Yes, that is pretty much how WeChat works. It is mostly a glorified messenger and payment system (like current whatsapp), that they added a proprietary webbrowser with addons and storefronts on top (and wechat gets commission from said webpages and addons people access through them).
You could maybe get a similar experience in Android if you install Firefox, save a bunch of commercial websites as favorites, save another bunch of social media websites as favorites, add whatever addons there are (ublock origin for the win), and access stuff only through it.
Voilá, now you have an everything app.
Depends on the use case of the person operating the computer really.
I recently installed EOS (with LXQt), and all i really did was install it using the GUI, install some of the app selection offered in endeavors introduction GUI (including flatpak), saved the webadress of arch repository, aur repository, and flathub.org, and then learned
yay -S (package name of aur and arch repository)
copy-paste flatpak install command from flathub.org. installed everything i used. Then i searched how to list the packages in flatpak and pacmac, how to uninstall both, and voilá, i was ready and had everything i ever used, with less than 10 terminal commands.
And when someone is short on money or just too tired of keeping track of which services having what media and switching chairs all the time ? remember there is always the way of Jack Sparrow, and go sailing to the 7 seas. ARRRGH!
1 - Paying for consuming media older than 30 years is a perversion of the intellectual property idea, of supporting artists for a short window of time by artificial restriction of the right to culture and knowledge, and then to release the works to the public domain for the enjoyment of society. That the capitalists extended said window to be the death of the autour + 70 years, and then invented the idea of owning the art-invention-etc made by worker-artists is the real robbery of the situation. The current phase of studios trying to leverage AI tools (and AI tools that are essentially industrial scale pirates AND plagiarists) to make even more exploitation of artists is not surprising to me.
I forgot to add: the original north american idea was 14 years + 14 years, if the artist made a request for extension to get the 2nd period. Imagine if we had 14 years copyright now, everything made 14 years ago would be released and available to watch or even to make derivative works…
2 - I am not north american, i am third worlder (Brazil). So, since i have the money and time to spend, i prefer to spend money on domestic artists and domestic works to benefit my nation, which is a lot poorer than western artists and populations, and with much less famous cultural works. Instead of giving (more) money to Disney, i can go on music shows or theater here, or sign up one of the local streamers, and pirate the foreigner’s content i want. Brazilian artists, that really need the money and attention, i try to pay whenever possible (if it is even available). For films made by disney (and equivalents) … they will make enough money from cinema release here and from their foreign rich country, no need to give then a monthly transfer on top. The book Open Veins of Latin America is something of a reference in this type of reasoning.
Movies have been getting longer for a few years or so but they are especially long this year. Look at the biggest films this year and see how they are about 20-30min longer than they would be in the past....
I prefer to watch films that are good to great, no matter the time as long as the artists know how to use the time well and make the work worth to watch. There is fantastic works that span the whole spectrum, from short films to lenghy films, and there is trash all the way too (Some director compared it to paintings, that range from tiny papers to whole walls). If we really think about it, any anthology series like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone 1959 are just a collection of short films that share a theme, some recurring stage crew, and etc. If i am short on literal time, i have no problem stopping and taking multiple sections to watch a film (purists have some point that it loses a little of the impact some times, but most of the time it really does not).
I think it is 2 reasons for the trend:
Cinema-at-home technologies just keeps getting so much better all the time, and it is already pretty great. Streaming and 80 inch 4K OLED TVs are just the latest iteration of a process started in the 1950s with tube TVs, and if VR-AR glasses popularize they will be the next. Cinema Studios and Cinema-at-theater companies had to invent new immersive technologies and art forms to stay competitive, from the rectangle screen form (16:9) until IMAX 4-D etc. They also artificially benefited the cinema-at-theater by having the release window schedule (3 months in theaters, another 6 months to dvd, 1-2 years to tv, etc), that has been diminushed but it still exists (6 weeks to 2 months in theaters i think), and in our FOMO infested culture this might make theaters stay in the long run in some form or another. But overall, home has never been such a sweet place to watch cinema.
The endless rat-race to keep cinema-at-theater competitive with cinema-at-home has eventually made that only Blockbusters in high tecnology cinemas are attractive enough to most people, and to pay for all this sensorial spectacle that ranges from the theaters to the films themselves, the scale of capital costs in the whole industry has just risen to the roof, and now the tickets are usually very expensive (and foods drinks etc). The average consumer in turn, feels that going to a film in a theater has to be WORTH it, has to be better than home and has to compensate for the high ticket (and foods etc) price. This means that films have to be a Spectacle that is highly sensorial and lasts a lot of time to become a memorable Event in the persons day, week or month. So, longer run times.
There is a cinema industry that is already more advanced in these characteristics: it’s Bollywood, with the Masala genre (i.e. a spectacle that has to please the whole family, and they include at least some romance action drama dance music in every film) and many hours of lengh (4hr is not unusual). Because the average indian is poor, and they go to the cinema rarely, so the indian studios have to make it worth it, an Event for the whole family, like Hollywood has to now. There is also something of a Music Show vibe, where the audience cheers and claps when the stars appears on screen, and actively engages with the film throughout (booing a vilain , lamenting a death scene, etc), it reminds me of the marvel spider man 3, but times 10 and all the time, it’s a cinema-at-theater experience also unmatched by home, because of the collective element. Maybe Bollywood is the mirror that Hollywood has to emulate now, instead of the other way.
SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike for many reasons, but one that stands out to me is an effort to make digital copies of extras and maintain the rights to use them in perpetuity. There are many implications of this, from people losing an opportunity to work, to Ethical implications ex:your likeness is used in a movie/tv...
My take: Companies can not take actor’s body image «for free forever» like they are trying to do, it is just theft and illegal.
If Disney wants to , say, take Harrison Ford body and make an Indiana Jones 6 with ‘‘him’’ (an animated rendering of his body), then they have to pay royalties, negotiate a contract, etc with the person, the same way any of them would do with their IPs. In general, everybody should have their body as their own IP really, by default and retroactively. With largely the same rules as the very IPs of these mergacorporations, so they enter public domain after a while too.
PS: i really want my AI-generated Buster Keaton and OG Popeye short films …
I am a non-power and non-technical user, and after trying Linux Mint (liked it) i tried a relatively obscure distro that i ended up loving: BigLinux
see their site here → www.biglinux.com.br , there is a translation button on bottom right
It is a brazilian distro semi-famous here, continuously developed by more or less a small team since 20 years, but with support for 29 languages including english.
they use a base of Manjaro Linux KDE, which is based on Arch. They install via Calamares, and you select the desktop configuration (windows-like, macoss-like, etc of 6 options).
The motto for the distro is : “In search of the perfect system”, and their goal is more or less to make a linux distro the MOST complete and beginner-friendly possible, sort of going in a Maximalist, anti-gnome philosophy. For this, they have:
Pre-packaged lots and lots of programs out-of-the-box (like rustdesk, both brave and firefox, steam, lutris, jdownloader, corestats, a printscreen program, image sound video converters, etc and 2 whole sections of Webbapps (including all of google stuff - docs, slides, maps - , almost all social media sites, microsoft office, all music streaming and television streaming sites → and you can disable them on the webbapp hub).
The only linux distro i found that out-of-the-box installs ALL packaging methods (i.e. ALL OF THEM). They natively have BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap (snap is activated by the user clicking in a button, so you can have it or not). They have integration for .appimage, automatic converter for .deb and .rpm installation, java installed and ready to run .jar programs, and Waydroid (for android apps). I know it is possible to do this on mostly any distro, but trying doing that as a noob was unsuccesful for me, i did not know the names of all little programs (or that they existed) , and is a lot of time and pain, this way it really just works.
The software store is great (Big Store), it is completely visual interface, you just type the name of the program, click a button, write the password, and it instals, and again, it has BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap to search. You can just search on the internet for the other packages, download the .deb .rpm .appimage .apk file, and just click, and it converts and instals them. I never have to worry about linux apps not being compatible for instalation on my distro, ever.
All in all, a truly graphical user interface, out-of-the-box functionality and beginner friendly distro. With the security of manjaro, and the bleedging edge of Arch. Negative point is that it both uses KDE and has a ton of programs pre-installed , so it leans heavy. I could not install it on a 2006 toshiba laptop even the light version, but a 2011 Macbook with ssd runs great. I use it on a Sony vaio 8gb ram 2013 all in one and have no complaints.
Alas, we have reached a point where lots of web stuff already just does not work in non chromium browsers. My father could not use Netflix on Firefox on Linux mint, we called Netflix customer support and they said to install Google chrome. And it then worked. I use opera and it worked for me too. So a chromium browser is needed, for streaming stuff at least. And non googled chromium probably does not have the commercial addons needed.
What would be the least bad chromium family browser then ?
You may be unaware, and it may be that it would have been possible to configure something or install something obscure and not noob friendly, but i can tell that in 2022 that situation happened, i tried to re-install firefox, did a quick google search on possible fixes, tried a handful, the netflix error continued, and then I gave up and called netflix, and installed google chrome.
now that you mention, i have plenty of addons on all browsers i use. Maybe i could have made it work by testing one by one, though the chromium browsers all worked out-of-the-box even with largely the same addons. I just do not have the patience for it now, and settled on using Vivaldi for chromium stuff when really needed, which should not be often.
Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have....
If only i could upvote you several times. I agree with every point, and was already called a Nintendo Hater, and now i say it with pride. Nintendo is just extremely anti-consumer, anti art preservation, anti community (even their own fans), actively erasing gaming history, and taking advantage of ignorants and ideologically confused fanboys in shitty deals, products and services. If this company were founded today, they would be dead in less than 3 years, but they successfully milk the nostalgia from their golden years from the 80s to early 2000s. Can only say this: It is ethically good to boycot Nintendo, do piracy emulation and buy from other places.
Young Koreans favor iPhones over Samsung Galaxy: survey (www.koreaherald.com)
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Spotify’s first US price hike for Premium is coming next week (www.theverge.com)
Studio Ghibli's Final Miyazaki Film Opens Huge Despite Zero Marketing (kotaku.com)
Have you noticed how movies are getting longer?
Movies have been getting longer for a few years or so but they are especially long this year. Look at the biggest films this year and see how they are about 20-30min longer than they would be in the past....
With Studios Attempting To Own Digital Likeness Forever, Lets Have a Look at Posthumous Performances
SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike for many reasons, but one that stands out to me is an effort to make digital copies of extras and maintain the rights to use them in perpetuity. There are many implications of this, from people losing an opportunity to work, to Ethical implications ex:your likeness is used in a movie/tv...
What is the most opinionated linux distro?
cross-posted from: infosec.pub/post/550905...
Gaming hot takes?
Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have....