+1
the UI could be improved (I always end up hovering for tooltips on controls) but it works really well.
I also like that tabs will stay in the stash by default on close, so its great for opening a bunch of reference sites really quickly without worrying about losing them
Closest thing to the old firefox experiment from a few years back.
Having as many followers as he does on the fediverse right now is difficult. There aren’t any tools or options to reduce the flood of notifications you get or do do any sort of sane filtering (especially on mastodon) so i totally understand why he often reacts the way he does. You cant feasibly block or de-federate when your reach is so large.
The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.
Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”
Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.
If you know how to add a real “delete” entry that would be great.
At least in nautilus 42 the preferences let you enable a permanent delete option in the right click menu, if that’s what you are looking for.
I’ve been using florisboard for a few months now. You will have typos. Auto-correct for obvious things would be nice… once you install a dictionary its not awful, but the dictionary struggles with simple typos since it isnt usually taking rhe surrounding words into context of the misspelled word. I think the only dictionary i could get installed was from libreoffice? So could just be a lack of common mobile typos in the dataset.
Florisboard does support things i actually used from gboard like a function row up top with undo/redo, activating voice options, and a clipboard with history. It also supports things like apps that support the autofill hints similarly to how itd pop up on gboard. Of all the foss options, it was the only one that had these modern expectations, so i also think its the best bet for a gboard alternative people will actually switch to. Anysoft and openboard are way too minimal (not a bad thing, just not what an avid gboard user is looking for)
Swipe on floris is ok. It definitely triggers when you don’t want it on occasion. And the lack of autocorrect makes recovery miserable.
I tried openboard too, but i could not get openboard to a reasonable size on the screen. Pixel 7 pro is fairly big… and i use the smallest text scaling… but even the smallest layout options put the top row out of reach of my thumbs.
not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird
The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.
UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.
I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.
I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.
(My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)
I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.
I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.
Roku supports chromecast (and airplay, if/when needed)
No specific rust experience with either, but some thoughts on the popularity reasons outside of the language:
I suspect a bit part of this difference in framework popularity may be due to GTK being more attached to gnome and friends, and by extension, Ubuntu (for better or worse, the most used desktop distro for quite a while) Most of the time that’ll be mainline Ubuntu which has always been GTK.
So if a developer or company is going to target something, then it may come down to “what is the ideal platform to build on for Ubuntu as our main target? GTK? Cool, that’s what we will use.” Of course, either framework is just fine, and either framework targets other OSs as well. I don’t have any experience with either, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the choice of GTK more often is akin to Swift + Apple’s toolkits for iphone development being more popular by a large margin than Ionic/Capacitor, React Native, Xamarin, etc, even though the others provide some benefits (and some significant context-dependent downsides, of course)
If i remember correctly, Qt was not fully FOSS for a while, so GTK was much more widely adopted and recommended early on. But that was pre-2005, I think.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I’m switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn’t working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.
Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.
No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉
The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.
Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)
I haven’t tried v1 yet, but i am really looking forward to their v2 release. Really glad to see they are swapping from ubuntu-based to debian-based. Tons of really neat features in their roadmap too.
I’ve been on an arch kick recently, but i like the idea of immutable for my laptop which i don’t use as often as my desktop, but when i do use it i need it to just work and not have to be as proactive about the rolling release schedule. Honestly it becomes a good secondary device OS since it’ll likely support whatever package manager you use on your main to make installing all the same things the same way easy.
I also have that UPS rack mounted, just the cage nut bolts. It doesn’t concern me at all. I have it towards the bottom of the rack since its heavy(ish) but its also not too deep so there isn’t a lot of flex on it.
I spent a weekend configuring a gpu passthrough setup to run windows on my arch machine. I haven’t needed it yet.
Generally any popular distro should be fine. SteamOS is arch (btw) but that doesn’t mean its necessary.
That said, i don’t play a ton of FPS, and when I do I have 0 interest in being competitive. Right now i don’t really play any games with anti-cheat for online play. When i do play shooters i tend to play on xbox anyway, so if you also have a console you should be covered for any edge cases, esp when cross-play is available.
Once you pick the right proton version for a particular game things tend to just work. Protondb usually has enough info for solving any annoyances. ProtonTricks is helpful for annoyances.
For anything non-steam, Bottles is excellent. Bottles can also run games with Proton, but also supports wine (which as an upstream to proton gets many of the features of proton anyway). Bottles is also great for running windows programs.
Without those things open source would slowly die. All of those are about getting more users for products, getting funding to make them happen, but more importantly, inspiring the next group of contributors.
Open source doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It costs money and time. People need to care about it.
Without users, a project is just a hobby and unlikely to persist long term. Without funding, contributors are forced to abandon for jobs to out food on the table. Without the next group of contributors to pass the torch onto, projects die.
So you want software developers to spend less time building the software so they can run a nonprofit too? Do you think all the conferences, sites, fundraising, marketing, extensive help docs, bug processing, and community engagement is all something that can just be done on the side?
Just ask any software dev working st any of these foundations. They don’t want to do any of the business-side work. Or, if they do, they certainly don’t want to do it alone. If they were alone in it, they wouldn’t have time to write code.
Thundercast is a great listen! Its not all about mozilla stuff either. Mostly a group of thunderbird team members hanging out with a few discussion topics.
Sounds like it will probably be behind a subscription like Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN, and probably very affordable like those. Server costs and all.
Definitely looking forward to more info about this. I really enjoyed the original send, and solving large files in email without needing to wire up a webDAV drive or go to another service to upload would be awesome. Presumably it’ll be thunderbird focused, but hopefully it can be used from a browser extension or web app to use on the go or with webmail clients too.
I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.
Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.
I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.
You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.
Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.
Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)
Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)
Forgejo is already working on federation https://forgefed.org/