I know KDE has a calendar, not sure how well it’d work for your use case but it’s there!

I mean you know better than me (I’m not even on twitter so everything i see is just the internet perspective of it). I’ll take your word for it as you’re probably right!

I wasn’t really involved with social media back then sadly, but yes I did get that general impression. Before all the toxicity really overtook it around 2020 it did seem quite pleasant.

Shame really, corporate greed taking something quite nice and milking it so hard it’s absolutely ruined. Then again, it gives way to things like bluesky so i guess it has its upsides!

Having never been on twitter myself I’m especially entertained, watching and laughing from a far corner of the internet

Just FYI, you can duplicate an entire google docs/sheets/slides document by going File > Make a Copy, and in your case preserve comments by checking the relevant box!

Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people’s experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn’t really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I’m aware.

In any case with the way ubuntu’s going I’m really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don’t think I’m alone)

From what I understand and to continue your example of Ubuntu-based distros:

As you say, Ubuntu itself is corporate-driven, so there are things in there that exist pretty much solely to benefit Canonical (e.g the telemetry they recently introduced if i recall correctly)

Most of the time when basing distros off of others, I think it’s to keep a lot of features - either to save dev time or because they only want to tweak a small portion of the distro and not write a new one from scratch.

Because devs can modify the entire codebase, they can remove features that are corporate-driven (telemetry and such) and effectively create something fully (or mostly) compatible yet without such features.

Another major example imo is the removal of snaps, which most people (myself included) strongly dislike - as far as I’m aware removing them in Ubuntu itself is quite a difficult process as it’s baked into the distro itself. I imagine a lot of people want something like Ubuntu as it is quite friendly and has one of the lower bars of entry for Linux, but object to corporate things like telemetry and the overall monstrosity that is snaps.

Apologies, i went down a bit of a tangent, but I hope that roughly answers your question!

Presumably yeah, if everyone could see the death / suffering count of various big companies we probably wouldn’t be using them nearly as much.

That’s an interesting idea, I suppose it’s possible if you have one or more databases with these statistics and then link them together and see. My instincts tell me that it’d be very impractical to implement though!

I have a pretty horrible sense of direction, and I find that looking for important (clearly visible) landmarks helps reorient me, as well as relying on a minimap wherever available. Also if there’s any way to place markers or waypoints to show you a route then that helps too. Navigating still sucks but it’s a bit less painful with those!

Looks great, what music player are you using?

I thought thunderbird still is a mozilla project to this day? I use it and it still comes up as mozilla thunderbird on installers and the like. I definitely agree with your virtue signalling point though, I like that they don’t shove it in your face every time you open the app, it just does its job.

(Partly continuing from part 1) Unless I’m greatly mistaken mozilla are a pretty big company and quite profitable themselves and they very much have the capability to install solar panels and such, and how else do you think unifying them would be beneficial? All of the major google-suite-alternative open source applications are working very well alone and some element of separation and competition seems ideal in my opinion. Interested to hear your thoughts behind this.

I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure what you mean by having less dependency on google - firefox is the only major modern browser not to be chromium-based) and thus at least partly google-based too), and why would unifying many open source apps under one company be beneficial? Signal, mozilla, proton, libreoffice, etc. all being separate entities actually seems better for privacy and decentralisation imo! Also, firefox offers a vpn and email client (thunderbird) and ecosia seems a bit odd to put in here seeing as a core part of it is adverts (and if memory serves i think it might even use google search apis or something?) Sorry if I’ve come off as too critical as I quite like the idea of having one unified open-source suite, but I feel like it’d be either unnecessary or impractical in most cases.