Seems like a bit of an overreaction. From what I can see, it’s mostly that Ubuntu don’t seem confident enough to ship this without more rigorous testing (i.e. they think it might introduce other/more severe bugs), so they want resume doing that testing before shipping it. Doesn’t really seem harmful to anyone that didn’t explicitly choose to use Ubuntu.
Dealing with GNOME users problems all day in the forum, KDE is just better for usability?
It seems not unimaginable that whichever is more popular (/the default) will have more people reporting problems in the forum, regardless of how good it is?
This is the post to upvote: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85
If you want a clean install, go for a carefully curated set of packages, rather than trying to mix and match to create your own selection - that’s bound to result in a Frankenstein installation.
I’m partial to Fedora Silverblue, which is essentially just a single package containing the things you need to have a usable desktop. You can install what you need separately on top of that, but on updates, the whole base gets replaced wholesale - including, which is most relevant to your concerns, removing stuff that is no longer used/needed, rather than having that clog up over time.
There’s a convention to append a tilde to files/folders that are backups, so presumably some app at some point made a copy of /usr/local/share/applications, and then the original one got deleted?
Is it just because it’s faster? Feels like I can wait a couple of months for that?
If we can’t discuss systemd until 4% is reached, we can’t discuss systemd ever. Which is fair, because the systemd horse has already been beaten to death at this point.
Exactly :)
Why would “people who don’t want to have to troubleshoot anything” be a niche? I love it exactly because it’s mostly the same as what I used to have, except that I don’t have to worry about updates breaking as much.
What would you need the Steam Deck for?
E-reader sounds like good advice though, unless they really need colour (e.g. are planning to mainly read comics). MEGA sync probably won’t work, but Pocket might be good enough?
Kobo’s are basically Linux, and have quite a few customisation options.
Oh actually, looking at the Ubuntu installation docs, that doesn’t really seem to be much easier - that’s a disappointment :/
Although if you don’t mind running one terminal command (specifically, sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillacorp/mozillavpn), I think after that you should just be able to use the Ubuntu App Center to install software - which usually is the way to install software in Ubuntu, and works similar to app stores on phones.
Also note that Mullvad has a pretty technical user base and target audience, and thus their documentation is likely geared towards them. You could also consider using Mozilla VPN, which offers pretty much the same advantages (they use Mullvad’s servers), at the same price if you pay annually, and is easier to use.
With all the Linux on mobile work, one thing I was wondering about is how Android (and iOS too, I think) can just stop apps running in the background if it thinks they won’t be opened any time soon, to save energy, and how apps must therefore be programmed to be able to handle that gracefully. There has been a lot of focus on making apps adapt to the screen size, but not so much on making them save energy like that - I wonder if this work could enable that in one go for whole classes of apps?
Yeah, that’s generally the idea behind Pine64 devices. Also note that they encourage you not to order if you expect refunds for issues like broken pixels.
They’re very cheap because of that though.
I use Organic Maps on Android, but it also has a Linux version nowadays. I haven’t tried it, but if it’s the same codebase, that might work for you?
They might do it to subsidise the software development they’ve been contributing to make so much of GNOME adaptive - for which I am grateful.
You might also consider the saying “perfect is the enemy of good”. If you can find something perfect, that’s great, but if not… Don’t go with the worst option.
Ah yes, I’m sure there are no trackers on eBay.
AFAIK screen locking is already possible and widely implemented; it’s just being handled by the display manager (? I think that that’s the right term). It’s just that you can’t install anything that provides a fancy animation, if I understand correctly.
Linux Mint is even more troublesome, because I believe it uses Ubuntu’s repos as well - meaning that they’d be counted in Ubuntu’s logs?
That said, with the exception of probably Distrowatch pageviews (which of course have very little relation to actual usage), AFAIK all proxy metrics we have do point to Ubuntu’s dominance, as well as anecdotal evidence such as the distros you see people using at e.g. FOSDEM. I’d be interested to see any data that might show otherwise though, but until then, my working hypothesis is that Ubuntu is still the most popular desktop Linux.
Haha I appreciate the candor!