The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.
The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.
The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it’s constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software. People joke that some day you won’t be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they’ve taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it’s ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system.
People worry that some day, you won’t be able to run a Linux system that’s compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd. Whether that’s a realistic worry or not I don’t know, and I don’t really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race, but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.
Yeah, Windows’ bullshit is what drove me to Linux in the first place. I only have it on my gaming system, and only because Discord’s stupid screensharing doesn’t transmit audio on Linux, NVIDIA’s drivers for Linux suck balls (going AMD next time now that their cards are good again) and there are a couple of games my friends play that have issues on Linux. I’ve never run into a game on my everyday laptop that Linux couldn’t run, and the Steam Deck will take basically whatever you throw at it.
Windows is a barely-functional rat’s nest of code spaghetti that falls apart at complete random. Sometimes your audio drivers will just stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes your computer will just refuse to connect to the internet until you do a clean install. Windows Update apparently runs Prime95 in its spare time and so does the Antimalware Service Executable. I hate using it so much. I wish Windows would just curl up and die.
This is the first I’ve heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!
Hopefully it doesn’t get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they’re barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.
Unless they plan on programming all of Mosaic law into all of their algorithms going forward, that’s a whole lot of hot air. And in any case it’s a serious violation of the Establishment Clause, if not veering into “and domestic”.
This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying “I tried to build the Torment Nexus”, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting “shame”.
In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn’t really anything comparable from other companies. It’s unironically the best compact tablet I’m aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can’t put Linux on one of those and even if you could it’s ARM-based so most proprietary apps won’t work on it.
In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don’t want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft’s devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.
On the flip side, it’s a rolling-release distro, so you don’t have to play a game of “what broke?” whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn’t got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).
Arch is good for a machine that gets used a lot, but for something where you need stability or to be able to run it for a long time between restarts and updates, something Debian-based is preferable. Just not modern Ubuntu because Snaps are performance-sapping nightmares.
USB-C hubs all seem to be dodgy crap made by anonymous Chinese companies and resold through various companies, including the likes of Apple. There’s an absolute dearth of hubs made by actual reputable firms.
The very fact that they work like mobile apps is a reason to dislike them, honestly. At least Flatpaks aren’t total fucking crap like Snaps.
OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It’s not always up to date or fully-detailed but it’s far from useless and I appreciate that. It’s my primary map program on my phone.
I can only imagine how thin the margins will be on laptops that are physically incapable of running their own operating system and basically don’t qualify as general-purpose computers. The computer itself will be streamed to you over the internet and you’ll just have an IPL that handles your keyboard and mouse, the display, the network connection and the encrypted memory buffer you use to send files to your cloud PC or receive them onto a Microsoft-authorised USB device for external transfer.
Will also be so much fun in 5-10 years when only enterprise customers are allowed the luxury of being sold a local version of Windows, so your whole laptop freezes up every time your connection is interrupted and trying to turn it on without an internet connection just takes you to a 404 page baked into the bootstrap ROM.
That or a starry-eyed optimist who hasn’t heard of XMPP and thinks Mark “they ‘trust me’, dumb fucks” Zuckerberg is really engaging with ActivityPub on anything resembling a good-faith basis.
If you want one for your phone, Feedly is pretty good. On desktop, I use Liferea.
Seconding Liferea.
The TL;DR is “so it doesn’t become XMPP” - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole “open-source” and “decentralised” part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.
If you’ve ever heard “the three Es” - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that’s what we’re worried about happening here.
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton’s contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we’re going to end up right back where we started.
Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.