Yeah, well, we are in mildly infuriating, I don’t expect to find big issues here… No one will come here to say “I can’t afford a house/food” or “I lost my job and will loose my house! It is mildly infuriating”

No one is talking of old things that still work. Op just bought something new that still uses micro USB though, that would ruin my day too tbh.

Yeah, I saw the comment in github but it felt too surreal and without looking at the patent I didn’t want to assume anything. But hey thanks for the link to the actual patent, I have had a look at it, and read some parts of it and I’m still kinda confused about the whole situation with this keyboard.

The patent was published 10 years ago. It says it is withdrawn but I don’t know if we can somehow see the reason or if it was voluntarily withdrawn.

The patent itself recognizes that the hexagonal keyboard alone lacks on innovation to warrant the patent so the author proposes together with that the “best” order for different languages.

Then the code in github seems to have been uploaded 6 months ago. Maybe they withdrew the patent until they can show an example?

But how often do devs working on some free software code go through the trouble of making patents? And the code appearing such a long time after the patent… I don’t know, I don’t like throwing accusations without proof but the whole thing feels like they are more interested in the patent than creating the keyboard but I can’t be certain of it.

And then we get to the whole ordeal of the key positions, changing over different languages, trying to choose the optimal positions… I don’t think that it is enough to be patented (but I’ve seen worse so…) and likely it won’t ever be something people can agree on. Creating such “best” order would be impossible and probably each person would have different ideas. Now, predicting the next most likely letter… That would be more interesting but it was done ages ago too. And the most important aspect of what makes us fast typing is not the order of the letters, but the fact that we have muscle memory to reach them once we are used to a layout. As I use three different languages daily, using the same keyboard layout for all, is the best option, but with this idea I would need to change the layout of the keyboard… It would make me so incredibly slow!

And more in detail with the patent, many claims are borderline ridiculous. But this comment is already long enough so I’ll leave it herewith my final criticism for the author. Forget the patent, and just create a good keyboard that people want to use.

I’m glad to see an open source keyboard for a hex design. But I’m confused with the patents… Hex keyboards are not particularly new, I’ve used them years ago, so on what basis are they patenting it?

I agree with you and your proposal with the exception of 5 figure income having no income tax. At a billion level it might not be so important the difference between one or two billion. But on the 5 digits salaries, the difference of someone making 30k or someone making 80k is definitely meaningful. And as someone being in a comfy point in between there I do think everyone in my bracket should be paying taxes. Not high, but definitely something. Then lower incomes then yes, definitely 0% tax. But the amount of people on 5 digits salaries that are on the higher end is definitely worth having some tax, even when a small amount it already helps support the system with so many.

This has been my path so far, nearly to a T. Got an old laptop, installed endeavour with a very light DE and attached an external drive and started messing with *arrs and jellyfin and bunch of other things.

The only downside is that my family now relies on that for watching so I’m more careful of not breaking the stuff that works.

Got another laptop that had no use so I started playing around on it. Installed Debian and CasaOS on top to test if that would be a nice alternative.

The only real issue is the lack of time to spend on this.