rollin with the homies

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2024

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  • SiS 6326 with 8MB.

    It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.

    The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that’s just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.

    Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.






  • We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

    So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

    When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

    I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

    The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

    I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

    My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.





  • –Gnome Web from Flathub

    –Chromium in the Debian repo

    –Chromium in the CalyxOS build

    I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.

    Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”

    But for me it being closed is a non-starter.

    Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.

    FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.




  • Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

    They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

    But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

    So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

    I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

    (I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

    Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.


  • SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlThe Dislike to Ubuntu
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    2 months ago

    Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

    Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

    In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

    Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

    It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

    Just use Debian.


  • That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

    When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.





  • SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlFedora: GNOME or KDE?
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    2 months ago

    Agree; Gnome on Fedora is just more polished in general than Gnome anywhere else. So sasy to add another language and that input language works everywhere including Flatpak apps Qt apps, etc. Fedora is winning me over in this regard and I’ve kind of been a Red Hat hater these days.