Dave

I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

For some reason, Mint doesn’t provide access to the power profiles out of the box… no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called “Power Profiles” and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

I’m starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today’s society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else’s. That kind of colours my judgement.

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

That and the woke mind virus.

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we’ll never know…

I had a similar need, and it prevented me from moving to FireFox for a long while. Luckily, I did manage to get fx_cast to work, and it’s been flawless ever since. In fact, I’d say it work more reliably than Chrome’s casting!

I use it for work. Other than having to think for a second to find weirdly hidden menu items, it’s fine. At least for my purposes, as a .NET dev. One thing I love about it is Windows Sandbox… really wish Linux would could up something similar.

Yeah, it’s weird. I’d been trying it on and off since 1997, and always bounced off because of some annoyance or other. Now… nothing. It’s very low friction.

It’s interesting how far Linux desktop has progressed recently… I don’t hate Windows, in fact I think it’s a great OS for most purposes. But I happened to try Linux Mint a few years ago in a fit of pique about being excluded from the Win11 upgrade for spurious reasons… and it just kind of stuck.

Two years later and I am full on Linux now. Don’t even have a Windows partition (though I do keep a VM). And I’m about to buy a new laptop that I intend to buy without an OS, it will never be touched by Windows, there’s just no need.

For my purposes, Linux does everything now. OS, software, the games I want to play… I never even think about it. Also, everywhere I look, I see Linux - my Steamdeck, my MiSTer, my Pis, my Miyoo Mini. It’s everywhere…

Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we’d be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age…

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

I mean, it’s worth a try… what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter’s fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?

It’s probably improved a lot since the early days. I remember it being significantly worse than the Google Music it was replacing.

They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.

That’s cool. I’m not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don’t need.

I really wish they’d drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.

On mobile, I’m using the Voyager app, which lemmy.world has installed as an alternative front end. Seems to work great.

On desktop, I’m using the amazing Alexandrite UI (https://alexandrite.app/) which solves all of my interface annoyances with the regular Lemmy UI (infinite scroll, opening posts without losing place in the feed, easily accessible communities list).

I love how flexible Lemmy is proving with its UI options… there really does seem to be something for everyone!

Haven’t used Bitwarden, but I’ve heard good things about it.

Until recently I was using Google Password manager and a half-hearted attempt a “system” for unique passwords. Luckily, I wised up and decided to raise my game… after a bit of research, I went with 1Password, and I’ve been very happy with it.

The integrations are okay, though not perfect. But the thing that has been most useful for me is the Watchtower stuff that basically gamified my security and forced me to change repeated or insecure passwords. I feel in much better shape now, and feel very confident in 1Password’s encryption model. So, for me at least, it has been worth the money.