https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214638/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/05/look-at-the-lights-my-love-annie-ernaux-book-review/674235/

Anyone who's studied the George Orwell novel 1984 want to explain to me what the fucking point of "newspeak" is and why it's not a strawman "we're gonna make the commies seem like supervillains and do random stupid shit for no reason" type trope? Because when has any prominent figure in socialism or communism ever suggested dumbing down language? Give me an example of a commie language reinvention please, 1984 is supposed to be the definitive manual on what happened under communism isn't it?

Also detecting a hint of racism in that plotpoint because there really are real languages that evolved naturally where the positive and negative expressions are indeed structured as good, not good, very good, very not good, etc. Is it trying to say that people speaking those languages are bad at expressing their thoughts because it's not how English does it?

Actually, Chinese is kind of like this with its use of pre/suffixes. Chinese is also one of the best languages for poetry and literature. Source: Native Mandarin speaker.

Crossposted from my Mastodon

And this is rolled back from their initial proposal of 80 hours.

I'm looking to get a straight tablet (not a 360-hinge laptop with a keyboard) that will mostly be used for mobile centric applications like when I'm out and about or when I want to binge shows in bed. Ideally it will be a device that I can exclusive use the touchscreen with for when I'm either too lazy or can't practically prop it up and use it as a proper laptop.

I want to keep at least the software as open source as possible, so my options are either an Android tablet that I can sideload an AOSP de-googled ROM like Lineage OS, or a Windows tablet with an x86 CPU that I'll install a Linux distro on (inb4 "Android is technically Linux").

I currently use KDE Plasma which is my favourite environment when I'm on my desktop, and I quickly found through testing on my touchscreen laptop that it's practically unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Here are some things that I found KDE lacking that I need:

• Integrated onscreen keyboard that automatically pops up when you're in a text field, and/or can easily be brought in and out of frame when needed.

• Smooth swipe-based scrolling. I find that swiping up on many KDE apps just selects text or drags an element, or does nothing, and you have to drag the tiny scroll bar to scroll.

• Pinch to zoom

• A terminal that works well with touch screen, namely one that makes it easy to use special characters and control keys with an onscreen keyboard. Termux on Android is what I consider one of the best implementations of this.

• Active stylus support with palm rejection is a plus, like the Surface when running Windows or the iPad Pro.

I consider myself very knowledgeable with Linux, and I do tinker with my computers a lot, but for this one, I do simply want something that "just works", because I'll either be using it at school/work and can't afford to start diving into conf files and searching up cryptic error messages because something broke, or I'll be in bed just wanting to relax before going to sleep.

Finally, is this futile? If we're considering stock Android as a benchmark for a decent user experience on a tablet, can anything on the non-Android Linux side even compare?