About haiku, isn’t it still too experimental? Like for using websites, when it comes to security?

About haiku, isn’t it still too experimental? Like for using websites, when it comes to security?

Thanks for the suggestions!

I’m not exactly a low end enthusiast, like doing it for fun, but I find myself around low end devices daily, from lack of alternatives, so I’ve been experimenting with software, trying to make the experience a bit better. To give a bit more of context, here’s what I use:

I have a somewhat decent main computer (although it has some hardware issue that makes it unstable, but it’s another topic), that I use with fedora and gnome, but I have a small 2 in 1 laptop that I use for writing and light web usage, shared with my gf. It has 2gb of ram and an atom z something cpu. It’s currently running mx linux with 32-bit firefox, and runs better than one would expect, but still a bit slow. My mom has a mini pc with 4gb of ram and a celeron n30 something. It’s running debian with xfce. The ram is fine, but I find it really slow. My sister has a laptop with the same ram and a very similar cpu, same situation, but it’s currently running fedora with lxde (it had fedora with gnome before and was very very slow, so I suggested a change, but my sister insisted on keeping fedora, because she liked it. Surprisingly, the lxde version is much lighter than I expected). The worst machine is from my gf’s brother. He enrolled in an online course and needed a pc for the classes, so he took one they had sitting in a corner. It has a pentium cpu (don’t remember the model), 2gb of ram and came with windows 7, so I replaced with mx linux and it’s running worse than before.

I believe they mentioned the ram used by xfce, not the total system ram, but thank you for the recommendations, I’m really interested in software able to run in very low end hardware.

I’d love to have archivemount or a similar tool integrated in a file manager

I’d also love to have some sort of full featured gui software to install and manage custom roms in phones, allowing to do everything, from unlocking bootloaders to downloading and flashing/upgrading roms. For the tasks that require manual steps, it could offer illustrated steps, with a community driven database of phone models.

Same here. In a more general way, I don’t understand why people can’t simply let things coexist in peace. Just because one doesn’t like or use something, doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t. I’m getting tired of that behavior in our society, to be honest.

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I find the screen technology itself to be interesting, but it’s more a competition to e-ink devices than to common tablets. However, the price is too high to be well received, unfortunately. I love reading devices, but the best I could do is a 10yo refurbished one. I wonder why they’re always so expensive…

I used to leave some usb device with multiple bootable isos lying round my table, but I found out that every time I needed something, none of them would serve me, and I had to download something else, so I don’t do that anymore and just download and write isos as I need them. Oh, but I still keep an old 4gb usb stick with some random distro on it, just in case my pc becomes unbootable and I have to do some maintenance/data rescue.

So true. I’d complement the first point to include a general lack of documentation. Sometimes, we can’t even know some pinout schema without trial and error.

I’ve been looking for some e-ink tablets running android, and all the ones I found on chinese sites were sold with android 11.

I don’t blame the users. There’s usually no way to upgrade android versions, so we get stuck unless we replace the phone, and most people can’t afford to replace their phones so often. I’d go further and say that people shouldn’t be supposed to replace their phones because of a new software version. The android’s distribution model is flawed, we should be able to upgrade our phones the same way we upgrade linux distros. If it was possible, then I would blame users for running unmaintained software.

If you had unskippable commercials on dvds, you probably missed pirated dvd stores like this one:

Glad to be helpful

SimpleQR can read qr codes from images, so you can take a screenshot and read it. The app is available on fdroid.

Welcome to the world of freedom. The first months may be a bit uncomfortable, but it’s a journey worth taking. Be welcome!

I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality

Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.

Content is also getting heavier, but both things aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s more objective to compare modern software, instead of older and newer ones. Before reddit created obstacles for third-party apps, they were famous for being much lighter than the official one, while doing the same (some even had more features). Now, if we compare lemmy to reddit, it’s also much lighter, while providing a very similar experience. Telegram has a desktop app that does everything the web version does, and more, while lighter on resources. Most linux distros will work fine with far less hardware resources than windows. If you install lineageos on an older phone, it will perform better than the stock rom, even while using a newer aosp version. If you play a video on youtube, and the same one on vlc, vlc will do the same with less resources. If you use most sites with and without content blockers, the second one will be lighter, while not losing anything important.

I could go on and on, but that’s enough examples. There is a bloat component to software getting heavier, and not everything can be explained by heavier content and more features.

That’s not bloat, that’s people running more apps than ever.

Not necessarily. People used to write text documents while looking for references on the internet, listening to music and chatting with friends at the same time in 2010, and even earlier, but the same use case (office suite+browser+music payer+chat app) takes much more resources today, with just a small increase in usability and features.

Bloat is a complicated thing to discuss, because there’s no hard definition of it, and each person will think about it in a different way, so what someone can consider bloat, someone else may not, and we end up talking about different things. You’re right that hardware resources have been increasing in a slower rate, and it may force some more optimizations, but a lot of software are still getting heavier, without bringing new functionalities.