I do have a video of the wifi in action though: https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/wifi.mp4

I reached out to them a couple of times, and they asked if I had rfkill installed, I told them no, but it shouldn't matter if it was a hardware switch.

They told me that they would look into it, and then never responded after that.

That's kind of the same-but-opposite of my experience.

When software tries to control how it's going to be used, it fails spectacularly more often than not, ime. The best software that I've used always leans into the problem: They let me access it via a dump. Then I can manipulate it as I need, then upload it back in.

But when those that don't understand the workflow try to tell developers how to design software, it usually ends up in a big mess of workarounds just to get the basic use-case to work correctly.

The actual people who do the day to day work have no real say in which software systems they use. Only management has any real say, so sales people tailor their pitch towards management. Unfortunately, managers only have a high-level overview of what the people below them actually do, and no understanding of software, so they have no idea what they need their software to do.

And situations like this are where sales people shine brightest. Sure, the new "cloud-based, totally-super-secure, widget producer 9000" won't actual be useful at anything, but it sure looks cool to management.

Look at companies like Oracle, and Microsoft for good examples: Their actual products are awful, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that their sales team can sell a shit product.

Now if we could just get app designers to realize that!

IME, apps are usually just poor front-ends for the website, where companies think it's OK to shove stupid things like unblockable ads, notifications, data-harvesting, etc.

For me, yes! Absolutely!

Having worked in a call-center before, there is a large amount of undeserved trust in their routing. I'm usually going to be transferred two or three times if I follow the phone-tree or not, skipping the phone tree just lowers my latency to those transfers.

I've looked at nextcloud, but IIRC, you have to have the whole suite installed, right? I'd love a way to just use the calendar function.

Can you point it out?

Can you point me to where it said that? I don't remember reading anything like that in his paper.

I can't point to any specific trigger, but I notice that I get drawn to certain creators. If I start to recognize their name/brand, and I look at their past work, I get a sense of "I want to support that".

A good example is Complexly: https://complexly.com (sorry that their website is awful)

I started getting videos sent to me by friends, and recommendations on youtube. After watching a few, I looked through their catalog, and relatively quickly and easily saw what they were creating, and I thought "I want more of that in the world".

They had a Patreon link readily available, and mentioned in the videos that Patreon was one of the ways that they funded themselves.

I know that's not a great answer, but everyone's trigger will be different.

I think for me it boils down to a few variables:

Do you have a good product that I would pay for, but aren't forced to? Am I excited for your next product, even if it ends up vastly different from your other products?

Do you consistently put out good material? (and by this I include: is your product full of ads/tracking?)

Is your income transparent?

Do you encourage people to share your work, even if you aren't going to directly make money off of every fan? Do I get the impression that you'd rather me share it with 1000 people who won't pay, or 5 people who will pay?

Do you make it easy for me to pay you, in whatever form is convenient to me?

Nobody ever fits all of this criteria perfectly (I can criticize Complexly all day long), but they have a solid product that they give to everyone, and have relatively low friction for taking my money.

I wish that instead of preaching Linux when it clearly isn't ready, we'd spend more time making it ready.

My experience is that it does not.

I agree that the consumers should change their behavior, but there aren't a lot of options for supporting good news. I can't say I've ever seen a news site that was good enough that I'd actually pay money for.

I love Creative writing, journalism, etc. In fact, I've paid quite a bit of money via Patreon and Kickstarters for creative pursuits. The creators didn't sell anything to me. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

And if your only method for asking your users for donation money is buttons/links, then you should change it up. Plug it in your media, in your speeches, etc.