It’s almost exactly a copy of reddit

The magic of reddit isn’t just the structure of the website, it’s the fact that there are so many people posting to diverse niche subjects. Although one structural thing lemmy is really lacking is the wiki and post flare components; those help give experts a reason to make effortful contributions as they do not fade into the ether after a few days.

That said, if reddit was new in 2025 or 2020, I don’t think it would take off as much. It gained popularity in a previous time of the internet and is now coasting off that.

it generates an html preview in a sidebar.

the benefit over any other 2 column editor is that geany is a real text editor with lots of shortcuts, configs and tools. so the editing part is a lot better. markdown is just kind of tacked on though.

If by GUI you mean WYSIWYG, I don’t know of any! Very mysterious to me why this has not been properly taken on given the popularity of markdown.

Once every year or so I check out everything that’s available and try out any new or upgraded packages I can find. All have at least one of the following issues:

• Massive bloat, often electron is significant culprit
• Stuck on the 2 column editor concept, generally with only rudimentary markdown implementation
• Fly by night new projects which are quickly abandoned in beta state
• Only want to access files within a certain subdirectory which may or may not be configurable; this is rarely the only problem but it’s very common in the PKM-type packages

I never quite got it to work properly but Zettlr suits some people. You might be able to cobble something together in Codium. Both those have the bloat issue. There are some self hosted browser-based editors if you are interested in that sort of project. The best and closest I have found is Joplin but it isn’t actually a markdown editor. I wish someone would spin an editor off from its code base; surely the skeleton is there.

I used to use typora; it does have a really nice convert web->markdown. I think that it is done by some javascript or something because the other tools that have comparable quality I can think of off the top of my head are obsidian, joplin clipper and a couple of firefox extensions. I agree that in my experience pandoc and a couple other cli tools didn’t produce such nice results.

I also think in all those cases the browser is doing some of the work because it renders the page, discards a lot of irrelevant stuff, then you copy/convert just a selection portion of what’s visible. Whereas if you, for example, grab a raw html page through curl and send it to pandoc, none of that is done. You probably aren’t using Select All when you copy a page to typora, but pandoc would be faced with the entire page. I don’t know if there is a way to access the Reader View from the terminal but it would go a distance to cleaning up your pandoc conversion if you could start from there (for those sites on which it’s available).

I tried and failed to do the same thing but it’s not markdown’s fault. No matter how many bells and whistles markdown would get, the issue is in the conversion from html part.

Sorry I was trying to follow your meaning, because the example of absent rich text you gave was underlines. There is already basic text formatting support such as strong, emphasis, headings and links.

You could style any, all or none of those to have underlining. Whatever chosen rendering, they all have meaning independent from the applied style. What you are asking for is to have something that is purely a display style without any structural value. This is not coming to markdown any time soon. Hardly anyone uses underline as its own thing in html anymore, for good reasons.

Maybe this article will help to further explain.

Native SVG handling would be completely out of scope. The point of markdown is that it is supposed to be understandable in its plain text format. SVG is incompatible with that. The closest thing would be like mermaid charts but I think it’s quite a stretch even then.

I think you should just use HTML, it has a much larger array of tools that would suit your needs. Markdown is purposely constrained because it enables much more portability.

Mailman

When I do free tech support for someone who I think could have solved it themselves I just make them solve it themselves by asking questions. “What information do you have?” “What have you tried?” “What does the error say?” “What do you think the error means? Is it giving a hint?” “When did you start having the problem?” “What can we eliminate?” “What did a search search suggest?” “What does the documentation say?”

“Did you try rebooting, reconnecting?”

But does that include any required deps?

My personal bias is being pro markdown. I do not know groff so below is based on some inferences on my part.

But I don’t think markdown is suitable for man pages, which contain specific kinds of information structured in a prescribed way. Markdown doesn’t and can’t know about these.

As I understand it, because of using a more sophisticated structure than MD, its possible to do things like:

• shell completion can be generated automatically from the man pages.
• a website like mankier.com which renders man pages in HTML and adds hyperlinks every time an option or argument

That’s not rich text. Rich text is when a format is applied without structural reason.

You could have a markdown interpreter that displayed **this** *this* or _this_ using any arbitrary format. You could change the color, weight, border, drop shadow, opacity, mouse over effects, font face… Any attribute.

Lemmy has conventions but all * really means is emphasis.

If you want to save a website use html

Someone can correct this but iirc some implementations of markdown have image options like this:

![alt text](/path/to/IMG.png|200px "description text")

Others put the size in { } after the main image item.

Rich text is contrary to the structural focus of markdown. Why should it be added?

There are a couple of apps on f droid that implement this with SMS.

This is true, here is a brief list: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/

But I’m sure it is a massive project you would need to have sufficient motivation at all levels. Not at all a trivial project.

I am curious how these changes feel on-the-ground to the affected workers who had no personal interest in linux or free software.

It is a question I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out. Can’t speak to docker.

Some of the specifics of Keeps and Dontkeeps depend on details of your system. You have to find out where the distro, DM and other apps keep the following:

Dontkeeps:

• trashes
• temp files
• file indexes … IMHO these dont backup properly if you leave them in and will prevent you from completing the task
• device files

Keeps:

• list of installed packages — explicit and deps separate if possible
• config files: /etc, ~/.config, ~/.* on a case by case basis… I say remove the obvious large temp dirs and keep the rest by default for simplicity
  • for the system configs I’ve had a tool called etckeeper running for a while because it was highly recommended but I’ve never actually restored from it…
• personal documents and other files such as typically kept in the home directory
• /root occasionally has something you need

Ways to investigate:

• use a disk usage utility to find out where your storage is being used up … It’ll help you find large Dontkeeps
• watch for recently modified files
• dirs and files that are modified all the time are usually temp dirs. But sometimes they have something useful like your firefox profile.

Most backup solutions are ONE of the following:

1. User files
2. System files

Don’t spend too much time crying about needing two solutions. Just make your backup today and reach perfection later.

Remember: sync isn’t backup. Test your backup if you can (but its not as easy as it sounds). Off site your most precious files.

Dont you have to power off the system and boot from clonezilla image to crea5e the backup?

I have also been confounded by the situation.

It is even worse when you are on the secondary market. The company’s product pages are broken. Trying to compare across different release years is way harder.

I assumed the reason for this had to do with the production systems and supply chains. They can get a certain number of x parts at y price from a factory located in a given location. You get enough parts in proximity to each other and you make it a model.

Its one thing for a small company to have enough components to have only a few models but with the volume dell or HP moves, they would need to really invest in suppliers or actually make the components themselves.

I dont imagine the marketing people have come up with all the options, they’re just the ones who have to try to sell want they’re given.

I’ve not used Guix but I don’t think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch— so be prepared for that. My ventures into debian, suse and fedora were made quite annoying by having to work around the many missing packages. Including user-facing applications, dependencies and background programs. I never quite got down with distrobox, maybe that’s the cure.

this chart on wikipedia gives the impression that Debian has more packages but that’s not the way it feels when you are looking for something. Maybe they have a lot of dot matrix printer libraries from 1992 or something which bring the number up.

Arch includes a lot of not-at-all-free packages (which it is impossible to distinguish in pacman or other tool as far as I can find), orphaned, new packages that haven’t yet made it into other repos, and packages where no attempt has been made to submit them to other repos.

On arch I have virtually never had to go outside the repos for packages. It’s very hard to give up once you are used to it. (Even though it’s better to use properly libre/free stuff and other benefits of a more curated approach like security, stability and quality.)

The other benefit of being in highschool is many people have loads of time to spend.

I honestly don’t know if there is any advice I can give to someone with a fulltime job and care giving responsibilities that would be convincing.

Ya just having the button always visible would make me 90% satisfied. Its just trying to make things “smart” but not being able to plan for all contingencies which makes it annoying. Would be better to have the option to hide it sometimes like how the Downloads toolbar icon can be either way.

I found an add-on a while ago that put a permenent button, but only for certain languages which the add-on also supported. It had some weird behavior but surely improvement. Its on a different computer I don’t have access to right now to tell you which one. It was from a related/forked project to the Translations.