Yozul

Can’t understand the difference between defending people who made a hasty decision when their life is on the line if they trust the wrong person and still supporting that decision now that there’s been time to analyze things? Wow, you’re 2 for 2 on the bullshit binary thinking on the basis of your bullshit stereotypes. Good job!

Holy shit dude, talk about binary braindead mentalities. Yeah, it’s true that a lot of the discussion around this misses a lot of important information, but this shit is literally a matter life and death here now for some people, and Andy Yen made that post right in the middle of a whole bunch of tech CEOs all kissing the ring. Americans are on edge for a damn good reason. That’s a good article, and I’m pretty convinced the whole thing was overblown, but if you can’t understand the difference between not trusting the guy who just praised a fascist and “trying to infect the rest of the world” then don’t fucking talk about other people being too binary in their thinking.

I’m not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don’t really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You’re not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you’re not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla’s shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren’t really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you’re still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there’s not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.

This isn’t really an important point or anything, but I always find it odd when people bring up sysv init when talking about systemd. That’s kind of like arguing that people should switch to Linux because Windows Vista was bad. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a very weird thing to bring up in 2025.

Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they’ve also come a long way since systemd first came around. It’s also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn’t all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they’re all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.

That’s kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don’t care about that, you probably don’t need to worry about systemd.

It’s not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn’t get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It’s not bad, but it’s a testing branch. It’s not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.

The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto, you’re better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.

My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven’t changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn’t always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I’ve never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

It’s true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the “last” version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they’re still in the “oh, this is what we’ll probably do when we release GTK5” phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don’t have good Wayland support. I wouldn’t stress out about it too much.

XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Terrible bait. I’m disappointed.

For my laptop, yeah. I rarely actually use it though. For my desktop not so much. I really don’t keep that much personal information on it to begin with, and if someone breaks into my house they could probably get more by stealing the desk my computer is sitting on then by stealing the computer. It just feels like a silly thing to waste my time with.

Call it hate if you want, but it is an intentional design decision to break compatibility with other DEs. That is a choice they consciously made and have been very clear in communicating. There are trade offs involved. I’m not saying it’s a completely irrational choice or anything, but it is aggravating for those of us that don’t use Gnome when we have to deal with libadwaita apps. Libadwaita is designed from the ground up to be a Gnome exclusive thing. It is not for Linux. It is just for Gnome. That is the developers’ stated intention.

You sure did. Maybe libadwaita even includes tools to make it easier or something, I don’t know. I just think maybe the toolkit that breaks everything all the time isn’t the best example.

You don’t need libadwaita to do that. Lots of KDE apps are designed to work on mobile. Libadwaita just makes everything broken outside of Gnome.

You can’t just misread something and then claim that makes it clickbait. That term is losing all meaning from overuse. It’s an article about a Linux distro and it has the name of that distro in the title. That’s not clickbait.

Sure, if it’s making your life easier or making you happy or whatever, then have it. Don’t let me yuck your yum. I just think it doesn’t provide any real benefit for most people. Am I not allowed to talk about my opinion?

Copy on write is pretty overrated for most use cases. It’d be nice to have, but I don’t find it’s worth the bother. Disk compression and snapshots have had solutions for longer than btrfs has existed, so I don’t understand why I’d want to cram them into an otherwise worse file system and call it an improvement. I will admit that copy on write and snapshots do at least have a little synergy together, but storage has gotten to be one of the cheapest parts of a computer. I’d rather just have a real backup.

You know file systems are not the only way to do that, right? Heck, Timeshift is explicitly designed to do that easily and automatically without ever even having to look at a command line. Backup before upgrade is a weird thing to cram into a file system.