Barrier has been abandoned quite awhile ago. Its successor is supposed to be InputLeap, and although their GitHub repo is very active, they have yet to make a release.

I didn't even know that Synergy provided a "community" version of their app until very recently. I've paid for a license many years ago, so I've been using their 1.1x versions, which for better or worse, are still maintained along with the 3.x branch (which I've tried using but could never make it work, which is for the best because the fact they pivoted their UI to electron-based also left a bad taste in my mouth).

Edit: also, if I understand correctly, Synergy's latest versions on the 1.x branch borrows a lot from InputLeap.

Not a variant. Read their README. It IS Synergy, they're renaming the open-source / community version to that, while Synergy will remain the commercial product built out of that.

This. It's not as simple to get it working as it is on non-free OS's, but with rclone I can get on Linux pretty much the same functionality I get from (eg.) Google Drive on Windows, including have most of the drive with on-demand access (meaning files are not stored locally, but downloaded / uploaded as needed) with a few specific folders synced for offline use. Since it supports a lot of storage services, I suppose it shouldn't be that different to set it up the same way with Proton Drive.

Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn't targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.

Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.

One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.

and do you think there were repercussions before?

For X? Sure, that's why they're leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge's orders, they'd surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they're adding gasoline to the burning world.

The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.

But it isn't. Now people get to spread misinformation to Brazilians with no repercussions.

I don't actually care about the drama per se at this point either. I mentioned it because, along with the fact that:

• development is not very open (in that only that one guy commits and releases stuff)
• release cadence is very erratic and often lags behind upstream chromium, which is a direct consequence of the previous point
• you mentioned about the guys absence - the first time was some time ago and he was inpatient in the hospital for (IIRC) alcohol abuse, and this absence actually coincided with the drama over the furry and the other stuff, so it took awhile for it to be addressed, which only added more fuel to the fire. The second was just this last couple of months were he was house sitting for his parents (mentioned on the release notes I linked before)

All of this paints a bleak outlook for the long term health of this project, IMO. Which is too bad , because I still think it's one of the better forks of chromium.

Well, Thorium developer stated he intends to support Mv2 past the 2025 deadline. Whether he'll make it, we'll see. It's a one man show, there was some drama involving it in the past, and there's the question of what's the point in maintaining Mv2 extensions support if you won't be able to install them from the store after they're cut off?

Sorry to slightly derail the thread, but I'll probably be on the market for a vertical mouse soon as well, which one do you use / recommend? I've been using Logitech mice for decades now, so I've naturally looked into their options and I'm not quite convinced on the ergonomics of the ones I've seen.

Thanks for this write up. I still can't say I condone some of Russia's decisions and posturing even in light of the data you presented, but these data certainly paints a more nuanced picture than people are usually led to believe, I think.

Ukraine should grant the people they've been oppressing their right to self determination.

Not sure I understand this. You mean people on Crimea and maybe east Ukraine that would be in majority ethnically Russian, or is it something else? Sorry if it's daft question, I don't really know the geopolitics in this region.

Ok OP, I've been seeing your posts here and they almost always seem to have an anti-west take on things. I try to read news from both sides of the aisle and make my own conclusions, so I'm genuinely curious: why do you think Ukraine should roll over and hand over their lands to Russia, or alternately, why is Russia justified in this war (that apparently they did provoke)?

I'm very torn on disco. Season 2 is probably the best (due in no small part that it sets up SNW), but the rest are a chore to watch. Most of them have some neat ideas, but they're badly executed more often than not. They also were too heavy handed with each season arcs serialization, most episodes don't stand on their own, and the writing and consistency is just bad. I just finished the final season, and I'm glad they're done with it so they can put more money on good Trek like SNW - hopefully they don't screw it up eventually.

Here. Tl;dr: He took it private for reasons, should bring it back in a "build it yourself" form later.

Not really new. It's basically LCD without backlight. So, higher resolution GBC / GBA alike screen.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

I think that's a "humans" problem, really, specially in the last few decades.

To the extent that a boss demanding sex in exchange for career advancement, I agree that makes them sex offenders. But those women still have a choice. They making the wrong choice doesn't mean they aren't the victim, but they still should be accountable for their choice.

Apparently it's not that the software is broken, it's that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it'll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft's rationale here. They can't be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it's known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

In the last few decades that I've been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I'm more frustrated at Microsoft that I'm forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.

Not to take Reddit's / spez side, but to clarify, that's not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.

Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.

Thank you for digging this out. Turns out it's even worse than what I gleaned from my surface-level take.