I stopped distro hopping and started hopping around Mastodon instances instead.

I currently have two active accounts. One is more established but the server goes down for days at a time.

The other is pretty robust but I’m still establishing myself there.

I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.

Monitors are starting to move in this direction. Samsung has a notorious 5k Apple Studio competitor that wants to connect to the Internet and uses the same interface as their Galaxy smartphones.

Standby. Winter is coming for monitors as well.

The movie Hackers.

Meatless nuggets

Got me excited, (I gave up McDonald’s in my 30’s) but this is only McDonald’s in France.

1,560 McDonald’s locations in France,

My god. (I had to do a double-take; I would have thought 1560 McDonald’s locations in the entire USA but I’m off by almost an order of magnitude)

I just don’t understand it. I see some people with $1000 car payments and nothing toward retirement. What ever happened to looking for good deals? We had a kind of “rugged ingenuity” thing growing up where you respected people who took care of their older stuff, and I guess that still holds true today. $1000 car payments, I would have paid off my car in under a year.

Honestly, I’m scared to spend. Which I guess is okay because I’m comfortable with how we live and sometimes you have to spend on life events out of your control.

Camry

Yeah, thanks. Between ThinkPads and system76 and Fairphone, it’s pretty easy to maintain. Monitor is a Dell U3014. It was over a thousand dollars new but these days it’s under $200 used and I’ve replaced the mainboard in it twice for about $145 each time. Everything was purchased slightly used so that saves a lot.

I kind of don’t really drive much. Between biking and living close to a lot of things, I’ve put about 40,000 miles on the car in 7 years. Car is in its third decade and has about 70k miles on it.

Live below my means, invest the rest.

I don’t dress or act like people in my pay range. My house is small and in a quiet neighborhood and cost less than my salary. Car is older but paid off and I know all the quirks and have the toolbox in the back to fix it. It is probably one of the top 5 most reliable cars in history. My work dress shoes are 10 years old and my around the house shoes were new in 2019.

I spend my money where I spend my time. So I have a nice phone, a very nice monitor and mechanical keyboard, and a good computer. And all with the right to repair philosophy. Same for my wife and kids. And also good running shoes, good exercise equipment.

The plan is to get to a point where I can just not work at all and maintain my lifestyle. Three percent rule and all that. And also help launch my kids.

Something about a 25 year roof and a Japanese shit box car in my fortress of solitude.

FWIW I grew up really really really poor like you wouldn’t believe so I’m okay with this.

Having a good memory and getting older.

No, you will be added to a list that gets sold around. Better to keep that data point private so you don’t become a target.

I’m pretty sure the pollsters aren’t cold calling or cold texting people any more. It is more likely than not, a scam.

The only poll that matters is election day.

–Gnome Web from Flathub

–Chromium in the Debian repo

–Chromium in the CalyxOS build

I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.

Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”

But for me it being closed is a non-starter.

Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.

FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.

Never heard of it.

Haha j/k, of course Safari too, good catch. Just a non-starter for me since I don’t use any of the platforms it’s on.

Geary from Flathub for all the day to day, manage my life and family and financial stuff.

And Alpine for my personal email account from 25 years ago.

Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.

The town of Chimney Rock is gone.

No hyperbole.

It’s gone.

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.

I never got it to work at anything over 4k several years ago.

I went down the rabbit hole and ended up just selling. Apple only ever released the driver for macOS and for Windows 10 with Bootcamp.

Apparently it will work in X11 with a few setup changes per this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6477626#post6477626