I’m not very familiar with Kodi, why do you recommend against it?

I’m pretty sure you should be fine. Seeing as you mentioned you’re running Zorin in another comment, there’s a page from their support site that tells how to update. From my reading of it, it shouldn’t risk messing up your dual-boot situation unless you’re doing a fresh install (in which case, even that should be fine assuming you make sure to overwrite the correct partitions). You’re miles more likely to experience issues dual-booting after a Windows update than any Linux updates.

Side-note, while I understand that people are trying to help by saying you can run some other Linux distro for free, that’s neither helpful nor answers the question. I paid for a copy of elementaryOS once because I wanted to support the project, and their very fair pay-what-you-want scheme allowed me to use what was my first Linux distro for free.

I get that some people might be turned off by Zorin keeping some cosmetic features “locked” behind a pawyall, but they really aren’t – you can make all those changes manually with other apps/editing config files manually, it just isn’t as easy or seamless. But that’s the point of their business model, they save non-essential features for the paid version as an extra incentive to support their work on a solid distro, knowing that some people might either value the convenience enough, or simply want to support the development monetarily.

Okay, I think I understand your point better. While I still think his perspective on demanding users is pretty reasonable, I agree (and didn’t make clear enough) that Martin’s reaction here comes off less-measured than it should’ve. He definitely isn’t all victim, he’s stoked some flames and not done his part to de-escalate on many occasions, that’s for sure.

This whole saga really is a shame, the guy clearly is talented, and there certainly are issues with how the Rust4Linux integration has been handled. I really hope things can improve systemically here.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the projects you managed? Much respect for your open source work, shit’s not easy.

his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? … Surprised users wanted external display support?

I think this misconstrues his point: he was talking about a subset of users (“entitled users”), not calling all the users entitled.

To me, it seemed less that he was surprised users wanted certain features, more that he was burned out by the feature requests that spent time expressing personal grievances, making demands, or getting mad about the project’s pace. I understand that might come off as him being overly-sensitive, but I absolutely see why a constant cascade of FRs written like demands instead of no-BS questions would wear down on someone, especially while they’re simultaneously trying to deal with upstreaming.

he needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic

I totally agree here though, I just hope that this whole fiasco isn’t written off as the result of some vague burn-out. There really does need to be some change in kernel maintainer authority structure and the culture. That can only really happen if someone respected (e.g. Linus) makes some moves to encourage more cooperation/openness from certain C maintainers, and helps put in place better guidelines for how Rust contributions should be handled. It’s simply too disorganized right now, and that makes it too easy for individuals with power to let their egos get in the way of good progress.

I had the same reaction when he suddenly dropped the “ulterior motives line” and my hopes became true.

Been watching his stuff for a while, and it was great to see a pretty successful artist find a way to make their pipeline work, and also talk about it.

Haha the edit about split keyboards, you know my every damn move. But really, I think you’re onto something there about finding a way to make your home row into a number row via some kind of layering. How exactly that’s done depends on what keyboard you’re using: if it’s an external keyboard then maybe you could use a QMK board and make custom layers for that. If it’s the keyboard built into your laptop, I’ve seen people mention KMonad working well for them, maybe that’s worth looking into.

Yeah honestly if they could do a massive overhaul on performance and UX with the OSK then that’d solve the main complaint I’ve had with touch interfaces on Linux

I think it’s based on the xdg-desktop-portal accent color support, but there were specific hooks added to libadwaita to handle that desktop standard, at least that’s my guess based on this.

Definitely glad we have the major desktops all natively supporting accent colors now, it’s been a long time coming.

I use a mix of GSConnect/KDEConnect, Warpinator, and Syncthing. I’ve got a shared “dropoff” folder on Syncthing that lets me easily drop files from one device to another. You’re having issues with Warpinator but if you’re able to figure out the issue there, that’s my second go-to for one-time file transfers. KDEConnect is a bit more fiddly, but I use it mostly for sharing clipboard info and the occasional file when it’s stable enough.

Yeah but it’s not that accurate, and it leaves most normal mobile users out of the picture. I know YouTube knew exactly what they were doing when they removed dislikes, but it still seems absolutely insane to remove such a useful tool for sifting through the bullshit.

MS really has always done this, what’s the name for this kind of marketing maneuver? Manufactured consent? Manufactured begrudging tolerance?

Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it’s made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.

So far I haven’t had any issues elsewhere I’m Fedora 40, but maybe that’s because I’ve checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.

It’s wild to me that anyone would say that sentence and not immediately realize they sound like an emotionless robot. Like damn, who would’ve thought people have a great need for authentic human connections? Not me!

This kinda shit you hear from people so deep in the world of product marketing is sickening and really shows how disconnected from they are from both reality and the point of selling a good product: benefitting people. I guess I’m just glad to see more stories of people ditching dating apps as they continue to become more predatory and less helpful.

Yeah unfortunately I agree, as much as I dread knowing Meta’s going to be behind a lot of the VR/AR developments as it gets more common, this isn’t really an indication that they screwed up. They’re not the first company I’d want to lead the VR market but it looks like they will be regardless.

You said it pal, not me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah seriously, I was surprised at how plain and illegible rpm-ostree felt in comparison to dnf, I really wish they put a little color or some extra separation just to make it feel less cramped and give people more glanceable info.

I think one worth adding is ZorinOS, it might feel more familiar and modern than Mint, and it’s worked well on the old hardware I’ve run it on. Still an Ubuntu derivative, so you can’t really go wrong with any of these.

I would say yes to this, but elementaryOS still doesn’t have in-place upgrades to the next major versions. I recall there being some progress on changing that, but I would wait till elementaryOS 8 before really recommending it.

I don’t disagree, the person you were replying to could’ve used better language that didn’t characterize Ubuntu as malware-infested and been more specific about what they were referring to. In any event, a couple scammy malware apps that were installed at the user’s discretion are not enough evidence that Ubuntu is a bigger malware risk than any other OS.

I don’t think people should avoid Ubuntu because their app store had the same problem so many others do, but I do think the fact that they make promises about the security of the Snap Store while also making the backend and review process less open than other Linux app stores is worth noting. Not to say there aren’t security incidents with other distros worth noting, but considering the popularity of Ubuntu, it’s not surprising it’s a bigger target.

It’s in reference to recent issues the Canonical Snap Store has had with letting malware get past the review process. Since Snaps are pretty tightly integrated in Ubuntu, people with concerns about the Snap store wouldn’t want to take the risk with a distro that makes it hard to opt out of an app store with a proprietary backend that seems to have issues with letting malicious apps onto the platform. This matters more to some people than others, but I think it’s fair to question Ubuntu’s safety given the track record.