FOSS - ensuring even new hardware stays in use when vendor-support eventually ends!
Whether or not you install GNU/Linux on it today, your new #Mac will eventually lose #Apple support. Thanks to the impressive work of #Asahi#Linux project (@AsahiLinux), it will not need to end up in the landfill once it does.
Project activity, software launches, updates, a spotlight on #sup3rS3cretMes5age - a one-time, self-destructing messaging service, and more in this week's self-hosted recap!
We're pleased to announce that Codethink are sponsoring this year's Electromagnetic Field in Eastnor. Taking place 30th May - 2nd June, Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival, featuring everything from knitting and blacksmithing, to computer security, and online privacy.
Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.
Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.
The reality is, you always take a chance when contributing to an open source development or projects. Just because you made a contribution, does not mean you own the project or can decide the path that project takes. Those of us who donated understood the risk (or at least, I hope most people did).
That said, when someone takes a proactive driving stance claiming they will deliver, you kind of hope you can take them for their word. And expecting the main website to be online is not a big ask, especially when that serves as a gateway for people to learn about and use the project you are funding. That, after all, was the reason I donated.