My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.
Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.
It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.
edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
Sadly they focussed on the beautiful GUI above upgradability of the debs. It lags behind actual Ubuntu by at least one Long Term Release (possibly 2 by now if they still haven't upgraded from 2012) and I've found it a pain to work with beyond the initial "wow this is pretty for Linux".
(I actually ended up using XFCE and then AwesomeWM, so maybe I'm not the market for Elementary!)
EDIT: just checked and their newest release, Loki, is based on Ubuntu's 2016 LTS. I'll be taking another look at it this evening!
eOS is something I would probably recommend to my mother or my girlfriend if I wanted to give them an easy "introduction" to Linux. But the designers made several decisions that seem hostile to power users (you can't even add your own PPAs in Loki by default), and for that reason I'm not sure I'd recommend it to developers. Which I can understand, I guess--I've mentioned my problems with it to the designers directly and have been more or less told by Daniel Fore that I am not their "target audience". So, okay, you can't please everyone.
The Pantheon desktop is beautiful, and it deserves all the praise it gets. I maintain hope that the eOS team will work on disentangling Pantheon from the rest of eOS once they finish stabilizing the core OS so that it can be ported to other distros. Ideally I'd eventually have Fedora running on my laptop with Pantheon strictly as the DE.
It's true, Windows and OSX are usually miles ahead of Linux in terms of the desktop GUI. But I absolutely love the simple beautiful UI in elementaryOS, it's a delight to work in. It is my primary OS on my laptop. I also has Windows 10 installed, but everything feels more instant in Linux. God knows what Windows does under the hood to make it that slow and unresponsive.
I installed the latest version (Loki) for a couple of months ago and except from 1 issue with "wobbling" mouse cursor (resolved by installing some xorg components) it works great.
I had some troubles with the previous version (Freia, I believe), more specifically the desktop manager would frequently hang. Luckily that haven't happened once in Loki.
All of the tools I use on my Windows box are availble for Linux as well: Netbeans, Jetbrains Pycharm, GitKraken, Chrome, Slack, Dropbox etc.
The only thing holding me back from switching primary OS on my desktop computer is gaming.
I use elementary OS Loki daily and am pretty satisfied with it. It has a few things that I'm not totally happy with, but it's my favourite OS right now.
I used a linux desktop but needed something a mobile without a hefty price tag. Got a HP Chromebook 13 and with crouton and it's brilliant. Beautiful hardware at a reasonable price. I just wish there was a crouton app launcher but its good enough anyway
I would love to see something like this for the actual software that runs the web. Things like OpenSSL, PGP, FessBSD and the other critical software that makes it all possible but almost all users will never visit there webpages. There would need to be some other way to allocate the funds, maybe by checking some form of header metadata to see what software websites are built on.
Is 1-3$ enough? If we had to invoice "the internet" and OSS to users instead of financing it with ads, wouldn't it require something starting above 1. $40/month for the charity websites and 2. $600 per machine (the equivalent of the cost of Windows) for OSS software?
Its better than nothing as a supplement to the funding some OSS software already gets. It would be nice for the internet community to be able to fund the internet infrastructure without having to have any idea about all the projects that make it possible. I'm not saying it will work as a sole source of funding but may of these projects are desperately underfunded and could do with some revenue. I think may users would be happy to donate to the projects that make the internet possible.
