Konsole has been so good for me. The only reason I've ever had to look into other terminal emulators has been to satisfy my curiosity.
The only thing I feel it's missing is hardware acceleration. That's not really significant for most workloads, though. But if you frequently do things that would benefit from being hardware accelerated, then you might want to look for another terminal emulator, either instead of Konsole, or just to complement it.
Indeed, but Helium is the new kid on the block. What might surprise you more is how many people won't have any idea what "a Firefox" is.
Calling it a "major" browser in the first place is pretty disingenuous by this article, when the popular usage metrics clearly show it to be a niche, if not obscure, choice of browser. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude more users than Firefox.
But things get truly silly when other niche/browsers are ignored in that same breath. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude larger userbase than Brave, too, but like with Firefox, it's still less than two orders of magnitudes of difference. And while Firefox has a few times more users than Brave, there's nowhere near an order of magnitude's worth of difference either. Meaning, while they are not equivalent in size, they are certainly comparable.
If Firefox is a "major" browser, then Brave would have to at the very least be considered a "big" player, too. And we all know it ain't a big player - not by a long shot.
You think that's a safety boot you've got there? It's anything but! It is clearly the bottommost part of a certain powered hazmat suit - why, it's a Hazard Boot! You'll need to ask one of the egg heads whether Secure Boot is a part of its boot sequence, though.
Poor Gordon Freeman, running around out there somewhere, with just one Hazard Boot. I guess you'll find that his other leg is running with Insecure Foot, then.
I like Ubuntu as little as the next guy, truly, but there are so many legitimate issues with Ubuntu/Canonical that we don't need to make up fake stuff on top. Both Mint and Ubuntu are completely open source, and in fact, Mint couldn't exist if Ubuntu was proprietary, seeing as how Mint is a derivative offshoot from an Ubuntu base.
I really like and appreciate this list. Thank you. I need to try out and experiment with number 1, 6 and 10, for sure. I can absolutely see how they could work!
No, it's comparing apples to rotten apples. It is the same thing, it is using excessive personal wealth to influence politics, but obviously one of the two is much more disgusting, and even damaging to your health, than the other.
Coming from XP, 7 felt like an upgrade, but I wouldn't say I was enamoured. Peak Windows for me was 2000, and while it probably lacks more useful modern features than I recall, I definitely still think it's the best looking, and the visually most well put together version of Windows there has ever been.
I love Linux, and I love how it has managed to bring back, or even surpass, the enjoyment and the sense of wonder and possibilities, that I used to feel in regards to computer use, back then. And I love how it enables me to install, create and customise any graphical elements of the desktop environment to my liking. One of the first things I managed to do, after switching to Linux, was, in fact, to convert my desktop into a very convincing Windows 2000 look-alike - just looking at the desktop, I doubt many people would have been able to tell that it wasn't actually the real McCoy. Nowadays, though, I wouldn't want my desktop to look like Windows of any variety. I use a few different styles, depending on mood, that are all either replicas of other, real desktop environments from the 90's, or they're imaginary "fantasy desktops" from the 90's of an alternate reality. I love that can just do that, not just because I love that particular aesthetic, but also because it is SO much more usable for me. The current trends in visual design, aren't just off putting to me, it's difficult and straining to parse too, what with the contrasts that are all out of whack, and lines and outlines all but seemingly banned, and with all the drop shadows and the transparency effects, and things fading and sliding around everywhere all the time, it's just so much visual noise, and it makes my head hurt. The late 90's is when GUIs and the graphical part of UX were at their peak, in terms of usability and readability, if you ask me. It's sad to me that almost every type of design since has seemingly been a direct or indirect rejection of that period. I wonder how much better GUIs could be, if they had stuck with all the things that worked well from back then, and had then continued to build off of that.
Sorry I think I went off on a tangent there.
As for 7 being the peak in terms of usability, what with some of the features it had over earlier versions, you may be right. I think 7 was the first version that had indexed searches, or at least had them enabled by default, and I remember how good that felt, experiencing it for the first time. But wasn't 10, on release, pretty equivalent to 7, really? IIRC, much of its dark patterns, ads, spyware and enshittification was only added gradually over its lifetime, wasn't it? Going by memory, I think I even appreciated the minor facelift it got, as it seemed essentially like the same thing, but with the Vista-esque/Aero-style glassy, glossy, noisy stuff gone or heavily muted and toned down, which made it much less distracting.
Are you also tired of being told that you are the one person responsible for choosing to live in a location that necessitates driving a car, or do you reckon it might be good to be told that a bit more, then?
I'm asking first, because I wouldn't want to tire you any more, just because the world hastily on its way to hell in a hand basket, what with climate change, and all the disastrous knock-on effects that follow from it.
Security questions are an idiotic type of "security", so of course I never enable them if they're optional, which they almost always are. As I said, I can count on half a hand how often I've used them in recent years.
Occasionally, though, they can be the least bad two-factor option available on a service that either requires 2FA or which makes itself, indeed, a hassle to use when you don't have any 2FA enabled, such as by throwing captchas at you up the wazoo. If such a service only offers 2FA by email, text message or security questions, then hell yeah, I'll take the latter option any day of the week. Needing an emailed link or code to log in, now that's a hassle. Same deal with text messages, but with the additional benefit of them being insecure as hell. You know what's not a hassle, though? Having one extra field auto-filled by your password manager. That's the hassle-free option.
As for taking things seriously or not - are you really trying to tell me that you don't have anything that's important enough to care about keeping secure? And if not, why would you not care about keeping anything that's important secure? Especially when it's so easy, and indeed, hassle-free, to have that security fully automated and handled by your password manager. If your gut reaction to security is that it's a hassle, then I'm sorry to say that you most likely have both poor security, and unnecessarily difficult or annoying-to-use security, too. Do you subject yourself to the mental load of having to remember all of your hundreds of passwords in your head? Talk about a hassle. Or do you just use the same password for everything? Now that would be a hassle, to have not just one random account somewhere compromised, but to have all of your accounts, everywhere at once, compromised.
You had to share your password over the phone? That's asinine. And you say it was your bank, and a major one, to boot? Wow. If that's their approach to security, I'd tell them they can just look up my password in their database, which I'd assume to be in plaintext too (and to actually just be a really big Excel sheet).
Anyway, regardless, you need some passphrases in your life! So much easier to deal with, if you ever have to share it out loud, and more importantly, a whole lot easier for you to parse and manually type, on the occasions where it can't be auto-filled. As I said before, Correct Horse Battery Staple! :)
I wonder if this will be just one in a wave of derivative distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian? I think doing so has been in the cards as a distinct future possibility for many of them, most overtly so with Mint's LMDE variant - even if it's ostensibly just an alternative, I think it's clear to everyone that it's always been about making sure they have a viable, working alternative, for the day when an Ubuntu base is no longer tenable.
Is anyone aware of whether there have been other distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian lately?
That strategy makes a lot of sense from Taiwan's perspective. One of their best bets at preventing or stopping an invasion from the mainland, is if they can ensure that they are completely indispensable to western nations, in particular the US.
Yes, thank you. "Prohibit lobbyism" is such a dumb, populist hot take, and actually going through with it would effectively be the end of democracy.
Instead, let's talk about how we can make lobbyism more equitable and fair, and how we can prevent corruption. But those are complex issues, that require genuine, deliberative debate, in order to find real and better solutions.
As long as you can choose the answer, you can also choose what the question really is. You can just decide that questions about your mum's maiden name are actually asking you about the last name of the doctor that delivered your first born.
Or, better yet don't tie security to personal or externally verifiable information about yourself. In the one or two cases, in recent years, where I've had to fill out such (in)security questions, I've just treated them as additional password fields, where I just create additional fields for them in my password manager, and generate long, random responses as their correct answers. Why yes, my mother's maiden name is Correct7Horse@Battery!Staple, why do you ask?
Look, if you don't like the meatwad, there are plenty other wads available!
Konsole has been so good for me. The only reason I've ever had to look into other terminal emulators has been to satisfy my curiosity.
The only thing I feel it's missing is hardware acceleration. That's not really significant for most workloads, though. But if you frequently do things that would benefit from being hardware accelerated, then you might want to look for another terminal emulator, either instead of Konsole, or just to complement it.
Smaller scale sounds like a pro to me, rather than a con.
I just want a picture of a gawd dang hot dog!
Indeed, but Helium is the new kid on the block. What might surprise you more is how many people won't have any idea what "a Firefox" is.
Calling it a "major" browser in the first place is pretty disingenuous by this article, when the popular usage metrics clearly show it to be a niche, if not obscure, choice of browser. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude more users than Firefox.
But things get truly silly when other niche/browsers are ignored in that same breath. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude larger userbase than Brave, too, but like with Firefox, it's still less than two orders of magnitudes of difference. And while Firefox has a few times more users than Brave, there's nowhere near an order of magnitude's worth of difference either. Meaning, while they are not equivalent in size, they are certainly comparable.
If Firefox is a "major" browser, then Brave would have to at the very least be considered a "big" player, too. And we all know it ain't a big player - not by a long shot.
You think that's a safety boot you've got there? It's anything but! It is clearly the bottommost part of a certain powered hazmat suit - why, it's a Hazard Boot! You'll need to ask one of the egg heads whether Secure Boot is a part of its boot sequence, though.
Poor Gordon Freeman, running around out there somewhere, with just one Hazard Boot. I guess you'll find that his other leg is running with Insecure Foot, then.
Would you say... you did nazi that coming? I'm sorry, I'll see myself out.
I like Ubuntu as little as the next guy, truly, but there are so many legitimate issues with Ubuntu/Canonical that we don't need to make up fake stuff on top. Both Mint and Ubuntu are completely open source, and in fact, Mint couldn't exist if Ubuntu was proprietary, seeing as how Mint is a derivative offshoot from an Ubuntu base.
I really like and appreciate this list. Thank you. I need to try out and experiment with number 1, 6 and 10, for sure. I can absolutely see how they could work!
No, it's comparing apples to rotten apples. It is the same thing, it is using excessive personal wealth to influence politics, but obviously one of the two is much more disgusting, and even damaging to your health, than the other.
You captured that landscape perfectly!
Coming from XP, 7 felt like an upgrade, but I wouldn't say I was enamoured. Peak Windows for me was 2000, and while it probably lacks more useful modern features than I recall, I definitely still think it's the best looking, and the visually most well put together version of Windows there has ever been.
I love Linux, and I love how it has managed to bring back, or even surpass, the enjoyment and the sense of wonder and possibilities, that I used to feel in regards to computer use, back then. And I love how it enables me to install, create and customise any graphical elements of the desktop environment to my liking. One of the first things I managed to do, after switching to Linux, was, in fact, to convert my desktop into a very convincing Windows 2000 look-alike - just looking at the desktop, I doubt many people would have been able to tell that it wasn't actually the real McCoy. Nowadays, though, I wouldn't want my desktop to look like Windows of any variety. I use a few different styles, depending on mood, that are all either replicas of other, real desktop environments from the 90's, or they're imaginary "fantasy desktops" from the 90's of an alternate reality. I love that can just do that, not just because I love that particular aesthetic, but also because it is SO much more usable for me. The current trends in visual design, aren't just off putting to me, it's difficult and straining to parse too, what with the contrasts that are all out of whack, and lines and outlines all but seemingly banned, and with all the drop shadows and the transparency effects, and things fading and sliding around everywhere all the time, it's just so much visual noise, and it makes my head hurt. The late 90's is when GUIs and the graphical part of UX were at their peak, in terms of usability and readability, if you ask me. It's sad to me that almost every type of design since has seemingly been a direct or indirect rejection of that period. I wonder how much better GUIs could be, if they had stuck with all the things that worked well from back then, and had then continued to build off of that.
Sorry I think I went off on a tangent there.
As for 7 being the peak in terms of usability, what with some of the features it had over earlier versions, you may be right. I think 7 was the first version that had indexed searches, or at least had them enabled by default, and I remember how good that felt, experiencing it for the first time. But wasn't 10, on release, pretty equivalent to 7, really? IIRC, much of its dark patterns, ads, spyware and enshittification was only added gradually over its lifetime, wasn't it? Going by memory, I think I even appreciated the minor facelift it got, as it seemed essentially like the same thing, but with the Vista-esque/Aero-style glassy, glossy, noisy stuff gone or heavily muted and toned down, which made it much less distracting.
Is she related to Jacob Zuma, I wonder?
Are you also tired of being told that you are the one person responsible for choosing to live in a location that necessitates driving a car, or do you reckon it might be good to be told that a bit more, then?
I'm asking first, because I wouldn't want to tire you any more, just because the world hastily on its way to hell in a hand basket, what with climate change, and all the disastrous knock-on effects that follow from it.
I hope you have a pleasant commute.
A hassle, huh?
Security questions are an idiotic type of "security", so of course I never enable them if they're optional, which they almost always are. As I said, I can count on half a hand how often I've used them in recent years.
Occasionally, though, they can be the least bad two-factor option available on a service that either requires 2FA or which makes itself, indeed, a hassle to use when you don't have any 2FA enabled, such as by throwing captchas at you up the wazoo. If such a service only offers 2FA by email, text message or security questions, then hell yeah, I'll take the latter option any day of the week. Needing an emailed link or code to log in, now that's a hassle. Same deal with text messages, but with the additional benefit of them being insecure as hell. You know what's not a hassle, though? Having one extra field auto-filled by your password manager. That's the hassle-free option.
As for taking things seriously or not - are you really trying to tell me that you don't have anything that's important enough to care about keeping secure? And if not, why would you not care about keeping anything that's important secure? Especially when it's so easy, and indeed, hassle-free, to have that security fully automated and handled by your password manager. If your gut reaction to security is that it's a hassle, then I'm sorry to say that you most likely have both poor security, and unnecessarily difficult or annoying-to-use security, too. Do you subject yourself to the mental load of having to remember all of your hundreds of passwords in your head? Talk about a hassle. Or do you just use the same password for everything? Now that would be a hassle, to have not just one random account somewhere compromised, but to have all of your accounts, everywhere at once, compromised.
You had to share your password over the phone? That's asinine. And you say it was your bank, and a major one, to boot? Wow. If that's their approach to security, I'd tell them they can just look up my password in their database, which I'd assume to be in plaintext too (and to actually just be a really big Excel sheet).
Anyway, regardless, you need some passphrases in your life! So much easier to deal with, if you ever have to share it out loud, and more importantly, a whole lot easier for you to parse and manually type, on the occasions where it can't be auto-filled. As I said before, Correct Horse Battery Staple! :)
I wonder if this will be just one in a wave of derivative distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian? I think doing so has been in the cards as a distinct future possibility for many of them, most overtly so with Mint's LMDE variant - even if it's ostensibly just an alternative, I think it's clear to everyone that it's always been about making sure they have a viable, working alternative, for the day when an Ubuntu base is no longer tenable.
Is anyone aware of whether there have been other distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian lately?
That strategy makes a lot of sense from Taiwan's perspective. One of their best bets at preventing or stopping an invasion from the mainland, is if they can ensure that they are completely indispensable to western nations, in particular the US.
Yes, thank you. "Prohibit lobbyism" is such a dumb, populist hot take, and actually going through with it would effectively be the end of democracy.
Instead, let's talk about how we can make lobbyism more equitable and fair, and how we can prevent corruption. But those are complex issues, that require genuine, deliberative debate, in order to find real and better solutions.
As long as you can choose the answer, you can also choose what the question really is. You can just decide that questions about your mum's maiden name are actually asking you about the last name of the doctor that delivered your first born.
Or, better yet don't tie security to personal or externally verifiable information about yourself. In the one or two cases, in recent years, where I've had to fill out such (in)security questions, I've just treated them as additional password fields, where I just create additional fields for them in my password manager, and generate long, random responses as their correct answers. Why yes, my mother's maiden name is Correct7Horse@Battery!Staple, why do you ask?