To me, it’s just death by a thousand papercuts. It doesn’t have any unique selling points that I’m aware of, and it’s slightly worse than my preferred distro in every way that the two differ, at least as far as I can think of.

I know that QMMP has a built-in visualizer, and the webpage says that the visualizer is call projectM, which you can apparently also run standalone: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

Thanks. 🙂

Interesting, I always assumed they would be using a pretty optimal algorithm with their .tar.bz2 format, because they obviously benefit quite a bit from smaller downloads. Good to know that .tar.xz is actually better.

Yeah, particularly for downloading Firefox Nightly, these self-contained archives are extremely helpful.

I think, you’ve answered your own question? There’s a lot of different formats for Linux. Getting them all correct and working on the different distributions is significantly trickier than just bundling a self-contained archive.

Having said that, they do actually provide a DEB repo since a few months ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended

On distros like Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, you need to enable a separate repository, if you want icky software, like proprietary drivers or patented codecs. In particular, you can’t watch MP4 videos. So, PeerTube and YouTube work, but if a webpage is hosting its own videos, or you happen to acquire a video file in some other fashion, there’s a good chance that it’s an MP4 file and you can’t look at it.

I’m hoping that when these patents expire, that it’s possible to ship the MP4 codecs directly, and then at least for me, that would currently result in not needing to deal with these separate repos.

Hmm, sounds like it doesn’t repaint the browser contents then. Could be something to do with your graphics driver.
Could also be that a profile refresh happens to fix it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_5-refresh-firefox

I mean, as someone who hasn’t encountered these same issues as you, I found btrfs really useful for home use. The snapshotting functionality is what gives me a safe feeling that I’ll be able to boot my system. On ext4, any OS update could break your system and you’d have to resort to backups or a reinstall to fix it.

But yeah, it’s quite possible that my hard drives were never old/bad enough that I ran into major issues…

My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.

But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.

Apparently, less also has a feature built-in to filter out lines based on keywords:

https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Exclude_lines_in_less_or_journalctl.html#%3A~%3Atext=Once+your%2Cterm (skip the first paragraph, past those three links)

Well, just a monitoring stack, like for example Grafana, would probably be more suitable for this specific task (if we’re doing central hosting/collection).

Kind of my main recommendation is to use something with OpenTelemetry. It’s pretty much the standard protocol for transferring logs, traces and metrics, so if you set everything up with that, then you can swap out the visualization software with less pain.
Here’s a guide for Grafana + OpenTelemetry Collector: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/send-data/otel/

Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn’t package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.

I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices…

Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.

Three things I can imagine:

• Something in your hosting stack strips the URL parameters, like maybe your reverse proxy, if you use one. You might be able to see in the Whoogle or web server logs, which URLs actually reach it. Might need to set it to debug/trace logging.
• Maybe there’s a flag in the Whoogle configuration you need to enable to accept these preference URLs.
• It’s a bug in that Whoogle version.

Codeberg recently held a translation event where projects could sign up, if they wanted help. You can still look at their resources here, or I guess, you can just pick out a project and start translating over here: https://translate.codeberg.org/

Depending on your file manager, you may be able to hold Shift while triggering the delete to get a hard delete.

Shift+Del is pretty much standardized as the keyboard shortcut. And here on KDE, I can hold Shift while clicking the “Move to Trash” menu entry, too (well, it actually replaces the menu entry with one for permanent deletion, but that’s effectively the same).

I mean, when you hold down the Alt key, it’s convention that GUI toolkits underline a letter in the text of UI elements, and when you then press Alt + that letter, it’ll activate that UI element.
That way, you can navigate most apps in a keyboard-driven fashion, although it is certainly not the most comfortable to use…

You can probably just do sleep 5 && grim as the program to run.

It depends on your desktop environment or window manager, how you’d bind a command to a keybind.