I find it so frustrating. The hate journalism gets is such a misdirection. This is a vital profession whose business model has been all but destroyed by the internet. The numbers of journalists have been in freefall for decades now. Their pay has never been lower, their jobs never less secure. Their desperate managers are pushing them to stop the bleeding by going for clicks and views. Predictably, they then get abused for being attention whores. Or, worse, part of some institutional conspiracy. And yet without professional journalists, bound by an ethics code, we're absolutely gonna be lost in a sea of junk and fakery and manipulation. It's going to be so much worse even than what it is already. And yet this could all be avoided if people were prepared to pay even a fraction of what they fork out to Netflix or Amazon. To be clear, I am not a journalist.
JubilantJaguar
Yes yes I know that. But the consumer desktop product is a loss leader. There is no demand for payment and yet It obviously cost them something to make.
It would help if European voters stopped behaving like spoiled children and voting for wannabe dictators because inflation or immigration or whatever.
Yes, Osmand is definitely clunky by comparison. But the UX is getting slowly more intuitive. I see no reason why Osmand's easy-peasy defaults mode cannot end up equal to to OM. They're not far off, and at that point its superiority would be clear as day.
Personally I wish the OM devs could have contributed their talents to making Osmand better. Really feels like wasteful duplication which benefits nobody benefits except the egos of a handful of developers. A common problem with FOSS and this is a great example IMO.
Seems you might be a more sophisticated user than the ones targeted by Ubuntu. That is: Windows normies who find the whole concept of Linux deeply foreboding, but bravely take the leap anyway. As usual, most people in this discussion are neglecting this crucial fact.
Ubuntu is trying to make things easy and secure. I don't much like Snaps either, but the security paradigm is better than APT, and they are nothing if not easy.
their “selling” point
Here's one place to begin. They're not selling it, it's literally free. Speaking for myself but I just cannot bring myself to criticize a free product which is not a monopoly. And this clearly isn't a monopoly. It just feels entitled.
Amazon ads
The tiny flaw in the above logic. Reminiscent of similar scandalettes involving Mozilla. But these sponsorship deals have always been easy to disable, even before they get dropped like a hot potato because of the backlash. I always come back to the same thought: how much are we actually paying for this product that is apparently valuable because we're using it and concerned about its flaws? We're paying nothing.
Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
The typical Ubuntu user will not know what a deb is, and should not be expected to. That's the point. It's meant to be easy. Whatever else they are, Snaps are definitely easy.
A good opportunity to remind everyone that a vastly superior alternative to Organic Maps already exists: Osmand.
Right now The Atlantic, plus a national online newspaper here in Europe. Nothing else.
PSA: if you value your personal freedoms, then you need to at least consider paying for journalism. Democracy cannot survive without an independent media.
Judging by the comment deletions, this seems to be receiving some pushback. Here's my guess why: the message is a little sanctimonious. And if there's one thing most people hate, it's sanctimony. This fact partly explains the outcome of a certain recent election.
Yes, the message is true! Chowing on burgers and chicken drumsticks is not kind, given the suffering that it took to make them. But food production and consumption have become so disconnected. And people are mostly kind in their everyday lives (far from factory farms). They don't appreciate being told the contrary.
This is why I prefer messaging that focuses on coherence. Show or explain how the meat was made, using facts or images, and without judgement or emotion. Point out that the alternatives are pretty tasty (no need to talk up healthiness, that will go unsaid). And maybe evoke, as gently as possible, the mismatch in our collective values. Perhaps by pointing out the love given to household pets. Delivered like this, the message might have a chance of landing. After all, people hate sanctimony but they also hate hypocrisy.
The same French of whom more than a third want an authoritarian strongman in power? Personally I would prefer to copy the handful of boring countries where people actually trust their leaders and so don't feel they need to resort to bloody revolution at the drop of a hat.
Interesting perspective. I too have used Osmand (or "OsmAnd" or "OSMAnd" or whatever unpronounceable official name it is) for years. 13 years to be precisely, without a break. I've contributed numerous bug reports and feature requests. It's clunky and unintuitive yes, but I've seen worse in other power apps of this kind.
But Osmand is still lacking a couple of features on my personal wishlist, so I naturally gave Organic Maps a decent audition, navigation included. I found that it did only one thing better: rendering of subway lines in dense cities. But this has now been largely fixed by a new setting in Osmand (cleverly hidden, obviously). In everything else, OM just felt to me like a poor man's alternative to Osmand. With a busy hive of developers earnestly working towards feature parity sometime in the next millennium.
These two projects have the exactly the same objectives. I continue to wish the OM developers would just put aside their egos and help fix whatever it is they don't like in Osmand. That's the point of FOSS.