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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Google Search brought in lots of revenue (comparatively), but in return they became dependent on the whims of a crazy-large tech company that has turned the corner into a full-on IBM-style corporation. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen with people advertising local businesses on Facebook and then the algorithm killing their income overnight. You have to treat it as a large risk to your business and do everything you can think of to mitigate it. Which maybe they were, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want my business to be reliant on the good nature of a huge tech company like Google.





  • The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts in Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode to mitigate font fingerprinting.

    I’m happy to see this. It’s crazy how hard advertisers try to determine who I am when I’m actively attempting not to be shown their garbage and won’t buy it from their links. Browsers should be sending far fewer html headers, and restricting the listed fonts to a common list is a good step forward.


  • Bodhi Linux. I have an old System76 Starling netbook that stopped working after some updates left it in the dust. I think it had a netbook version of Ubuntu on it originally. Years later I installed Bodhi Linux on it (since it was supposed to be good for low spec machines) and I currently use it as an Angband terminal, a photo slideshow device, and occasionally surf the web with it just because I can :)

    I’m amazed at how well it works with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, and a 250GB disk drive. Kudos to the Bodhi Linux team.


  • I must be lucky. I’ve been using Linux (Debian then Ubuntu then PC Linux OS then back to Kubuntu) since approx 2002. I don’t remember ever having to reinstall my OS because an application borked on install or otherwise. Reboot, maybe, but it was normally fixable. I have been annoyed at my favorite apps disappearing in a new release and having to change my workflow, but that’s about it.

    Even all the pain I had to go through to get X11 working correctly in the early days didn’t require reinstalls.





  • +1 for the package manager. No need to find some website to download what you want while having to worry about whether you’re at the right one and if you’re going to download a virus or ransomware or something. I can’t believe that’s the normal way to install software on windows, download something from a website and hope it’s the right thing. Much better to browse a bunch of software that is designed to work well on your system and is free besides.

    One big thing for me is that linux doesn’t try to push you to do anything. I run simulations and they are a pain to set up again sometimes so having the computer decide to update itself out of the blue is completely unwanted. Linux will wait until you are ready. This can have a downside if you don’t keep up on updates, but it’s far less a concern than it is in the Windows ecosystem.



  • It’s amazing to me that some company writes some awesome tech that allows users of one OS to run games on another OS that the game was never designed for and they complain because they might have to read protondb.com and copy something into a box in settings and maybe click another checkbox and select proton experimental from a drop-down list. I’ve been on linux as my daily driver at home since 2002-ish. I went years without playing most games (other than some wine experiments and old school rogue-likes), and right now the world has completely changed. If the AAA studios would enable a checkbox, most of their games would work with anti-cheat, but they want too much control of your system. I play games on an older nvidia cpu that work amazingly well. I had no desire to go back to Windows before, let alone now that gaming went from famine to feast in just a few years on linux. Valve has completely changed the linux landscape and has made it much much easier to get rid of Windows for good.