I moved one of my computers to endeavor, but one is still on manjaro and the contrast is kinda hilarious. Manjaro machine always gets funky after updates, it struggles to deal with sleep and hibernation, and it feels slow even when its like 4x as powerful as my EndeavourOS machine.

I mean, the issues were present and widely reported for several months before Intel even acknowledged the problems. And it wasn’t just media reporting this, it was also game server hosts who were seeing massive deployments failing at unprecedented rates. Even those customers, who get way better support than the average home user, were largely dismissed by intel for a long time. It then took several more months to ship a fix. The widespread nature of the issues points to a major failure on the companies part to properly QA and ensure their partners were given accurate guidance for motherboard specs. Even so, the patches only prevent further harm to the processor, it doesnt fix any damage that has already been incurred that could amount to years off of its lifespan. Sure they are doing an extended warranty, but thats still a band-aid.

I agree it doesnt mean one should completely dismiss the possibility of buying an Intel chip, but it certinally doesn’t inspire confidence.

Even if this was all an oversight or process failure, it still looks a lot like Intel as a whole deciding to ship chips that had a nice looking set of numbers despite those numbers being achieved through a degraded lifespan.

Wow, Bitwarden has made leaps and bounds on catching up to 1password on dev tools and enterprise features the last few years. I’m going to need to re-evaluate/consider moving over.

As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.

I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.

The space example is extremely apt. Its possible we could have had tons of space stations, a moon colony, maybe even some other stuff going on around the solar system, asteroid mining, etc. But thay would have at least required the space race to continue longer and for spending to grow to create a big enoigh industry to ensure thay outcome, assuming no capacity or time issue. Alas, we took another path.

Something that seems important to us might not matter in even 10 years, or at least, not have a monetary and/or societal incentive to keep advancing.

So the site should just… Not work in firefox then?

A lot of the sites in the about:compat block or don’t work in Firefox because the sites don’t follow web standards

All web browsers have semi hidden pages like this for all sorts of purposes. Its not really intended to be secret, its just not stuff worth even adding to a file menu. Some of the about: pages in firefox are in some submenus, some on settings, but def not all. Tho you’ll fimd them mentioned and linked in support guides.

If anything, the ability to access these is better than them being blocked…

I’ve also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour… Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.

Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so… Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.

I don’t print much so haven’t put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn’t gotten as much community support I guess

Brother, in particular, has always been fairly well supported via Linux fortunately. Especially great since their laser printers have been the best cost/value for home use for a long time.

Honestly, I’m not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.

Until recently, Wayland development was rather slow, especially in the areas where more specialized software run into issues that force them to stick with X11. Since Wayland does a lot less than X11 and is more componetized across multiple libraries designed to be swappable, some of these areas simply do not have solutions. Yet.

And, as always with FOSS, funding is a big part of the problem. The recent funding boosts the GNOME foundation received have also led to some increased funding for work on Wayland and friends. In particular, accessibility has been almost nonexistent on Wayland, so that also means that if an app wants to ensure certain levels of accessibility, they can’t switch to Wayland. GNOME’s Newton effort is still very alpha, but promising.

While big apps like blender and krita get good funding, they can’t necessarily solve the problem themselves by throwing money at it, either. But the more funding Wayland gets to fill in the feature-gaps and ease adoption, the sooner we’ll be able to move away from xwayland as a fallback.

Wayland and its whole implementation process certinally aren’t without fault. There’s a lot of really justified anger and frustration all around. Even so, staying on X11 isnt a solution.

While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

Don’t feed the troll.

Especially not one that uses mental illness as an insult.

Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”

Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.

The page title isn’t necessarily visible on the web page that sets the title.

Clicking is not always a simple task.

I shouldn’t have to leave my current page just to figure out what another tab is.

Again, just because you feel something is useless or easily avoided doesn’t mean that all internet users feel the same.

Tooltips are a standard accessibility feature. Just because you may not find them helpful doesn’t mean others do not benefit. The delay is to ensure they don’t get in the way unintentionally (but still allow usage) for those who do not need the accessibility benefit at all times.

+1

the UI could be improved (I always end up hovering for tooltips on controls) but it works really well.

I also like that tabs will stay in the stash by default on close, so its great for opening a bunch of reference sites really quickly without worrying about losing them

Closest thing to the old firefox experiment from a few years back.

If you know how to add a real “delete” entry that would be great.

At least in nautilus 42 the preferences let you enable a permanent delete option in the right click menu, if that’s what you are looking for.

not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird

The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.

UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.

I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.

I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.

(My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)

I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.

I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.