C++ Software Engineer Big interest in OpenSource communities for years now. 20+ years linux user. But a newbies in fediverse, had heard about it before but needed the help of twitter (for mastodon) and reddit changes to give a real try. Also a fan of Stephen King books. Was [email protected]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Ok done a bit the reverse as many here: came from Heliboard and tested out FUTO (thanks to this post and some others telling it was great). And indeed, it works pretty well, better than Heliboard, especially in English (~40% of my use on Android - I’m French native speaker so most messaging is in French and I use English for some search, lemmy,…). So that’s say in French, futo is not as good as in English (suggestions are often less accurate than in English) but it’s still better than Heliboard. The swipe works better too (and doesn’t require an external (proprietary) library). The only drawbacks I see until now is the limitation to 3 suggestions in the suggestions bar, with Heliboard there was a 3 dot menu giving more suggestions and the lack of spellchecker.
















  • I think that one of the structural change that helped a lot to have less stalled or unmaintained open source projects is the improvement in the DevOps tools.

    I mean that, until recently, I always had been an open source user and supporter but, despite being a professional software engineer, I never coded in open source projects. The reason to this is that I did not wanted to commit myself into a project that I cannot afford to work regularly on because of professional and/or personal time constraints.

    Now with the broad use of git and related platforms for open source projects (GitHub, gitlab, …), it’s possible to work only a little on open source projects. You can fix a bug impacting you as an user, translate some strings in your native language, improve the doc, … without commiting to work regularly on the project. You just change the stuff, have no requirements to inform anyone, make a pull request and it’s merged or not by the maintener …

    I think this is really what contributed to improvement in the way open source projects evolved.




  • I recently started using Duck Duck Go instead of Google.

    I still had this thought that Google was the best technology as I went from the early web (remember… altavista.digital.com, yahoo, …) and I remember that Google was really a game changer when it started to become popular.

    I tested setting DDG as default search engine in my desktop and mobile browsers, thinking that when I don’t have expected results I would go to Google… I never had to switch to Google because I was wrong, DDG is as good as Google while being better from privacy point of view.

    For the browser I use Vivaldi on both android and desktop.