Definitely count these other DEs into my criticism. They’re part of the problem.

I love the free software ideals, but I think we’ve got a different understanding about what constitutes a good and a bad license. What many people seem to forget about software licenses is that there are these other countries besides America. They couldn’t care less about whatever judges rule over there. A good license is a dumb simple license that anyone can enforce in court with ease. A bad license is a convoluted license that crumbles like a house of cards in court. I read the GPL. It’s convoluted. It’s an opaque terms of service agreement riddled with legal boilerplate disguised as software license. A poor execution of the ideals I hold. I only use the GPL as a formality to say that I support the free software ideals, but I have zero confidence in enforcing the GPL.

Shame that we don’t have a proper copyleft license tho? GPL, as nice as the intentions are, is a license so convoluted that I’m not sure whether it’d hold up in court in my country.

None of the above. 64-bit, 64 bit, x86-64, 1000000 bit, amd or i772.

Let’s use Ubuntu for comparison.

• Ubuntu is more up-to-date than its spin-offs.
• Ubuntu will outlive Ubuntu spin-offs, including Zorin.
• Ubuntu offers paid support, whereas Zorin doesn’t.
• Ubuntu community is bigger than Zorin. More resources, tutorials, etc.

Zorin adds only the following value:

• More themes, primarily lookalikes, which is arguably a bad thing.

When people see Windows, they expect Windows. Installers, package managers, peripherals like printers, etc. are different from Windows. Pretending to be Windows makes people feel at ease for a moment at the expense of fundamentally misunderstanding what operating system their computer runs on, and it’ll trip them up eventually, probably sooner rather than later.

See macOS: It looks and feels different. People don’t mistake macOS for Windows. People who use Windows don’t expect macOS to behave like Windows, and vice-versa. But hey, let’s make macOS look and feel like Windows at first glance. Why can’t I run that .exe? What do you mean, I must use an app store? What is HDCP, and why does it prevent me from connecting this laptop to the projector?

For iOS that’d be questions like: Where is the Play Store? Why can’t I install that (Android-only) app? I think you get my point.

This is one of the reasons why branding exists. Yet many Linux distros would like to believe they can replicate the Windows experience through a miracle, and fool themselves into thinking that’s a good thing for Linux newcomers. It’s especially bad for people who don’t know they use Linux, like when they use computers at the office, library, etc. with a distro like Zorin.

Like auto update and auto driver installation? They expired for sure, but especially the auto driver installation patent is hilarious. Like no shit sherlock: Check internet for driver with the device md5 hash and the version of the driver installer. Download driver if it’s a newer version. Install driver if md5 hash matches. Repeat for all devices, and that’s fucking it. Plus an irrelevant figure that shows a computer connected to a printer, scanner and the internet. 3 pages in total, of which 1 page is a copy of another page, so only 2 real pages in total.

They have computers, but only a privileged few know how to use them: https://youtu.be/IrCQh1usdzE?t=944

Yeah sure let’s ignore out of print books that nobody will ever see again unless you pirate it.

Copyright doesn’t encourage new works. If anything, copyright discourages new works by locking fair use and transformative behind an expensive legal process. Digitization in America is illegal by default except for books where a judge ruled it’s transformative enough.

The proven method to encourage new works is to have no copyright. But alas, publishers back then didn’t appreciate that others print “their” books. Higher quality cover? More durable paper? Book is out of print? Zero profits? Give me money or fuck off. Publishers sure didn’t change.

Domain name ~$15/year

.com starts at $10.28/year

Offshore server providers usually start around $30/server/month and quickly raise to thousands

Proxy everything from cheap offshore servers to servers from legit hosting providers with fair pricing.

Corporate application techs are usually $2k-200k/month depending on size

Ops are a tech themselves, work with techs they split donations with or pay or nothing at all, or become a tech themselves as time goes on.

Anything that requires a GPU would be a custom build, dell power edge is a powerful machine you can lookup retail for

True, but a website like FitGirl Repacks needs no GPU.

Storage Amazon s3 is $0.022 per GB/month

Don’t use Amazon S3 if pricing is a concern.

Keep in mind that providers […] often provide multiple releases codexes, resolutions and providing a lot more than people are requesting

I’m not sure what to say about that? They sure can do that for images, but not for game repacks.

You often have to pay for networking as well which scales exponentially

Pirates don’t build on-prem data centers, they rent servers or services.

Email accounts are usually $10/user/month any time would come from a senior developer ~120+k/year

No, they can re-use whatever server they use for email. Why pay a senior developer ~120+k/year for email?

But they are likely full stack developers so it might be closer to 200k in the US

If a developer works with a pirate, they don’t get paid a wage. They’re part of the operation, and get paid depending on the donations or nothing at all.

And servers to run development environments (double the costs above!!!)

The development environment can be on the server or even on the dev’s laptop. They already paid for that, so $0.

And infrastructure like Jenkins/monitoring which can scale high as well, but likely <$20k/year

Put it on the server. Scalability isn’t practical for pirates to begin with. If they lay all eggs in one basket for maximum scalability and cost savings, then the cloud provider can end their entire operation.

I didn’t know that. Yeah, that sounds reasonable if they need it. It’s probably best to view my original comment from the perspective that they don’t need these benefits.

Hard if not impossible to say. It depends on what they host. Hosting also gets real expensive if they make poor choices.

If they choose to host their WordPress piracy website on WordPress.com, then that’s a shit idea. They’re overpriced as hell, even with an annual discount. 300 € annually is WordPress.com’s discounted price for a somewhat usable, but still restricted WordPress instance. Furthermore, pirates face the risk that hosting providers terminate their account and keep the money, so long billing periods are risky.

They accept that risk to save some cash, and use WordPress.com. Okay, now what? WordPress.com terminates the account at the start of the new billing period and keeps the money. How sweet. Pay 300 € for the privilege of another restricted WordPress instance. Annual spending: 600 € for what could’ve been 21.12 € annually with a dumb simple Hetzner webspace.

You may think that this is impossible, nobody is dumb enough to spend 600 € when a 21.12 € solution is good enough, right? Look no further than any company that lifts and shifts apps into the cloud that weren’t designed to run in the cloud. Expensive as hell for no fucking reason other than it’s in the cloud now. Or this poor fella who got a $ 30 gift card for saving their employer $ 500,000 with five clicks.

… from committing the severe crime of copyright infringement, of course!

I get the frustration here, but it’s also kind of… idk? A “No, you just don’t understand!” response. Everyone who works in a white-collar job knows what it’s like. Everyone has different theories about why that project failed, but nobody knows the objective truth. Nobody can present a “documented and verified” list of reasons for why the project failed, not even the lead designer here. They can guess, but never reach the truth. He could repeat what he always did without changing anything in the next project, and succeed due to different circumstances, plain good luck.

We’re talking about Word documents, right? People hate when a line wraps in the information block, or their fold and hole marks move, each time anyone with LibreOffice touches their letters. Or their crop, bleed, registration, fold marks, color bars, and safety margins when they print anything professionally. Sorry people, but Word documents require precision sometimes. They look the same, even across several major Word versions. If LibreOffice can’t guarantee that, then you can’t use LibreOffice in an MS Office environment where precision is necessary, and this starts with letters.

I didn’t describe what could happen, but what did happen in real life. Multiple times.

MCBans is open-source btw, yet nobody checked and changed the source code, as should be expected really. Operators whitelisted alts and friends. Blacklisted server owners who didn’t appreciate that the operators of their global ban list griefed their servers with backdoors.

Another typical example is 3rd-party Discord ban lists. They whitelist their own staff. They backdoor their bots to fuck around with servers. It’s just the reality of global ban lists.

If Erlite doesn’t abuse that trust, then someone with admin access will, or Erlite’s successor. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Email spam filters prevent single trust lists with scores, multiple lists, etc.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We’ve seen how this plays out already.

Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won’t be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.

Unlimited is never unlimited. Why nobody forces them to disclose this clearly is a mystery to me. An unlimited contract with 5 TB data for 15€/m is better than an unlimited contract with 1 TB data for 15€/m, given everything else is aight.

I’m not sure what you mean. Artists use Photoshop for drawing, yet Adobe advertises Photoshop mostly for image editing. Even though Adobe advertises Photoshop for image editing, which should include fully editing your own photographs imo, the only proper Denoise AI is built into Lightroom lol. Photopea also supports pressure sensitivity, so it should work just fine for drawing. Tools aren’t that big of a deal. People who design beautiful presentation decks use PowerPoint after all… with the default system fonts.

You conflate VPN providers have an incentive to store no logs with it’s impossible to verify whether VPN providers store logs. It’s like trusting your friend to keep a secret. They promise not to write down what you say, but you can’t be sure. You accept that risk in your threat model, and that’s fine. But newcomers should judge that risk themselves. I feel like “Don’t worry bro, they don’t keep logs.” is an inappropriate response to people that’re about to commit a crime that can land them in jail.