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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • mortrek@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlThank You devs.
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    2 years ago

    I agree. I’m very grateful to OSS developers. I use almost exclusively OSS software every day at this point, and it wouldn’t be possible without the countless people devoting countless hours of their valuable time to these projects.

    So, a question to devs, especially for smaller, more approachable projects: I have a minor (plus a bit more) in CS, a lifetime of casual coding, but never really built anything larger-scale than a C-based sh-like shell in one of my CS courses, or many years ago an IRC front-end for a chatbot engine. Mostly I just write scripts (sometimes kinda complex), or small C/C++ projects. I would try to contribute to a project directly, but I don’t want to step on toes, and most projects have people who are deeply intertwined in the code of the project. It feels impossible to get involved in any way other than testing without possibly just annoying people who have been doing it for years. I’ve known enough intimidating grizzled *nix guru people to make me paranoid that I’ll just get in the way.

    How do you get a foothold in a project? Should I just start with creating my own OSS project, and once I get somewhere where I’m familiar with the flow and project management and such, then I can consider contributing more to other projects?

    Or is it really more helpful to the community to just test stuff, create documentation, answer questions, etc? Would becoming another dev be more helpful to OSS, or would working on supporting projects in these other ways be more helpful?





  • Only significant issue that I’ve had with EndeavourOS/Arch is when I had a laptop with it installed and didn’t update for like 6 months because I rarely needed it. When I went to do a full update, it really messed multiple things up. There were just too many massive changes at once. I just shrugged and reinstalled with the newest ISO, but if I had heavily customized it or something, I would have been pretty annoyed. Ever since then I usually install it with BTRFS and auto pacman snapshots.

    Also, never perform partial upgrades unless you know what you are doing. That’s apparently the fastest way to mess things up. I played with this before and it definitely will break things.






  • Any Android phones that are still decent? Somewhat repairable, sd card support, audio jack, and relatively easy to install a mature, non-Google firmware/os on, in the USA?

    Pixel doesn’t check those boxes. Fairphone does but who knows if they will commit to the US market… Also quite pricey.

    I have a Moto G Stylus 2022, which checks some boxes and is cheap, and has little bloat, but isn’t terribly repairable and cannot easily be fully degoogled, and doesn’t really have a good alternative OS.