It has replaced idly making selection squares on the desktop.

Various projects. With C I wrote drivers and networking stacks for embedded systems, with C++ I worked for years on a the networking layers of a now long gone smartphone OS. With Rust I’ve been doing hobby projects like a library+application (win/linux/macos) for controlling WeMo switches on the LAN. Most recent is a Memory+CPU usage monitoring applet for the nascent COSMIC desktop environment.

I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can’t be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.

So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.

COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.

I believe the EU redirected open source funding to LLM/“AI”. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund on the other hand had its budget increased.

They also have port forwarding without static IP, but you have to renew the port every 7 days. Which is what I use, I don’t mind changing port once a week.

Well, when it comes to laptops these days lots of brands can practically only be serviced/repaired by bringing them back to the Apple Store/manufacturer’s repair shop. Especially when it comes to lightweight models.

I miss my old Sager/Clevo gaming laptop where I could replace practically everything, I even upgraded the gfx card.

You seem upset. Blink twice if someone is forcing you to use it.

It might be a bit tighter than Fedora, I haven’t tried Fedora so I wouldn’t know but Flatpaks can still be installed as user, no pw. All mine are, by default.

I’m lazy - just gmail pinned in a tab on my browser on my Linux desktop, the browser is always open anyway. Default mail client on iOS/iPadOS.

I’ve used Thunderbird in the past. The redesign was nice but it’s still a bit cludgy to use somehow, compared to gmail web.

It’s fixed. In general no distro is fail safe, recently even an immutable distro (our current hopeful advance in update reliability) had a hickup on an update that required manual intervention. It basically boils down to that it’s not possible to test for everything, we can only hope to continually add more test cases and improve human procedures based on post mortems.

I’ve been using OSMC on two of my TVs for years. First on RPis, then on Vero boxes. They connect via SMB to my NAS for content. OSMC/Kodi can play almost anything without needing wasteful transcoding. I use them daily.

For Netflix/Prime it’s either built in on the TV or running on a Firestick. Interestingly one can sideload Kodi on a Firestick, so an OSMC device isn’t necessary in that scenario.

Meh, if just wanting a lightweight laptop that’s fast even when unplugged there’s people who would be OK paying $700 for a M1 MBAir or a bit more for a 16GB version. They’re great laptops, the Rust compiler is very fast on M1/2 and with no fan noise. If buying Apple Refurbished they’re like new.

Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE’s, I’m flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.

Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can’t find the local SMB connections in the “Remotes” group.

I’m also watching COSMIC, it has a very well thought out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.

Yeah also I think we should be careful about calling anything we find annoying Enshittification, otherwise we’ll dilute the concept and it loses all meaning. I see this happening with hyperbole all the time, for example one of the strongest words in the dictionary “hate” have almost no meaning as people use it for even the mildest dislikes instead of utilizing a richer vocabulary. Let’s reserve Enshittification for Xitter and friends.

By dragging their asses you mean adding it it their very first beta driver just a few weeks after it was merged into Wayland/Xwayland?

Was a student, couldn’t afford CDs.

Nowadays I

1. don’t want to subscribe to too many streaming services, each just having a few things I want to watch. Also I broke my neck and I’m now on disability, there’s no budget to waste, at all.
2. Like to watch old shows and “rare” movies that aren’t available anywhere.

It’s always a good idea to be aware of .pacnew/.pacsave files. If you ignore them everything might still work but you might end up using old configs. This might not break anything but could have security or performance implications. A system can slowly “rot” this way while still appearing to be fine.

This looks like a fallacy in the argument. Ubuntu is generally known as being very stable as well, they tend to avoid breaking changes over the lifetime of a release and there are LTS releases to boot.

GNU Terry Pratchett

I didn’t downvote but for a lot of the time the core devs were mostly 1-2 ppl working some evenings because they have dayjobs/lives. They released many updates to 2.10, and they’re often feature releases not just bugfix releases. At the same time they almost completely rewrote the backend to use a new graphics library GEGL, which they also wrote from scratch. As for GIMP 3 they have also redone a lot under the hood to allow for easier development of new features moving forward and custom old GTK widgets updating to GTK3 required rearchitecturing as they work fundamentally differently from modern GTK3/4 versions.

So that’s why I don’t joke, there’s also nothing to forgive. Let’s hope that GIMP 3 will get more interest from devs with its more modern and capable architecture.