Luke

I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.

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.

Looking through their comment history, they proclaim their honesty quite often, it’s pretty funny when you’re looking for it 😆

I’ve now tagged them so I’ll remember that they are very honest:

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.

Vortex seems to work fine using Lutris now. I’m not sure when it changed, but at some point recently I figured I’d give it a shot again and just downloaded and ran their installer exe and it worked.

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?

I’m not sure what else they would need to do. You can just install Plex or Jellyfin on your Steamdeck right now, and you’ve got yourself an HTPC. It works great!

What are the missing pieces you’re still looking for?

What I’ve done in the past is to copy the URL of the unavailable video (if it’s still accessible via the playlist entry, sometimes it isn’t which is annoying) and feed it into the Wayback Machine in the hopes that it got archived at some point. The video stream isn’t usually available that way, but at least the page title sometimes is, and then I can search for other versions of it.

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.

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?

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!

As far as I know, Firefox Mobile doesn’t have a bottom toolbar so I’m not really sure what you are referring to there (at least, there’s no bottom toolbar in Firefox on Android where I’m using it), and the notification/battery area is definitely not part of Firefox. It sounds like your phone’s system UI is providing those elements, and it’s likely not really fair to blame problems with the system UI on Firefox.

How do you mean? I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and aside from one website (my bank) everything I’ve tried to do with it has been perfectly fine. It even has adblock and videos play in the background. I’ve also not seen any issues with dark mode; I’m using dark mode right now, actually.

They kinda do already; Apple sells a twisted piece of metal for $1k, and people buy it from them.

Something like this would be cool for ublock origin too, with a sound pinging whenever an ad is blocked; could be fun.

This looks interesting, but I don’t understand what it’s for. I read through the readme, but came out none the wiser. What exactly is a compose sequence?