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2 yr. ago

  • Works pretty well. Reader Mode is great at unfucking user-hostile site designs like this.

  • Yeah, Windows' bullshit is what drove me to Linux in the first place. I only have it on my gaming system, and only because Discord's stupid screensharing doesn't transmit audio on Linux, NVIDIA's drivers for Linux suck balls (going AMD next time now that their cards are good again) and there are a couple of games my friends play that have issues on Linux. I've never run into a game on my everyday laptop that Linux couldn't run, and the Steam Deck will take basically whatever you throw at it.

    Windows is a barely-functional rat's nest of code spaghetti that falls apart at complete random. Sometimes your audio drivers will just stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes your computer will just refuse to connect to the internet until you do a clean install. Windows Update apparently runs Prime95 in its spare time and so does the Antimalware Service Executable. I hate using it so much. I wish Windows would just curl up and die.

  • They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.

  • The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don't want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.

  • This is the first I've heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!

    Hopefully it doesn't get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they're barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.

  • Did you read the article? Excerpts include:

    Generally, in business, it is sensible to provide your customers with what they want. With Twitter, the meme-makers' favourite billionaire is doing the opposite. The cyber-trucker is trying his best to cull his customer base.

    Threads is what would happen if Twitter and Instagram made out in a bowling alley. It's all their worst parts combined - but it may well succeed. Rocket-man Musk's changes to Twitter have not exactly made it 'brand friendly'. Threads, meanwhile, is shaping up to be a paradise for in-your-face brands - and the AdTech industry would love for you to join them

    and

    Threads' naffness won't stop its success. It's data-scraping fluffily dressed up as substandard corporate twaddle. It's a cringe-inducing privacy invasion. It's not meant for users, but that doesn't really matter: you're not a user, you're a product.

    It's describing Threads as a product not for users, but advertisers. The perfect brand-friendly non-place for companies to stick their marketing crap. That doesn't really come across as a ringing endorsement to me.

  • Been using LineageOS with microG on my phone for the last couple of years out of a general distrust for Google, using open-source apps in place of the Google ones. My phone stopped getting OEM updates after Android 12, so being able to use Android 13 through LineageOS is a plus. Main downsides are that some apps don't play nice with microG and that unlocking the bootloader makes banking apps stop working.

  • Honestly, the biggest problem with the Quest headsets is that they're made by Facebook. Sorry, "Meta". The Quest 2 stand-alone headset would be an obvious recommendation to anyone curious about virtual reality if it weren't a Mark Zuckerberg product.

  • All it takes is enough people who aren't fully committed Trump voters in swing states finding it difficult to vote, or ending up not voting out of apathy. Or those states picking electors who will give the votes to Trump regardless of who wins the vote. A Trump victory can't be ruled out even with what should be several major disqualifying factors running against him. That's more an indictment of America than a credit to the strength of his candidacy, frankly.

  • I'm so glad we prevented all those abortions so the unwanted or unhealthy kids could instead die in more painful ways such as congenital defects, poverty and neglect. Virtue signalling is bad, unless it causes preventable suffering to children in which case apparently Supply-Side Jesus is all for it.

    Remember the 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel out-of-state for an abortion, and poor Milo Evan Dorbert, who lived a short life of 99 minutes before dying painfully of Potter syndrome, which left him without functioning kidneys. There are many other rape victims and babies with invariably-fatal conditions who have needlessly suffered for political reasons.

  • This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying "I tried to build the Torment Nexus", chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting "shame".

  • And it's still less shit than Snaps. It's the giant douche and turd sandwich situation with this stuff.

  • In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn't really anything comparable from other companies. It's unironically the best compact tablet I'm aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can't put Linux on one of those and even if you could it's ARM-based so most proprietary apps won't work on it.

    In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don't want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft's devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.

  • On the flip side, it's a rolling-release distro, so you don't have to play a game of "what broke?" whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn't got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).

  • Arch is good for a machine that gets used a lot, but for something where you need stability or to be able to run it for a long time between restarts and updates, something Debian-based is preferable. Just not modern Ubuntu because Snaps are performance-sapping nightmares.

  • USB-C hubs all seem to be dodgy crap made by anonymous Chinese companies and resold through various companies, including the likes of Apple. There's an absolute dearth of hubs made by actual reputable firms.

  • The void wants to be your friend!

  • VR possibly needs to get as high as 16K to be truly perfect for the human eye, so it could be useful there. But 16K headsets are a long way off, and refresh rate also needs to improve since the human eye can perceive up to 2,000 frames per second, so I feel like refresh rate will be the priority over pixel density by the time we get even 8K headsets.