Many people who deliberately choose open source, are also into privacy. I’m not sure what people like. But you’ll definitely face some rejection by people like me. I like to file bugreports myself. I get my apps from F-Droid and they usually strip those telemetry libraries from the source. But for people who use Obtanium or Google Play, it’ll work. I think there is a good share of users who are fine with crashreports. Maybe the majority. You could make the app ask for confirmation before sending the report. Or offer two variants of the app, one normal and one without. Or let people like F-Droid offer the latter.
If it’s more than crash reports, I think it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
I like the old fashioned way of doing free software. Have a community around the project, a bugtracker and engage people in a discussion about future developments. I’m happy if that’s baked into an app if it’s opt-in and it’s an open backend or something simple, meaning you don’t include the whole Firebase, Crashlytics, … stuff. But it’s up to the developer. If you like it, and your audience isn’t privacy nerds, include it and see if people complain.
I’m not sure if Ubuntu requires a wired internet connection. I’ve installed a different distro yesterday and wifi worked fine during the installation. The installer asked me to connect to network and I used the wifi. I’ve never plugged a network cable into the machine. Maybe it’s the same with Ubuntu. But sure, there are other possibilities. Offline installers and/or you can install Linux on a different machine and then swap the harddisk/ssd. Just take care not to overwrite the internal disk of your laptop. Make sure it writes to the correct disk (or unplug other ones).
Seems you just plug in the cable on Linux and you’re done. Low latency video can be transferred over network for example with gstreamer/pipewire and files with any file transfer protocol.
It’s copy and pasting 5 lines into the terminal and hitting enter. It’s not that hard. If it’s not worth the 15 seconds of ‘work’ you probably don’t need the software that badly.
And it’s not the default. Usually you shouldn’t add random software sources and download software from some websites. Your Linux package manager should be the source for software. (Software Manager / Store / Synaptics, … whatever Ubuntu calls it) It installs software with one or two clicks with the mouse, the software there is tested and tied into the rest of the systems and tens of thousands of packages are available. No malware guaranteed, and updates are handled automatically.
And with other Operating systems it’s also ridiculous: You need to find the website of some software, avoid malware and copycats that advertise similar software with ads, click download, click ‘yes’ I accept a download with a harmful extension. Then you need to open the file manager and double click on it. Then a window opens and you need to click ‘next’. Accept the terms. Give permission to install and maybe remove a few ticks and choose a location. I’d say it’s about the same amount of work and the downside is it doesn’t necessarily handle updates and security fixes.
I think Ubuntu doesn’t have Mullvad available in their own repository. I took another approach and imported their settings/profile into the VPN/network manager that is available per default on many Linux distributions. No install required at all. But importing the settings isn’t easier, so YMMV here. And I think you have to create a profile for each and every country/endpoint which is a bit cumbersome, depending on what you’re trying to do with the VPN.
Ask your Linux group. Seriously. They should know best what kinds of issues their ‘users’ frequently face and what kind of information there is.
I learned Linux by doing. Set up a webserver, set up a network share, assemble a RAID with 2 old HDDs. Install Steam and play around a bit. Try LaTex and write your next homework assignment with it. Set up a Python / R / C++ development environment. All of that is good practice and you’ll understand the concepts and specific issues once you do it yourself. Imho that’s better than a theoretical course. You can do this in VMs or find old hardware. Some people in such groups have good connections.
Also a university library should have some free (for you) material (books) on Linux.
A hard link won’t work across filesystems or across disks. If you want to point to another arbitrary filesystem, you’d need a symlink. I don’t know if that’s supported in that software stack. But you either move that Download directory to the same filesystem on the USB HDD, or use symlinks, or figure out a different way.
I think that’s a good start, but the baseline of what AI can do. These scripts are around since filesystems have been invented. And you can do this with one (lengthy) shell command. Or one of the already existing file sorting utils. (something like this [Edit: see next comment] or Hazel or DropIt) With those you can even configure if it should recusively visit subdirectories and do individual subdirectories for the filetypes or mangle everything together for example in one big unsorted mp3 directory.
What I’m waiting for (I’m not OP) is something that looks at the content of the files. Do a directory for all the manuals I downloaded for the household appliances, find out on which event I took a photo and make a correctly named album for that, find the project files for my diverse electronics projects and file them into seperate directories together with related info. And find the mp3 files and TV recordings with a mismatch of metadata and folder structure.
Yeah, the maintainers of F-Droid will probably appreciate you did the work for them.
And I think it’s a sound approach. I mean the Linux ecosystem works the same way. We have upstream developers, and distributions and maintainers who adapt the packages for the user. We can have all the diversity, modern tools and also distributions like Debian that swich everything to privacy per default because their users like that. I think the same approach works for android and I really appreciate I get to choose between F-Droid, Obtanium and the Google Play store.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. As of now I don’t think they have diverged much. So they’re (still) about the same. It was mainly created because of the takeover of the domain and trademark by a for profit company. Not because of different functionality.
I think it’s just a larger undertaking. Like mentioned in the last comments. People either need to address that as the main focus for some new major release and work on it. Or subdivide it and find people to work on the individual components to make it happen (gradually).
Also there is always the thing with hobby / free software projects. Sometimes people focus on functionality and features and not so much on asthetics and the first impression. I agree the welcome screen is somewhat important as it’s the first thing a new player sees. But I also like the developers to work on features which enhance the actual gameplay because I just see that screen for 10 seconds and it’s kind of a waste of time to improve it for someone like me. The current screen works alright. There are several dynamics affecting projects: “Perfect is the enemy of good” (don’t make it too complicated) but also sometimes a makeshift solution or something that works “okay” stays inplace indefinitely because “it works” and people concentrate on other stuff. That’s just how things work. It takes deliberate effort to work against those dynamics.
So I’d say the cause is, their focus is somewhere else.
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.