I’m a monthly donor to KDE EV and to the Mozilla Foundation.

Bash

Not because it’s the best or even my favourite. Just because I create so many ephemeral VMs and containers that code switching isn’t worth it for me.

It would, but I already have several dev boards I use in that configuration. What I’m looking for now is something I can take with me to use as a semi-daily driver so I can start reporting bugs in real world use cases.

I’m considering it as a second laptop option, but I have a particular niche use case: I’m a developer who writes developer tools and is currently trying to ensure we have first-class RISC-V support.

This is probably what I’ll go for if I buy in the next month though: https://liliputing.com/dc-roma-laptop-ii-packs-an-octa-core-risc-v-processor-16gb-of-ram-and-ubuntu-linux/

Kubuntu

Steam for Linux only has x86 builds right now and wine only translates system calls, so by default they won’t work.

There are ways to get them to work though, but they mostly involve emulating x86. Given the performance of the current state of the art in RISC-V, that won’t exactly go well right now.

That said, that’s not what this machine is for at all. As a software developer working on developer tools for Linux, this is particularly interesting to me as a way to improve the Linux RISC-V ecosystem while dogfooding my own stuff.

Probably the black sea, dad.

The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.

It’s because it’s an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn’t really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.

People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.

I had a coworker at a previous job who used to take naps in the bathroom stall because it was the only place in the office with a bit of privacy.

I kinda get it. I used to sit in a stall to decompress my brain because open plan offices are incredibly stressful to me. Every couple of hours I needed ~10 minutes of privacy.

Because they’re doing it by mistake. They’re intending to register to vote as independent (no party aligned) voters, seeing “Independent” under party, and choosing that.

Yeah that’s solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.

But I don’t want to have to run flatpak run dev.htop.htop to get to htop.

Apple

Good faith

Lol good one!

I use Firefox as my daily browser, but I tried the manifest v3 based uBlock experiment in Chrome and honestly I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the regular uBlock.

I welcome people switching over, but I don’t think this is anywhere near the killing blow to adblocking people think it is.

I’ve got a desktop that got a dirty install of KDE Neon when the repositories first got put up (before there were isos). Been in-place upgrading it ever since.

Kubuntu works well on mine. A friend has Lubuntu on his.

FWIW, the Biden administration is doing a decent amount of behind the scenes work on housing costs, both directly (funding low income housing) and indirectly (incentivising cities to change laws that decrease supply and prop up the local landlords). Some of the reasons (IMO) he doesn’t talk much about this are:

1. Small-scale landlords are a decent chunk of the Democrats’ donor base. So although this isn’t going to significantly negatively affect small-scale landlords (not that I’d care if it did - it just isn’t), too much messaging on that front could have a negative effect on donations.
2. Some of the least reliable voters that the Democrats are depending on this year are sufficiently leftist to dislike any attempt that isn’t fully public housing. And none of what the Biden administration is doing will result in massive swathes of public housing. Some places might get some at the margins, but mostly what’s happening is that local governments are working with non-profits to provide more affordable housing, using the influx of federal cash to make it happen. Messaging here needs to be very careful not to give these folks an excuse not to vote.
3. Many of the voters who are (somehow…) on the fence between Biden and Trump are also very NIMBY. So if someone from the Biden administration were to come to their town and say “Joe did this!” that could actually dissuade some undecided voters.

Is it stupid? Absolutely!

Is Biden doing enough on housing? Definitely not!

But a big chunk of what he is doing is flying under the radar, partially because they’re not advertising it and partially because it takes longer than just one presidential term for these kinds of projects to make it to fruition. The first development in my city that took advantage of Biden administration policies finally broke ground in September. The first actual affordable unit to come out of it will be available in 2025.

Here’s a real-world use case that also won’t require insane GPU power.

Here’s a real-world use case where this difference is noticeable to the average person. We don’t need to render video games at 1000 Hz, but many things that can be rendered with comparatively low GPU power could be made a better experience with it. The real question is whether/when the technology becomes cheap enough to be practical to use in consumer goods.