Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

Hell yeah. My favorite shell for almost 5 years, now. It was definitely an adjustment trying to get away from Bash-isms, and everything shell-related online essentially expects Bash. But it’s just like their tagline says, it’s a shell for the 90s. It’s great.

Pi-hole is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is the reason I began self-hosting six years ago.

Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.

Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:

• Upgrade Policy
  A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade.
• Expiration Date
  Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.

You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.

I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.

The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.

As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.

How do you manage your podman pod? I just manually wrote it out into a script just this past week, but it seems inelegant to do all these commands so manually.

You’ve heard it several times, now, but once again: Asahi works really well for what it is, but it’s definitely a compromised experience. For example, on my M1 Macbook Air I cannot plug in a USB-C dongle and then plug in an external monitor. The driver support just isn’t there. I think if I had an Macbook Pro with a built-in HDMI port I would be able to use that… but alas, I do not.

If you want to use macOS and then use Linux on the side now and again in a dual boot setup, sure. If you want to use 100% Linux on your computer… there are better supported options.

Here is a table of supported features but it isn’t really the full picture, because it doesn’t give you a clear view of things like putting the computer on standby consumes more idle power than it does with macOS, or drivers for hardware video decoding don’t exist, so all video is software decoded. The processors can do it really well, actually, but obviously it’s more power-efficient when it’s done by dedicated hardware.

The element zapper

It’s not absolutely shit, it’s a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn’t working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it’s now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don’t know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it’s not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can’t remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

I replace the <default, slow, annoying to use> image viewer with qimgv, which is ergonomic and very fast.

It’s also a bit sad when it has a facade that looks like a competitor’s proprietary offering, but you then peek under the hood a bit further and the finer details of polish, functionality, and taste are missing.

Love it all the same, but I can’t pretend it’s not a shortcoming.

You’ve gotten good responses already, but I just live and let live with Gnome’s Mutter & KDE’s Kwin. It’s worth mentioning that they’re both highly polished offerings. But I would also understand why one wouldn’t want to use either.

Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.

Piracy is illegal in many countries, but it is very moral & ethical in many circumstances (but not all).