All major browser engines are FOSS.

Chrome and Edge are proprietary wrappers around Chromium (BSD license). Firefox and derivatives are FOSS (Mozilla Public License). Safari is built around WebKit (LGPL/BSD).

The problem, however, is governance. These projects are all too big for anyone to realistically fork and maintain independently. So in practice, they are under control of Google, Mozilla, and Apple — all of which have questionable priorities (especially Google).

It would be like taking your compiled machine code and editing it by hand because your compiler sucks.

Just use the right tool from the start.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but if you want to do that, be sure you are installing Firefox through similar means across distros. This will not work with the Flatpak, for example.

Manual installation of Firefox is quite simple, and it self-updates, so that’s always an option.

Yeah, I don’t understand the fixation on BTRFS in the article. Nobody’s going to have BTRFS problems unless they’re doing advanced things that the documentation clearly says are experimental and unsupported. Nobody’s going to accidentally set up a RAID5 array, or accidentally create a swap file on a non-swap-friendly volume. The average user won’t see any difference between BTRFS and EXT4, except that BTRFS snapshots might save their butt in an emergency.

BTRFS is a perfectly reasonable choice as a default filesystem. Probably the best choice in general. Last year I thought bcachefs was the future, but now that’s getting dropped from the Linux kernel so nope, guess I’ll stick with BTRFS.

Yeah, it’s weird to talk about OpenSuse MicroOS and Fedora Atomic when they are not even the flagship desktop distros of their respective families. I guess the author drank the atomic kool-aid and thinks that’s a killer feature for a consumer OS.

That said, Ubuntu is not really aimed at beginners anymore. Canonical has shifted hard to enterprise offerings over the past 5 years or so. Take a look at their web site — they barely spare a word for desktop Linux anymore. This is what you’ll see on the main page:

“The complete guide to RAG”

“Modern enterprise open source”

A “Products” dropdown with thirteen items, maybe one of which is comprehensible to a beginner.

For all the hate Snaps get (and rightfully so), they make a lot more sense in the context of enterprise deployment. It’s like Flatpak but for headless servers and with professional support. It took me a long time to understand Canonical’s game there, because I couldn’t shake the idea of Ubuntu as a beginner’s distro.

I guess it would be cool to have an atomic OS designed for beginners, since the current crop are more complex than traditional distros, not less. But I don’t think atomicity itself really matters, especially if you’re talking about systems that are mostly locked down to begin with.

Wireless card readers are relatively new tech. I see them more and more as time goes on. New places usually give their waitstaff mobile readers, but there’s little motivation for older restaurants to upgrade their whole POS systems. POS systems have pretty long life expectancy. At least the older ones do.

Absolute nothingburger.

From F-Droid’s statement (emphasis mine):

We respect Tusky’s decision to block mentioned website; it’s their right to introduce restrictions like these into their software. We also respect Fedilab’s decision not to hardcode a login block; instead they are actively working on making it easier to block certain domains in the app itself and thus giving users more power to moderate which content they’ll see. If people disagree with F-Droid’s decision not to flag Fedilab, a idea is to develop a decentralized tag system based on package IDs which allow third-party servers to share their own warnings with their community.

They’re not blocking any fediverse apps that you can use to connect to any server.

Feel free to use any Lemmy or Mastodon client to connect to any hate-filled instances your hateful little heart desires. If you don’t like that some apps have built-in blocklists, use different apps, or modify them. That’s the beauty of open source.

Do what you want, just don’t expect the rest of the world to amorally do it for you. This is perfectly in keeping with open-source philosophy.

Note that even GrapheneOS no longer supports the 5a, since it is no longer getting firmware security patches. You’ll need to install an archived version of GrapheneOS, or go for something else like LineageOS.

With LineageOS, you’ll continue to get OS patches, but you’ll be stuck with an unlocked bootloader, so there’s a security tradeoff there.

LOL, figures.

I assume GrapheneOS will nip that right in the bud, but I’m not totally sure what Google’s recent change to the AOSP reference device means for GrapheneOS. If they can’t make GrapheneOS for Pixel 10, I will most definitely not buy one. Without GrapheneOS, I don’t think a Pixel would even be in my top 3 phone choices.

Wasn’t 14 still in beta? Do they ever release final versions?

I mean that an individual folder will always look the same (consistent), and also look distinctly different from any other folder (unique) if that’s how you arranged it. So you could identify a folder instantly.

Everything in list view looks the same at a glance, and most file managers don’t retain a folder window’s size and placement. Modern macOS kiiiind of does but you have to fight it if you don’t want a single-window browsing UI.

It’s been a while since I tried Samsung Browser, but I recall that it was very fast and also supported ad blocking.

I use Firefox on Android because I like syncing tabs to my desktop.

The last time I found icon view useful was in Mac OS 9. There were three main characteristics that made it useful that no current systems have AFAIK:

1. The icon grid was tight (32 pixels) and you could either snap items to that grid or place them freely.

2. Window sizes and places were directly associated with folders. (There was no “browser-style” single-window mode.)

3. File names used dynamic spacing. Longer names would occupy multiple grid spaces as needed.

These factors meant that every folder had a consistent and potentially unique size, placment, and layout.

OS X took the Finder and either ruined or neglected everything good about it. Windows explorer has always been garbage. Never found a Linux file manager with a compelling icon view either (though to be fair, I’ve never looked all that hard). The lack of system-level metadata for layout kind of mandates an abstraction between a directory and its display.

Saaaaame.

I’m hoping to upgrade to the 10 this year. Memory and storage are the biggest thorns in my side now. A bump to 12GB of RAM should bring me back into “good enough” territory for the next few years (I hope) but 128GB of storage is no good.

Can’t bring myself to switch brands at this point. GrapheneOS is just too good to give up.

Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.

Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.

They’ve always uses PWM. The author is confused. PWM is the one that does cause eye strain. DC dimming is the alternative which does not but it’s pretty rare.

The difference is that they’re increasing the PWM rate so it shouldn’t be as bad. Google skimps on a lot in the Pixel line.

Nobody should feel a strong need to upgrade after only two generations. Same deal with most tech like GPUs and CPUs.

I use my phone a lot and my Pixel 7 is fine. The primary factors driving my last couple upgrades were battery degradation and software support. Neither should be a big problem with a Fairphone.

I’m also trying to decide whether to stick with the Pixel/GrapheneOS ecosystem or go for Fairphone.

How hard/expensive was it to replace your battery? I looked on iFixIt and it seemed a lot harder than my orevious phones.

SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.

Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.

It’s not necessarily the most efficient, but it’s the best guess we have. This is largely done by trial and error. There is no hard proof or surefire way to calculate optimal arrangements; this is just the best that anyone’s come up with so far.

It’s sort of like chess. Using computers, we can analyze moves and games at a very advanced level, but we still haven’t “solved” chess, and we can’t determine whether a game or move is perfect in general. There’s no formula to solve it without exhaustively searching through every possible move, which would take more time than the universe has existed, even with our most powerful computers.

Perhaps someday, someone will figure out a way to prove this mathematically.

Ring was an obvious trojan horse from day 1. It’s depressing how many people are only just realizing this, and how many people still don’t even give a shit.

If you have a Ring camera, you are a scourge to your entire community.