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.

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

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.

This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

The key point is this:

[…] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.

Good. We think alike 👍

Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.

I did it all using this. Took me about half an hour to migrate all my 15-something accounts to KeepassXC.

Doesn’t PS2 use a PowerPC architecture?

No, it uses a custom architecture around a custom CPU, the “Emotion Engine”, a MIPS-based CPU. You must be thinking of the Wii or XBox360 that came after it.

Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox

Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.

My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it’s just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it’s performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla’s choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.

I know I’ll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.

There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.

What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won’t be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you’d need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That’s not great UX.

Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn’t necessarily be expensive, but wouldn’t be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don’t see a hint of it happening.

All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?

I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn’t want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I’ll have to.