Oh, that’s a very good point. Makes me wonder why Mozilla doesn’t talk about donations very much. Must be a strategic decision or something.

As someone who is severely allergic to ads, I really don’t like this transition, but I understand why they’re doing it.

Mozilla seems to be facing a tough problem. How do you make money when your core audience isn’t enough to support the company, but you can’t realistically pivot to a new audience without kicking out all of the old users. Would it be better if Mozilla just faded into irrelevancy and focussed on developing Thunderbird instead? The FOSS community would have to continue to support Firefox, which would slow down development to such an extent that it probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rest of the web.

I don’t have numbers that would directly address that. However, there are lots of statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users when it comes to the traffic in general. This trend has been clearly visible for about 15 years now.

Here’s something I found on a short notice. link

Not that many people use real computers any more. At work, you may need to use a computer, but you probably can’t change the browser. At home, you have the PCMR folks who use a computer and probably also care about browsers. Everyone else just uses a tablet or a phone for browsing the web.

Speaking of the web, most people interact with specific websites through an app and an API, so they don’t even launch the mobile browser until they have to visit a site that doesn’t have an app. The world has changed and browsers aren’t as relevant as they used to be.

Mastodon devs were clearly aware of the quality of text people tend to write online. It’s a very fitting term IMO.

Mozilla also has a VPN, so that should provide some revenue. Might not be enough to let go of Google’s support, but at least it’s something.

If you find out that your current ram is obsolete, you probably have lots of other ancient stuff in your computer too. By the time your ram is too slow or there isn’t enough of it, your CPU is going to be abysmally slow by modern standards. Even if your mobo is still fine at that point, it won’t support any of the upgrades you have in mind, so you’ll end up changing everything anyway.

Man, that is just such a cool little easter egg. Totally love it!

When reading your post, I started thinking of silicone lubricants. Have you tried anything like that? Ideally, you would only lubricate the parts that come into contact with the ball.

What kind of unholy abomination will be born from this? Some kind of half-PC half-console hybrid?

Speaking of the engine, if Mozilla ever decides to stop developing gecko, it’s going to force the community to continue that work on their own. If that ever happens, it would have a big impact on all the forks too.

People who hunt said predators.

Is there a community where we can post whatever the popular opinion happens to be at the time? A sister community for !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world seems to be increasingly necessary.

Never had CPU compatibility issues, but I’ve had similar frustrations with power supplies. Some of the strangest glitches I’ve seen were eventually traced back to a cheap PSU. If you hadn’t already found the root cause, I would have recommended swapping the PSU just to make sure.

Most likely AUR is the main issue here. I’ve specially avoided it to make my system as simple and easy as possible, so my experience has been a bit different. The thing about Arch is that every system is unique, and it’s hard to say something that would apply to all of them.

Thanks. I should really look into automatically updating the mirrorlist. I’ll start with reflector and the others you mentioned.

Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.

However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.

So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.

If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.

On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.

As a lazy Arch user, I can tell you that there will be frustrating moments, but not that many. Mostly you’ll be fine, but be prepared for minor annoyances.

Features

If you didn’t install it, it’s not on the system. That’s good for a minimalistic system, but frustrating for a lazy admin. Once you’ve ironed out all the issues you encounter during the first few months, the system should be pretty solid and worry free. However, once you encounter a new situation, you have to do your research, and install (and maybe even configure) that one missing thing. Later down the line, this becomes increasingly rare, but never disappears completely, so be prepared for minor annoyances like this.

Interventions

Before updating, check the official site for big news. Some rare updates require intervention, so you should know what you’re doing before updating your system. Usually it’s totally fine, and you can run the update command blind folded. It’s definitely not recommended, but it’s not going to destroy a simple installation any time soon. If you do complex stuff with your system, the updates become more frustrating. However, once you break your grub this way, you’ll learn to read those notes before updating. These things don’t happen often, but once a special update like that does roll out, you’re going to find it frustrating. Could take a few years, so you don’t really need to worry about it today. Just know what you’re getting into.

Updating takes a while

I update roughly once a week, but occasionally only once a month. Maybe there’s something wrong with my connection or settings, but I get timeouts all the time. As a result, I ended up just using the no timeout option instead of actually doing my research and looking into this problem. Need to take that deep dive one weekend eventually. One month worth updates is also a lot of data to download, and I’m getting 0 kb/s for several minutes at a time, so it takes even longer. A lazy admin suffers from annoyances like these. Be prepared for something similar to happen to your system sooner or later. Probably takes only 30 minutes of reading and two commands to fix, but I’ll get around to it another day. Before anyone asks, yes, I’m using a list of the fastest servers, and no, I haven’t updated that list in months.

I still have Arch on my main laptop, but recently I replaced the Fedora of my HTPC with Debian. I just can’t be bothered to spend a minute on system maintenance, so Debian is better suited for that purpose. I’m still going to stick with Arch for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Probably just sunk cost fallacy at this stage…

And that’s why you need to figure out what’s the right balance of work and inconvenience vs. the amount of privacy you get in return. Setting up a degoogled android is possible and relatively easy too. Living with that phone and interacting with the real world around you in 2024 is a completely different matter, and it’s entirely understandable if that isn’t your cup of tea.