<5min Germany

Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

Honestly, this sounds great!

Funding.json is a good idea for a standard proposal and seems to solve most problems I‘d personally recognize with FOSS funding :)

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

apart from ne not having that much money laying around a the moment I’m not a fan of people having to pay for their search engine, as I’m of the opinion that such a fundamental tool to use the web should remain free

Yeah, I’ve recently switched to SearXNG instances on some devices, definitely seem to be getting better results

it sometimes seem to, most advanced searching still works, at least on DDG

Oh my god, I feel this so much… Also, I think that recently got even worse, as I recently found myself switching between DDG/Google and finding both extremely bad for my query

“it’s called free software, but copyleft licenses restrict what you can do with it, therefore it’s unfree!!1!” or so they say

Actually, I can’t help but find this more socially/ecologically viable than the alternative–which wouldn’t be that suddenly all of these people drove all electric, but rather not at all or even bought completely new gas cars.

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

Man, Woman, TV, Camera, Lights.

(In reply to the post) Actually, I’ve found my immutable distro of choice (Silverblue) to be a lot of fun to tinker in (not with), but you just have to accept that tinkering does work a bit different here, with toolbox/containers instead of your actual host system to install most stuff you want to try etc. on