Here to follow content related to Star Trek, Linux, open-source software, and anything else I like that happens to have a substantial Lemmy community for it.
Main fediverse account: @f00fc7c8@woem.space
I hope whatever remedies the court decides upon to weaken Google’s monopoly end up helping Firefox, otherwise it’s just making Google a bigger monopoly. But this case was mostly about search, and I don’t really trust the Justice Department or the courts to be this keenly aware of the state of web browsers.
Niccolo Ve did a pretty comprehensive summary of all his problems recently: https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=mhqeuO9RKKk
He’s been on a right-wing, transphobic, anti-woke downward spiral for years now.
The website claims that sponsors have no direct influence on the project (“board seats are not for sale”). The reality is that no project of sufficient scale to fully implement web standards can survive without a significant amount of funding.
Depends on your desktop environment. Look for an “autostart” or “startup applications” setting. If you’re on KDE, this could also be caused by “Restore previous session” under Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session.
I always keep close track of these contests, it’s fun to take a look at all the different concepts. Though IIRC only Juliette Taka (who designed the themes for 8, 9, and 11) even submitted a theme last time. She’s great, and Emerald is great, but I hope this post gets someone even better involved with the artwork.
Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.
I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.
I was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my “forever distro”, until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn’t have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought “new” (about a year old) hardware.
I still want to keep Debian, because I’ve found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I’m hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I’ll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.
Not sure why, but a lot of other distros did something just like this in the past (see the comments about WUBI) and no longer do. Q4OS still has a .exe installer though.
I really liked the simplicity of GNOME To Do when it was around. The successor seems to be GNOME Endeavor, which I haven’t tried extensively.
oh it is still being updated! great.
I’m aware of FreeTube and PlasmaTube, which IIRC both require an Invidious instance. There was something called SMTube in the past, not sure if it still exists.
Nothing I’m aware of has both desktop and mobile version, but if anything there are more options for mobile YouTube clients; try NewPipe or Clipious.
Edit: SMTube does still exist. It does not require Invidious, but it does use tonvid.com.
Revolt is the most Discord-like FOSS chat app; it’s very easy to use and customizable. Rocket.chat and Mattermost do similar things and are more oriented toward organizations (the Slack/Teams Classic use case).
What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn’t seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I’ve only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.
There is a complete set of free assets, in the form of Freedoom. Also, the official Steam version is closed-source, so make sure you’re getting a free source port. (Most distros have a few in their repos, and Freedoom+GZDoom is also in Flathub.)
I highly recommend playing Doom with the Crispy Doom source port and the Freedoom data files.
For something more modern, Xonotic is about the best-looking FOSS game out there and an excellent multiplayer arena shooter.
For some reason the most pessimistic voices always get boosted the most on social media. (Well, on my corner of Akkoma/Mastodon, that is.)
While, yes, there is a large anti-trans campaign going on in the US, and yes, it’s succeeding scarily often, it is failing just as often. The threat isn’t from a hateful majority, it’s from a minority in power. One way or another I believe it’s a losing battle for the bigots. We exist and nothing they can do will change that.
I’d say they all offer different types of customization. It’s less a matter of how much you can do, and more a matter of what you want to do and how much time you’re willing to spend working on it. KDE is for people who want to customize their desktop, and want it to be easy to do so. GNOME is for people who just want something that works, but it still offers a lot of customization, it’s just not as well-supported (their philosophy is “if theming breaks an app, it’s not our fault”).
KDE doesn’t support full CSS customization on its own, but there are theming engines like Kvantum and QtCurve that address the limitations that arise from this. I’d say it’s on almost equal footing with GNOME in that regard, since both GTK4+libadwaita and Qt6+KF6 are designed for color scheme customization, but require various workarounds and obscure settings for anything more than that. If anything the workarounds are easier in KDE.
Similarly, KDE supports layout customization through widgets and graphical menus. GNOME also supports layout customization, but through extensions instead.
And then you can do all of the above and more if you use a window manager, or an LXDE/LXQt-style desktop that lets you disable or replace all its components in settings - just mix and match components like panels, file managers, display managers, polkit agents, etc. You can basically build your own DE that way, and it doesn’t get much more customizable than that. But maybe you don’t want to spend your time choosing every component of your custom DE. That’s what something like KDE is for.