It can be both!

This is being pushed by social media companies that don’t want to be responsible for age verification

Stability in the sense of: my computer does the thing i expect with the hardware i happen to have, every time, over many years.

I agree Debian is up there. I only mentioned Arch because of the massive userbase. I think Debian is a little more technical (for a new user with limited time and attention) than Ubuntu or Fedora, but much less so than Arch

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch are undoubtedly the big 4 Linux distros in terms of long term community, stability, and documentation

Fedora or Ubuntu. No need to overthink it. They are the two biggest distros in popularity by far (except Arch, which probably beats Fedora), so you have access to maximum mindshare and previous troubleshooting.

Including Arch, these three distros are among the most polished, stable, and well-documented. Arch takes quite a bit more effort, so a beginner without much time on their hands should start with Ubuntu or Fedora.

RE: use case

It’s really nice to be able to see the whole titles. A vertical panel cuts off most text, so you just have a bunch of icons when you minimize. if multiple windows are from the same app it’s confusing.

If you use a horizontal panel you have a bit more room, but a significant amount of text is still cut off, and the panel fills up quickly.

Even with as few as 6 windows open (lets say two browser and three file manager, and a terminal) minimizing is a mess. I find it better to just leave the window bar somewhere visible and shade it, since i can read all the text on my window at a glance. Combined with “keep above others”, you can get a really nice way to quickly refrence something infrequently while you do most of your work in another window.

A more typical workflow for me is 1-4 windows of a pdf reader, 1-3 file manager windows, 1 browser window, and 1 terminal window. It’s just easier to keep it all organized with window shading.

I find it much faster than a bunch of alt-tabbing, or playing hide and seek with the panel just to get a specific two PDF windows up side by side for a second

Thanks for the link! Heartening to know there are others that love this feature like i do

Damn. I guess it’s finally goodbye window shade or goodbye Plasma. I really wish they’d figured out a solution.

I get it though. The edge cases will never be fixed until devs know what they are, and GNOME proved this is an effective way to find out.

I dont agree. Life is a balance. You use proprietary software every day, everybody does. It exists in nearly every aspect of day to day life. You can never truly be free of it, but advocating for and using FOSS where possible is worthwhile anyway. Going fully blob-free would mean significantly more effort for what to me is not that much of an improvement to my life.

It’s the same reason i garden on my apartment balcony, but dont grow all my own food. I could probably just about manage it, but i’d be spending every second of my available time to keep the thing going just to reduce my already infrequent grocery trips (but not to zero since i still need soap and toothpaste).

I’m happy with the additional features, security, and transparency provided by Fedora over the OS my laptop was designed to run. I go through some level of effort to use Linux, but nothing crazy. If there was some widely available hardware with decent performance, price, and comparable features, made with ethical labor and that worked with Debian with the deblobbed kernel, i’d definitely give it a shot. Currently it’s too much work for too little gain for me.

But if it works for you, that’s awesome. I respect the commitment to your ideals.

The Pinebook Pro is unfortunately not a very good laptop. It’s very slow, has a weird storage setup, and the hardware isnt 100% supported by any distro even now, years later. The battery also takes forever to charge and doesnt last all that long.

I get better performance on a Raspberry Pi 4 and even that is too slow for me

It was a cool idea and if the software support was there it might have become a very compelling laptop, but as it currently exists the PBP is not worth what it costs

I interpreted it as a “non-nerd” laptop, like a lower end consumer model purchased at full price for example

Laptops like that tend to be more hit and miss on Linux than say a Thinkpad or Dell XPS

You dont need the install preserved, you need the login session preserved. I doubt that it’s even possible

I would suggest responding to what they wrote, rather than what they didn’t write or what you imagine they may have written, but that’s just me.

Another good option is to not respond at all.

Inventing a strawman then arguing with it is pointless

the implication that they only tried it once is childish

Perhaps it would be helpful if people who weren’t interested in discussing in good faith would refrain from posting

Yes, though the future of GrapheneOS on Pixels after 10 is currently in question

Long term everything they make is for the landfill. Soldered RAM and SSDs on most M-series made it clear Apple doesnt expect the devices to last very long.

A 5-7 year lifespan is enough if your customers generally upgrade every 2-4 years.

For those that don’t click:

These are recommendations for other FOSS podcast apps by the developers of AntennaPod, since they only have the time and resources to develop their app for Android

The url made me think AntennaPod was available on other platforms, it is not

my wife has a Kobo reader and it’s a great alternative, from Canada. The reader works great with Calibre on desktop for books you already own, and the Kobo store is more or less equivalent to the Kindle store.

I have no suggestion for getting files off an iPhone, but presumably an app exists to arbitrarily send files to desktop, and from there Calibre works.

Kobo build quality is better than othe e-readers, and it supports color and markups. Overall it’s pretty good for PDFs/textbooks and novels, but manga/comics can be a little goofy.

I cant speak on the syncing since she has only the one device.

Good luck!

Edit: seems like you edited (or i misunderstood) the OP. Kobo (the device) works great with US library lending, but ymmv if you are in another country. If you use the kobo app on your phone it will sync your position with the device, but the app is pretty flawed on mobile and doesnt have a desktop version i’m aware of.

I wouldnt mind using the app to read fiction, but it’s not great for reference material. I use a standalone pdf reader for that kind of thing on my phone, which obviously doesnt sync.

I dont think it’s about housing/shielding, just the lack of being powered on over many years.

Many of my drives are also nearly 20 years old

I’ve heard usb flash memory can degrade over time, but refreshing the cells by plugging it in once in a while can mitigate the potential data loss.

I have a few USBs like that and i plug them in once a year for about 5 minutes. I don’t usually even mount the data. Not sure if it makes an actual difference, but nothing lost so far

Boxes is very clean and functional. I even use it on Plasma. Great app