I don’t think it is reasonable to expect every individual to become a privacy / legal expert. I think people should have reasonable protections and assurances given to them without needing to study the details of everything they do on a case-by-case basis.

We have laws about what food can and cannot be sold - so that individuals don’t have to personally test and monitor every product for safety. Privacy & data could be done like that too.

It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.

When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.

gTerry Pratchett, I think.

I find this list weird. I guess I’m the kind of person you’re complaining about!

I like having GUI available for standard stuff (eg. dconf editor is great for various desktop settings). And I like file extensions in many cases - eg. I like to be able to tell the difference between a .png and .jpeg just by reading the file name. … And Linux often really does give better performance on older machines compared to Windows.

… So I suppose in your eyes I’m basically an old Windows admin brining bad habits to Linux. I’m just not seeing the downside of these ‘bad habits’.

Well you’re in luck - because Linux has reached the point where you don’t need the terminal for any kind of standard activity. You can easily install and uninstall stuff, and change various desktop UI stuff, and run all sorts of apps - all without ever touching the terminal.

The Orange Box 2; featuring Half Life 3, Team Fortress 3, and Portal 3.

I watched:

• The Wild Robot. I was hoping for something along the lines of Wall-E, and was disappointed. The Wild Robot doesn’t have that kind of broad appeal. It’s aimed at children only, and it’s pretty shallow.
• Heretic. Very good mood building and pacing. Good acting. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t quite feel like the last parts held together well. Pretty good movie though.
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. A bit of light-weight fun. This kind of movie doesn’t demand the kind of precision that Heretic needs - which is good, because certainly don’t have it! But I think it did a decent job of being what it was trying to be; a good sequel to the first movie. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would based on what I’d read.

I’ve got a couple games with stats like that; and I do play them a lot… but I think a big slice of the time is that I often leave the game open basically all day while dipping in and out to do other things.

The play time is ticking up, but I’m having lunch, or doing laundry, or clearing the house or whatever; and I come back to the game when I’m done.

• Mozilla is sliding down a slippery slope to enshitification; but they’re still near the top of that slide. The bad stuff hasn’t actually come yet. So Firefox is still top-tier in the short term.
• In the medium term, we can look towards a fork such as Librewolf or Waterfox.
• And in the long term, we’ll probably turn to a new project using Ladybird or Servo.

/r/degoogle is total bullshit. That sub routinely and consistently shits on any non-google suggestion, for all sorts of bogus reasons. It’s like the sub exists to trick people into thinking google is impossible to avoid, rather than just supporting steps away from google.

I found this site useful. The list of alternatives is very large.

From my looking around at other info and advice, I’d say that Posteo is the best one if you don’t have custom domains; and that mailbox.org or possibly Tuta mail is best if do need a custom domain. Tuta is probably best if you need it to be free.

Another solid option not on that list is fastmail.fm (which is Australian).

OpenTTD is a good game.

I reckon Lemmy is actually pretty good. I wouldn’t know if the mobile apps are good, because I don’t use those - but for me the core functionality of Lemmy on my computer is smooth and functional. I don’t see any obvious low-hanging-fruit.

Yep. GOG is good. I’ve been getting a bit more into itch.io as well though. itch is packed with small simple experimental indie stuff. I’ve got no interest in most of it; but there’s a surprising amount of good stuff there too. (At least, it was surprising to me when I started visiting it more frequently.)

I guess if you already own a Kindle then you might be interested in jailbreaking it. But for someone choosing an ereader it seems that Kobo is just a better choice. Isn’t it? Like, why pay to put yourself in a jailed system in the first place?

For what it’s worth, I was using linux for a full 2 years before I worked out whether or not I had wayland. – Because it just doesn’t matter for normal everyday use. And I’ve never even heard of ‘gamescope’.

The technobabble that you’re concerned about is only relevant to people who are interested in looking into the details of how things work. Its a bit like talking about the Windows registry, or the many settings you can change with ‘group policy’, or NTFS, or comparing versions directX. For most people, that stuff just doesn’t matter - even if it is a core part of how the system works.

Fair enough. Thanks for the info.

The winapps link in my post says it is a hard-fork of the one you linked to (and my one has updates as recent as yesterday). So it isn’t abandoned.

Is there a reason why you’ve suggested qeumu in particular for the VM? (winapps suggests two different VM options)

I’ve never heard of OnlyOffice before. The wikipedia page seems to imply that they are web-apps; and the OnlyOffice website talks about pricing for businesses and personal severs or something, listing team collaboration features. So I’m not yet entirely sure exactly what OnlyOffice is - but I suspect it isn’t really what I’m looking for.

Maybe so, but then there’s still Excel and OneNote.

Regarding OneNote in particular, I’m not using that for any collaborative work; but I do have extensive notes and useful past work there. I reckon OneNote is pretty good - but I regret using it now because of the lock-in effect. And there doesn’t seem to be any Linux analogue at all. (What I need is xournal++ integrated into Joplin. I sometimes fantasize about trying to hack that together myself; but that’s just a dream really.)