I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

“Like” might be too strong a word, lol. But thanks, I’ve heard great things.

Ah! I take it back, there has been one other thing. For one of my pairs of Bluetooth headphones, on one of my computers, Blueman intermittently won’t show the correct sink (not sync) codec options, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting will fix it, meaning that they only work in VoIP headset mode (so, lower quality). I bought these headphones after I switched to Linux, and they’ve only ever been connected to the one machine, so I don’t know if the problem is with the headphones, with Mint, with the hardware, or with Blueman. I have to tear down the Bluetooth stack and rebuild it, which sounds a lot worse than it is (actually it takes like two terminal commands and four seconds), but annoyingly that means it also disconnects every other Bluetooth device I have connected.

It’s a minor annoyance, but it’s an annoyance. Still, I’ll take it over dealing with Windows’ terrible audio interface any day.

✋

A little over a year ago, I had a 5-year-old daily-driver Windows laptop that I knew wouldn’t get Windows 11, so I put Mint on my 15-year-old desktop machine to see if I could live that life. I had tried dual-booting Ubuntu a couple of times over the previous decade or so, but always just booted into Windows after the novelty wore off. While I expected it to run Linux better than Windows, I was still bracing myself for a terribly slow experience. I was startled to discover that my 15-year-old desktop computer, which had essentially been sitting cold for over five years because it ran Windows 7 like molasses and wasn’t eligible for Windows 10, not only ran Linux Mint better than Windows 7, but also ran Windows 10 in VirtualBox better than Windows 7 on baremetal. It was a little slow and laggy, definitely not gaming ready, but perfectly usable.

Then I discovered that, when I went back to my Windows laptop, I missed the way Linux worked and all of the customizability. And I discovered that Valve’s work to make the Steam Deck a viable gaming console was making Steam gaming on Linux a quite pleasant experience. So earlier this year, when I bought a new laptop (trying to beat the tariffs), I decided to get a Framework without Windows preinstalled. I put Mint on it, too, and only rarely needed to boot into VirtualBox a couple of times for work stuff (mostly opening Adobe files). So last week, I turned Windows on for the last time on my old laptop, pulled the last couple of files off of it, marveled at how old Windows looked, and installed Mint on that one too.

My house went from 100% Windows to 0% Windows over the course of the past year, due entirely to Microsoft’s own-goal of killing off their most popular and reliable product. And I couldn’t be happier.

Problems and challenges? I haven’t run into a single one that wasn’t already a problem before I installed Linux. Maybe it just hasn’t been long enough, or maybe sticking with a “normie” distro has insulated me from the worst of it, but I haven’t had a single driver issue (on the contrary, the Bluetooth module that never worked on my old laptop under Windows works perfectly now), and I’ve been able to find an open-source alternative to basically every Windows-only application I want or need. My wife’s old Chromebook, which had been basically useless for anything but web browsing before we replaced it, is still basically useless for anything but web browsing even on Lubuntu (it was too puny even for Mint). But no problems due to Linux or due to not having Windows outside of a VM. No hours spent debugging broken drivers. It’s all been super smooth.

Oh, I guess one thing is that I know Powershell a whole lot better than Bash. That’s been a little bit of a learning curve.

AOSP is still open-source. If they do, it can be forked.

You just open it in Firefox and modify it. It’s only form filling for now.

I have concerns.

Best privacy

What does “best” mean here? Privacy is binary: either something is private, and only you decide who has access to it, or it isn’t.

and unbiased ad-blocking

Uh-oh. That’s a red flag. When a company makes a big deal out of being unbiased about something that isn’t inherently biased to begin with, I just automatically assume right-wing.

by default.

And how easy is it to change that default if you don’t like it? Or if YouTube kills ad blocking in it? No thanks, I’d prefer it be an extension, thanks.

Handy features like native !bangs

Custom search with extra characters. Firefox has had it for over a decade, and Chrome has had it for a while too.

and split view.

Pretty sure this has been in several browsers recently, too.

No adware,

Thanks, that’s…kind of the bare minimum in a browser?

no bloat,

Degoogled is already that for Chromium, if that’s really what you want. There are several Firefox forks that pull out a bunch of stuff and make it leaner, too.

no noise.

Bold move disabling the sound API. Respect. /s

People-first

Which people? Ok, this is easy to say, but essentially meaningless.

and fully open source.

Isn’t BSD a sharealike license? So they can’t not. Still, props to them.

At the end of the day, I think I’d still prefer a Gecko browser, or Degoogled if I absolutely had to use Chromium.

I can’t find any links to the project itself, only to announcements about the project. Anybody have anything more concrete? How far along is this project?

Nothing in life really prepares you for meeting such an unfathomable being…

Ok, obviously merging while you merge is super dangerous. Almost as dangerous as using light mode on your phone. The rider should’ve known he was a sociopath just from that.

Pull Request. You don’t merge a peer review.

“When in Rome” is the first half of an old adage: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” It means that when you’re in an unfamiliar location, take your cues on what to do from the people who live there. It doesn’t mean that they’re literally in Rome.

It’s being used somewhat incorrectly in this title; to say that the Uber driver is just doing what’s normal for Bay Area people, I guess.

Man, I don’t recognize this at all. At work I’m currently in the middle of a two-month project that I think will end up producing about ten lines of code. It’s all about tracking a bunch of stuff down in a gigantic code base and then trial-and-erroring all of it until it works.

So, my mother-in-law’s phone keyboard switches to French-Canadian? Yeah, I can definitely fix that! My dad wants a mesh network in his house so he can listen to music in the garage? Can do! My kid’s audio player breaks and I need to transplant in a new part? Give it to me! My wife’s computer won’t print suddenly? These little wins (and sometimes medium sized wins!) are euphoric. They keep me from feeling like I’ve wasted an entire day switching one variable, running a build, and then switching it back.

Sure, it gets annoying when they don’t try anything before they ask, or they keep having the same problem over and over again. But that’s by far the minority.

Login with a solemn promise

Where were all you awesome people with these great suggestions back in May?!

When I was looking into this earlier, I was explicitly searching for markdown clients, so it didn’t come up, but thank you. I’ll look into it!

Nice, thanks for that info. I do use vscodium, so that could work.

Unclear, at this point, and it’s been a while since I looked.

It’s been a while since I read the details, but as I recall it stores them primarily in a database. The .mds are mirrors or something, maybe?

In any case, it looked to me like they could get desynced pretty easily.

This is great intel, thank you.