Fireborn

For the past decade or so, many children had no access to real computers. Before covid, many households either only had school-issued chromebooks, or only smartphones. With covid causing a rise in remote schooling, many families got laptops, but again often only locked-down chromebooks. There's adults nowadays that do their taxes on their phone, cut videos on their phone, and edit spreadsheets on their phone. And while smartphones and chromebooks are great at accomplishing your desired tasks, they offer no opportunities for growth. You can't change and play around with the system, become a power user, modify your system, look behind the curtain, and gain real understanding. There's an excellent blogpost on this topic, "The Slow Death of the Power User": https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

See this comment for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380075#46381858 Here is a slightly-hopeful article: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love…

Ironically, X11 supports "diverse" people better than Wayland does. https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love…

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/why-the-hell-does-android-even-exis… It's disappointing that google has turned evil. I loved how easy it waa to mod things in the beginning. All that is now gone.

Very good article. After read about the poor scenario where the Linux accessibility tools is today (https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love… I was wondering: if maybe the developers start to use these accessibility tools to improve their speed reading (and productivity as well), this could also helps to prioritize the accessibility features and bug fixes in Gnome, KDE, Qt, etc.

WSL 2 is one of the biggest reasons I'm able to be productive as a blind software developer. With it I'm able to enjoy the best desktop screen reader accessibility (Windows and NVDA) as well as the best developer tools (Linux). I hate Microsoft's AI and ads force-feeding as much as anyone else but trust me, you'd do the same if you were in my shoes. Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating even faster than the os itself and even though Linux / Gnome accessibility is being worked on, it's still ready only for enthusiasts who don't mind their systems being in a constant state of somewhat broken, as illustrated by this series of blog posts from just a few weeks ago: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love…

Someone's been writing a great series on accessibility for the blind in Linux https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love…

That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe. I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-public-dont-… and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop? > The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona. > Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate. It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading. Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility-theater-a… could be more convincing?

The fact that I keep hearing people have issues because it's now the default doesn't fill me with confidence. It's probably a minority of people having these issues, and I imagine the problems with screensharing and the like are gone by this point, but accessibility tools which need access to everything X gave them are never going to be compatible without being completely rewritten with Wayland in mind. I'm also not filled with confidence by posts like this[1], which confirm that Wayland was still deeply broken in many ways just in 2024. Two years is not a short amount of time, but given it took Wayland 10+ years to be anywhere close to usable for desktop usage, I'm not placing my bets on the pace having gone up so fast that long-standing issues are solved yet. That post takes somewhat of an extreme position, but kernel of truth is that it breaks a lot of things, many of which apparently still aren't solved. This post[2] has a better outlook I believe. I.e. that things are broken today (since it is for accessibility), but that there is real potential and that it can be fixed. It just has to be done. Shame that doing that is hard and that accessibility ends up taking a back seat. [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 [2] https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love…