk like they don’t have a choice meanwhile I’m here watching them all throwing any customer goodwill out of the window and wasting internal resources and budget on dead end AI initiatives all in the name of not falling behind as it’s literally hurting their bottom line.

It’s funny that for capitalists who are supposed to care about making money a lot of them these days seem to give very little shits about actually doing so

@danirabbit

Is it Linux?

@MichaelBishop its built on Linux, yes :)

@danirabbit
I loaded it on to an old machine today for a tryout. Seems to work well though box is straining. Might retry on a better box. Good work!

@danirabbit I have the slight problem that when I want to install another distro, I can't delete eOS, even though I did not encrypt it. I have to delete everything with gparted which sometimes annoys me when I have just this one distro on the USB stick that doesn't have gparted to delete everything. ....and sometimes the dark mode doesn't apply correctly

@danirabbit even though I run Mint (LMDE, in specific), I have an interest in other takes on an alternative to Windows. I think it's important for me personally because I threw Windows to the curb in 1995 and have been interested in seeing "Linux" get better over the past 30 years.

That your company lines up with all my values and is expressly NOT aiding in the harm of marginalized groups is a weighty plus, and IMPORTANT.

@danirabbit 🔥✊🏻💚💜

@danirabbit please keep up the good work, I'll support it as much as I can 😁

@danirabbit right.. good arguments. I might try

@danirabbit I personally don't use Elementary OS (I prefer KDE's Plasma DE for my use cases), but Elementary OS is a good option as well.

I hope you can work with other distros so that Pantheon can be packaged by them as well. It would be a shame to see it not be available outside of Elementary OS.

And of course, I am so glad that the project is not run by facist nutjobs. Unfortunately, there are too many of them right now, and it's becoming difficult to avoid them...

@danirabbit Super duper neat!

I juuuust barely got my opensuse install back to where I like it, so I likely won't distro hop right away, but I love the PWYW app store idea and the aesthetics of Pantheon. I bought a download just now to at least show my approval.

Do you know if the elementary project packages are still considered experimental/unstable in opensuse tumbleweed?

@Dio9sys I don’t know the status of packaging on other distros, sorry!

@danirabbit I know it's about politics but even politics put aside. How the fuck did they came to the conclusion than sponsoring a bunch of scripts maintened by a guy who has enough money to work on it until his death living with a better lifestyle than all if us was the a better investment to support Linux mass adoption than supporting you, who lead the UX fight for Linux. It's complete bullshit (╯°□°）┻━┻

Hi @danirabbit ! It's heartwarming to read that a popular FLOSS company is anti-fascist, rejects genAI and supports queer rights.

Lately I've been discussing with open source devs about if/how/where to make the same kind of stance explicit.

I'd be curious to hear about your experience as I think this will be more and more a subject. I've seen that the blog is pretty explicit about it for example, but I cannot find any mention about the company ethics or values on the main page.

Thanks! ☺️

@ppaluchowski64 make sure you report any issues you experience in GitHub. We release updates every month!

@danirabbit I remember seeing this a few years ago, great to see you're still here and going, love to see it

How compact is the final install? Tempted to install it on my Chromebook again, it has 16GB of storage which makes it a fun test device (it did run Windows 10 for a bit as a test trial)

@danirabbit So, when I have some free time, I'll try to test this distribution again and report any issues I encounter. And if everything is decent, I might switch to it By the way, thanks for the reply. Most founders of such large projects don't have the time for this, so I wanted you to know that it really does matter when a user decides which solution to choose

@danirabbit it's not for me (use rocky for the server and macOS - fedora box down for a year and a half but that's another story) but recently I got my mum to use Zorin (for the Windows theme - it was a long time ago she used any unix). Out of curiosity though: I presume both firefox and thunderbird are supported? Along with libreoffice? In other words like a linux distro (or maybe is?) but with looks that might belie it? I love the anti-AI view. Best wishes!

@xexyl Someone in the thread says it’s based on Ubuntu so probably yes

@danirabbit

Them: "...and more cowbell"

Me: you had me at "aggressively queer"

@danirabbit I see a number of companies doing good, and then they get bought out. What immutable poison pills does your company have to prevent take over and destruction? It’s not enough to be doing good, it’s necessary to actively stop the bad people taking over.

https://oldbytes.space/@Kroc/115066030317215400

@Kroc all of our code is under GPL-family licenses. I think if we used a non-commercial license we wouldn’t be able to use our own code 😅

@danirabbit So, if I understand correctly, this is a Gnome+Ubuntu LTS derivative.

(I wonder how much is downstream, and how much is meant to be upstreamed / contribution to upstream maintenance and development)

(The documentation is squarely aimed at the general public, and I didn't find a page really explaining what this brought on top of the usual software)

@Sobex No, we don’t use GNOME. We make our own desktop called Pantheon. We do build from Ubuntu LTS repos, but we build from metapackages with Debian LiveBuild so it’s not an Ubuntu spin. We also maintain a Flatpak remote.

You can see all of the repos we maintain here: https://github.com/elementary

Edit: the blog is also a great place to see development details at a higher level with screenshots etc

@danirabbit I'd like to ask you a few questions, if I may?

@audreygwinter questions might be better directed to our Discord! I’ve got kind of a busy Saturday planned 😅

https://discord.gg/pCenUBu

@danirabbit Thanks for the invite!

@audreygwinter woudl you mind writing a TL;DR of the questions and answers you got ?

@Sobex I plan on asking about whether I'll be able to import my Steam games or have to reinstall them under the new OS, and whether I'll be able to import/play some non-Steam games.

@Sobex @danirabbit I have decided elementary OS is not for me. I had issues installing Steam, I felt a lack of true control over things like the desktop, and I didn't care for the "Application"-only menu. The Discord folks did give me the helpful idea to install to an external drive, and I thank them for that. Good luck to you!

@audreygwinter Elementary doesn’t run on my HW, and macOS Sequoia (15.7) runs fine (I’ll move to Tahoe *after* my paper deadline, but I don’t think it will be a major issue).

I have a Fedora Asahi Remix, with KDE working too, with which I’m much happier than some Ubuntu based system.

@danirabbit question: does elementary use systemd or sysv/openrc as an init system? I couldn’t find an answer from DDG or in FAQ so thought it best to ask (apologies if this is a dumb/irrelevant question in the current thread)

@fionasboots i believe it uses systemd

@earnestma that was certainly my assumption given that it’s based on Ubuntu. Then again it’s possible to rip systemd out (MX Linux, Anti-X, Alpine, Devuan and some others do this). Personally I prefer not to use systemd as it seems like a massively complex set of problems waiting to happen.

@earnestma @fionasboots it does in fact use systemd

@McNeely @earnestma thanks for confirming. That is a bit of a shame really.