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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.




  • Not the guy you’re replying to, but I have been using Thorium for the past couple of weeks. It’s pretty nice, kinda like what Edge was before going to shit for the past year or so. But being a Chromium browser, it eventually will be hit with the ManifestV2-no-more hammer. The maintainer said the best he’ll be able to do is use some patches to keep ManifestV2 active through enterprise group policies, but it’s expected google will eventually remove the ManifestV2 code entirely, at which point he said he’s not going to be able to maintain a fork to keep ManifestV2 in.

    I dislike Brave for some of its sketchyness in the past, and the other Chromium forks haven’t made clear guidelines on what they’re going to do when ManifestV3 is made the default, so I’m bracing because I think I’m going to be forced to go back to Firefox because of AdBlock shenanigans.





  • Just FYI, Barrier has been abandoned / unsupported for awhile. Although the last release mostly works, don’t expect future support.

    Its successor is https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap, and although there have been some coy maintainance on it, they have yet to provide an installable release, due to “reasons”.

    I use Synergy myself, which is the ancestor of both of the above. Although it started as open source, it has been turned into a commercial product a long time ago, which is why I’m not providing the link here. It’s still maintained, for better or for worse, but in the latest release-to-be they revamped the UI and for some reason I couldn’t get it to work at all on my setup - it seems to rely on some auto configuration / autodetection gimmickry which simply is not working here. To make matters worse, the new UI is essentially an electron app, which means it has become a lot more bloated. And then there’s also the telemetry thing. I’ve been using the old 1.1 legacy version, holding out hope that input-leap eventually lifts off.


  • If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

    This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that’s what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

    I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I’d have no reason to other that I like it?


  • Hold on, is that for real? Like, for Unity games developed years (maybe over a decade) ago, developers would need to start to pony up if they’re installed now? I thought that pay by install thing was just for licensing contracts from now on (not that this isn’t bullshit too, but at least people could just move on to another engine).





  • Same here. In fact, I bought my Legion (which btw I feel like it was a good choice on OPs part because I believe Lenovo’s laptops tend to have better cooling engineering in general, for whatever laptop category, compared to other brands) to serve first as a work laptop, and then some gaming on the side, which I’m not too picky about because I don’t really play on PC that often anyway. My reasoning for that is that the business laptops I had been looking before going with the Legion were frankly overpriced crap with limited expandability, shoddy components and build, and full of built-in bloatware pre-installed. I find that gaming laptops tend to have higher quality components and slightly better expandability, so it was a win all around.