optymizer (u/optymizer)

optymizer commented on Open Source Maintenance Fee github.com/wixtoolset/iss... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

queenkjuul · a month ago

Canonical and Lenovo both make lots of money already. Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.

optymizer · a month ago

> Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.

This is the downside of not owning both software and hardware. The integration is lacking. I already gave money to Lenovo when I bought my laptop, and clearly they're not going to support Ubuntu. Maybe if I gave money to Ubuntu, they would support this hardware. It's worth a try, because leaving it at "sucks" is not acceptable.

optymizer commented on Open Source Maintenance Fee github.com/wixtoolset/iss... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

qwery · a month ago

While I love the idea of a better deal for free and open source software developers, I don't think a sales/transactional model will actually solve the problem at scale.

For one thing, it will eat away at the reasons you like open solutions in the first place. If it became normal/expected to pay for open source software, businesses would control a lot more open source software.

> when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

> funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that? Like there must be $1 in each laptop they sell that could have gone towards even documenting the hardware so some nice developer can implement a working driver/whatever. Really, it's not the Ubuntu or Linux people that need to be paid to solve that problem, Lenovo is free to submit a patch whenever the hell they want to, they just don't want to.

optymizer · a month ago

> businesses would control a lot more open source software

Only because individuals would presumably open LLCs

> But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

I don't think the choice is between "John works on this project 11pm - 1am on the days he feels like it" and "John wants to IPO his company". I'm advocating for "John works on this project 3 days of the week because people pay him a small fee for using his project".

> Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that?

The money I gave to Lenovo went to Microsoft for an OEM license to the pre-installed Windows OS. When I download Ubuntu and install that on my laptop, Lenovo couldn't be bothered to see if closing the lid suspends the laptop or not.

Should Lenovo write drivers for my custom kernel as well? As a business, why should Lenovo bother to implement resume capabilities for an OS that is a rounding error for their consumer line of laptops?

optymizer commented on Open Source Maintenance Fee github.com/wixtoolset/iss... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

optymizer · a month ago

Honestly, open source software should come with a price. I think the "starving artist" approach is detrimental long-term.

Sure, there is great value in having a free (in both senses) operating system, but at the same time the year of Linux desktop is a running joke.

To be blunt, money motivates people to do the work they otherwise would not do. It's soul crushing to run the 400th manual test. It's not sexy to work on a lot of the bugs that affect real users, so, when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

Maybe if we all sent $1 to open source projects we use, there'd be enough funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

optymizer commented on XMLUI blog.jonudell.net/2025/07... · Posted by u/mpweiher

jeroenhd · a month ago

Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based. The callback generation wasn't as easy as with VB, and different phone sizes meant you had to deal with resizing (which VB applications usually just didn't bother with), but the experience was pretty good.

These days you've got Gambas for a free and open source VB, including the terrible language, but in my experience the looks are a bit off when you design on one desktop environment and run the application on another.

optymizer · a month ago

> but the experience was pretty good.

Our experiences do not match. I used Borland Delphi to build business apps 20 years ago just using the UI builder. I've been using Android Studio to build apps at FAANGs for 10 years now and I cannot remember the last time the Design tab was useful - it was always faster and more reliable to just edit the XML file.

Yes, Delphi didn't do resizing windows and crashed half the time, but I was pretty happy with the WYSIWYG / UI building functionality for production apps.

Android Studio's UI builder is nowhere near that level of usefulness. I have a hard time believing anyone is using the UI builder in Android Studio for anything other than tutorials or entry level Android apps. It doesn't render the layout properly 90% of the time, or just renders some placeholders with no content and calls it a day.

For a modern IDE, Android Studio is somewhere between just OK and bad, mostly because it has features the other IDEs didn't at the time, but the dev experience is behind Turbo Pascal in the 90s on MS DOS. The editor is laggy. The debugger is slow and hangs often. The list goes on, but I'll stop the rant here.

optymizer commented on XMLUI blog.jonudell.net/2025/07... · Posted by u/mpweiher

optymizer · a month ago

What's old is new again. It's Adobe Flex for the kids. I like it.

optymizer commented on KX Community Edition defconq.tech/blog/From%20... · Posted by u/AUnterrainer

AUnterrainer · a month ago

Thanks. Looks like at least someone could follow my thought process

optymizer · a month ago

If your site requires people to explain your thought process, your presentation has failed, unless your goal is to confuse as many visitors as possible, in which case I wouldn't change a thing.

optymizer commented on KX Community Edition defconq.tech/blog/From%20... · Posted by u/AUnterrainer

optymizer · a month ago

What a confusing website. The website is named 'defcon', like the famous defense conference. What does 'defcon' have to do with Q? What even is Q?

The landing page is uninformative. No explanation of what Q is. References ticks, doesn't mention what these are.

The About page is filled with generic words and no substance - so much fluff.

I couldn't tell if KDB-X is an exploit database for Defcon participants, or some other kind of specialized database, and at this point I'm so disappointed by this presentation that I lost interest in whatever this piece of software is or does.

Luckily someone else on HN figured it out and commented with a TLDR, but I'd use this site as an example of how not to design websites.

optymizer commented on Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business projectionlab.com/blog/we... · Posted by u/jonkuipers

teiferer · 2 months ago

> I will put a few more extra hours today in my project thinking about you.

And that's the recipe for failure right there. Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion, not thinking about somebody else's success that you are trying to replicate.

optymizer · 2 months ago

> Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion

Maybe he's in that valley of despair right now that the article shows occurs many times. Passion is fleeting and at times you just need a little inspirational jolt to get back into it and regain some of that passion.

Also, to share a personal experience, passion is not sufficient. You need favorable conditions as well (or the ability to create them). For example, the article talks about working nights and weekends. I'm not sure if the author has kids or what the arrangement is in his family, but personally, as much as I wanted to work whole weekends on my passion project, I would feel like a shitty father if I ignored my kids over the weekend for months, so the project gets put on the back burner a lot while I'm biking with my kids outside and having fun.

optymizer commented on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174) · Posted by u/dang

waynesonfire · 3 months ago

So, after 5 years, they can deduct the entire salary.. this just seems like an incentive to promote long-term employment. Doesn't seem like a bad incentive.

optymizer · 3 months ago

Well, we had massive layoffs, so I don't think the incentives worked.

optymizer commented on Getting Older Isn't What You Think katycowan.co.uk/blog/gett... · Posted by u/speckx

supportengineer · 4 months ago

I'm 50 and my life isn't what I wanted it to be, and now I'm out of time. It sucks.

optymizer · 4 months ago

You know, setting expectations for yourself when you're young for what you want your life to be when you're old is great, but it can be a bit like providing estimates for how long a project will take when you have barely started it.

You made an estimate when you had the least amount of information. Now that you have accumulated more information, the most productive course of action is to revise the estimate and work towards to meet that goal.