https://whatpwacando.today/ is a nice site to test things out. You should see the option to install on Firefox for android, as well as verify what features work.
Glad it finally landed in main, I’ve been using nightly to install PWA’s for a while. It worked fine, but having the two different browsers to juggle for initial install was a pain.
+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.
Having as many followers as he does on the fediverse right now is difficult. There aren’t any tools or options to reduce the flood of notifications you get or do do any sort of sane filtering (especially on mastodon) so i totally understand why he often reacts the way he does. You cant feasibly block or de-federate when your reach is so large.
The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.
Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”
Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.
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.
I’ve been using florisboard for a few months now. You will have typos. Auto-correct for obvious things would be nice… once you install a dictionary its not awful, but the dictionary struggles with simple typos since it isnt usually taking rhe surrounding words into context of the misspelled word. I think the only dictionary i could get installed was from libreoffice? So could just be a lack of common mobile typos in the dataset.
Florisboard does support things i actually used from gboard like a function row up top with undo/redo, activating voice options, and a clipboard with history. It also supports things like apps that support the autofill hints similarly to how itd pop up on gboard. Of all the foss options, it was the only one that had these modern expectations, so i also think its the best bet for a gboard alternative people will actually switch to. Anysoft and openboard are way too minimal (not a bad thing, just not what an avid gboard user is looking for)
Swipe on floris is ok. It definitely triggers when you don’t want it on occasion. And the lack of autocorrect makes recovery miserable.
I tried openboard too, but i could not get openboard to a reasonable size on the screen. Pixel 7 pro is fairly big… and i use the smallest text scaling… but even the smallest layout options put the top row out of reach of my thumbs.
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.
I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.
Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.
I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.
You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.
Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.
Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)
Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)
100% agree that Notion is fantastic compared to OneNote. I also switched back in 2018.
Unfortunately, their mobile app is still fairly sub-par, their data format is proprietary and not markdown, and it is only slightly cheaper than Obsidian Sync. Also, their integration system has basically gone nowhere. Which sucks because it could be good. I also have lost data on numerous occasions due to their sync system and their official policy is “oops”. In that respect, OneNote is better.
I used Notion for about 5 years before switching to Obsidian recently. Notion was far better than anything id used and generally it is a good tool, but i also was never able to make notion work as well for me as Obsidian, esp. in a way that i optimistically keep information in it. Notion often was just enough effort (esp when on the go with mobile) that i just simply could never use it to its full potential.
However, obsidian, imo, does require some plugins to meet my needs. But i think this is a good thing. Projects basically does everything i like about Notions databases. Dataview takes care of database views.
Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.
Which is relative to personal taste and needs.
If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss.
I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don’t need to pay unless you want their sync.
Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software.
Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don’t work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.
By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]… thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.
Anyone who just casually adds their own affiliate links without asking is not your friend. All they had to do was ask. Consent is easy. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
The CEO is also known to be homophobic, has some ties with some far right chat boards, and has been resistant to privacy checkups/audits, which is a red flag on its own. I wont post links, but there are plenty of threads here and on other forum/aggregator sites where they can be found. These points are obviously something that is less about the browser itself and more the people running it, but if the people running a project are untrustworthy or exhibit behaviors that are exclusionary, one has to consider using or supporting their products.
Qemu can also easily evade anti-cheat, iommu passthrough or not. Lots of great guides over at the level1techs forum.
Thanks for the detailed response, definitely a lot to consider there.
I think part of where I’m coming from is that i see the negative points, especially around preventing money being spent or gaining unfettered access to information, as items that are only a few laws away in event of a ultra-conservative majority, regardless of a digital ID system. With a MAGA-driven majority at some point there is not much in the way of patriot act 2: electric boogaloo, patriot act 3, 4, etc. So i tend to see the CBDC fear mongering as being distracted by the trees instead of considering the forest in total. There’s not much to be done to prevent it, but whether its mandatory or not, the bigger problem is who ends up in charge of it and especially who ends up writing the initial laws for it.
Don’t quote me on this but i recall seeing something a while back about how a significant part of the windows kernel was already ported to rust. The windows kernel has been fairly decoupled from the UI layer for a while, that was one of the big efforts in the 8.1 and 10 versions: to have a core that xbox, phone, and desktop could all share.
Not a solution to your current problem, but an alternative to consider depending on your network setup.
I’ve been running unbound as my DNS via OPNSense. Same capabilities for blocklists, plus some nice privacy benefits with DoH/DoT. I think you can use unbound with pihole too, fwiw, i just don’t have a need for that.
This. We already rely on digital, currently through a rather small number of payment providers who, at the end of the day, suck at privacy and security. I’m not terribly well educated on digital ID, but i generally don’t get why it is any worse than our current system (in the US, at least) of a bunch of corp run finance systems which are already very transparent to government surveillance, and care more about appeasing shareholders than security or privacy.
Comparing visa/mastercard/discover/credit reporting/banks etc to a government based digital option, at least the government option can be beholden to voters and at least the government, as a whole, isn’t serving shareholders wants over privacy/security.
It certainly means an authoritarian government could abuse the system more easily, but its a mistake to think that an authoritarian government can’t already abuse the current system to the same extent.
Whether the US adopts their own stablecoin and bans/doesn’t ban other crypto, and whether this digital ID thing is the harbinger of that, it wont change what the vast majority of people reach for at the end of the day. Which, pending massive societal upheaval, will be whatever the government backs.
You wont be able to revert everything, since 115 is essentially a new underlying UI framework. Your best bet is a fork like betterbird since you’ll be able to just load up your profile and keep going fairly seamlessly. But chances are rheyll eventually catch up to 115, and betterbird may diverge further or follow along.
Thunderbird 115 does have a decent amount of customization still. You can switch the list views from the new cards look back to the table layout, if that is your main dislike. It’s the icon at the top right of the inbox list next to the quick filters button. You can also change the layout to a horizontal one from the hamburger menu under views.
As far as tool bars there is not much you can do other than try to get as close to your preferred setup with the customize capabilities. Just right click on the top header area, just like in firefox. It wont have everything from older versions of Thunderbird, but most of the common tasks are available to use there instead of in the message veiwer or on the list/table view.
And of course, there may be some add-ons which restore some UI elements or features you miss. Many of those things would need to be re-implemented for the newer UI framework and would need enough people who use them to justify an add-on dev or the thunderbird team to make it happen.
Foundry makes a great information hub, even locally. All your DM handouts, their character sheets and notes, bags of holding, etc can live inside it. No more “who has X thing?”
I usually have a couple of maps set up for global use. One is the world/region map and I move a toke on it to show where the party is. Journal entries are pinned to locations and I reveal them as the party learns info.
Then I’ll usually have a map set up as essentially their “planning table” with all the info relevant to the current events, images, etc.
It’s set up so that even if we are running a combat in another map, they can swap back and reference something themselves if they want. I can always draw their attention back to the combat encounter map on demand if needed.
Also, if you also run 5e-tools it makes life even easier. You can import all sorts of things from 5e-tools into foundry with no need to spend time re-creating spells and items and such
I’ve been windows-free for about 8 months as well. I’m a more casual gamer so i haven’t had to venture out of steam proton yet (but i’ve got bottles on hand to experiment anyway) A few of the games i tend to return to every few years will definitely need bottles.
I built a beefy system, and I was initially planning on running windows (or one of the de-microsofted builds) on a vm with pass-through GPU (shunting my linux over to the on-cpu gpu when im running it) but so far i’ve had no need to continue setting that up. I proactively placed all my steam games on an ntfs filesystem just in case i do in the future.
Either way, i’m glad to have the flexibility to make windows work without dual boot, but so far it looks like i was being overly cautious. Probably cant play some games with anti-cheat right now… but i so rarely play those types of game.