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

Well put

About 2 years for me. It’s a better experience than vanilla Android except that tap to pay doesnt work.

Other than that one downside it’s been nothing but an improvement. so much more control over what apps can access, and what Google services to use (if any). Google services are treated like any other app, and can therefore be easily sandboxed.

If you have a compatible device i highly recommend GrapheneOS. I’m pretty unhappy with the build quality and camera on my Pixel (7 Pro), but that was all the same on Android.

I really wish GrapheneOS supported another brand of device. Pixels are way overpriced for how cheaply put together they are, but i’d rather have a meh phone with real security than a nice one with just security theater

It works great with Linux for me, i expect Debian will have no issues

True, but almost nobody uses Wine by itself when Proton is so much more convenient

Wine is still a thing, but most people prefer Proton for gaming.

The easiest way is to install Steam and play your games through that. Non-steam games can be added with “add a non-steam game”, and then you can choose to launch them with proton though the settings for the shortcut you created.

I can count on one hand the games that havent worked for me using this method, and it applies to any distro. I’ve never even considered doing a full VM for a game, i’m not even aware of a game that would work under a VM but not Proton.

Check out ProtonDB to see if your games work, and if any tweaks are required.

You can use a combination of shift, meta, pgup/pgdown and arrow keys to move between workspaces and to move applications between workspaces, and you can alt-tab to switch window focus within a workspace. window management and manipulation can be entirely keyboard-driven

edit: i just pulled out my laptop to find out how you do it. i only know from muscle memory.

super(windows) + pgup/pgdown to move between workspaces

shift + super + pgup/pgdown to move focused window between workspaces

and of course

super + left/right to tile

super + up to maximize

super + down to un-maximize

super + h to minimize

super + number to launch from the dash

Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I’d say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i’ve had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.

I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the “just works” experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.

I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven’t had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It’s also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.

The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.

Any distro will work once you install Nvidia drivers.

For Fedora and Ubuntu you can do it from the software center application.

If you go with Fedora you want to also look up how to install proprietary media codecs. That’s the one other thing you need to do after installation. Ubuntu has them built-in.

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I did History and Computer science and had no issues whatsoever. Most of my history work was LibreOffice writer saving to PDF or .docx formats. Printing, scanning, and using library wifi was always fine.

Computer Science kind of expected Linux, everything we did there was cross-platform already.

Built my first PC in High School from scraps. Decided to try Ubuntu 10.04 (current at the time).

I was very impressed with how much performance a free OS could get out of my awful hardware. Have been using Linux in some form as my OS ever since.

Thanks! This is probably the phenomenon i’ve been observing

Thanks!

Gnome seems to swap out default apps pretty often. Are the old apps getting abandoned? Or are they always jumping to the next cool new thing?

I like Ctrl there, Unix/Sun layout. Backspace is also an interesting idea

You’ve got me wrong, but do what you think is best.

A comprehensive reading involves slowing down and taking context into account. It was included for a reason.