Luke

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

Wasn’t that the Loki show, where all of time is run by a boring dystopian corporate bureaucracy?

Now that I think of it, I guess you’re right, that show probably did do better than Black Adam.

Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex “just work” for me on my Steam Deck. I didn’t even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.

AdGuard has a list of trusted DNS providers, which seems like a good source. Many of the ones in that list are free as well.

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?

There’s no more funny malware.

That depends who gets infected.

You or me infected by malware? No thanks!

Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!

Having to copy a line from a document titled “The Principles of Communism” just to sign up should’ve tipped you off that something was a bit weird.

Uh what? How is it weird to have a mild anti-bot task in a registration process? That’s pretty normal.

If you’re objecting to the content in the text, well that’s just silly. A communist instance referencing communist writings is not “weird”, that’d be entirely within the realm of reasonable expectation.

If you feel so threatened by the mere presence of communism in your bubble, maybe don’t try to join an instance by and for them? How dare the dastardly communists be so happy and welcoming to everyone!

KDE Connect should fit the bill; despite the name, you don’t need to be using KDE (or Linux even) since there are clients for every major OS, even mobile.

Among many other cool features, it lets you easily and simply just send a file from one device directly to another on your local network. I use it all the time to send photos from my phone to my desktop without plugging anything in, for example.

Still want to add a few bits of info to it, but I’m pretty happy with the dashboard for my kitchen display that sits on top of the fridge where I can see it from the living room as well:

Uses the excellent LCARS theme by th3jesta via HACS.

Almost everything shown is just standard markdown cards, with minor tweaks by card-mod, with the exception of the 2 weather widgets shown (also via HACS):

• Hourly Weather Card
• Weather Chart Card

I don’t even have an EV and I have to see the ads on the chargers because they’re in front of the store I’m walking into. So far, I’ve only noticed that at grocery stores, but it’s annoying.

AFAIK, those codes don’t need to be kept private, but I think they only do that verification once, so you can probably just delete the file at this point. (After all, you can also use a TXT record to store the verification code for a domain with Google, and those are definitely not private; anyone can dig your domain’s TXT records.)

If you’re into Paint.NET, check out Pinta; it’s basically Paint.NET (inspired by it) but open source and works on all 3 major OS’s.

You don’t see how a corporate entity like Google is related to capitalism? What exactly do you think capitalism means?

It’s not downloadable software, but you might check out WordPress if you haven’t recently, it’s open source and free (though you do need to host it somewhere).

It used to have kind of a bad reputation for being a horrible hodgepodge of bad editing UI and random plugins that do things in wildly different ways, but the WordPress team has really stepped up their game in the last few years and it’s actually very nice now as long as you stay away from the commercial plugins. There’s almost always an open source plugin available for anything you’d want to do, but the out of box experience is plenty good for most pages you’d be likely to need.

WordPress has a very nice “block editor” enabled by default these days, which is essentially just their name for a WYSIWYG interface. Use drag and drop to design the pages, and then click a button to see it in a “code editor” that shows the HTML if you’d rather edit that way.

Anyhow, I know it’s not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I’d mention it since you did say you are open to something web based.

I feel like that’s just a longer way of saying “they all do it, so why bother mentioning it”, which is a lot more defeatist than I think we ought to be. Pointing out anti-consumer behavior is worthwhile for more than merely a simple dig.

that’s generally how computers work though? Updated OS is more resource intensive and require upgrades

That’s not how computers work unless you have an OS that intentionally creates that situation. Devices with Linux on them don’t get any slower over the years. Sometimes an old device even gets faster with OS updates because the OS isn’t being written by a corporation intent on driving you to new purchases incessantly.

Not in the US.

I’d be careful of making sweeping statements about 3.7m square miles of land from your doorstep in LA.

I’m in the US too, and here in Atlanta I use Organic Maps frequently to find specific street addresses. It works quite well. I would agree with the other responses here suggesting that maybe you could contribute some data to OSM for the areas you encounter that are missing street numbers. You’ll be helping yourself and others!