I’ve also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour… Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.

Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so… Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.

I don’t print much so haven’t put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn’t gotten as much community support I guess

Brother, in particular, has always been fairly well supported via Linux fortunately. Especially great since their laser printers have been the best cost/value for home use for a long time.

Best be careful when changing sheets anyway. It’d be a shame if your mattress wasn’t properly killed before being shipped from Sqornshellous Zeta and it went on a flollop rampage after being exposed to too much sunlight.

Lots of mythology is compiled from many incomplete sources, and not all common accepted stories will completely mesh up with others. It’s also not uncommon for the myth of one village to be completely different from another regarding a particular entity, even if the towns are within a hour walk. What we have now is often just what survived.

Until recently, Wayland development was rather slow, especially in the areas where more specialized software run into issues that force them to stick with X11. Since Wayland does a lot less than X11 and is more componetized across multiple libraries designed to be swappable, some of these areas simply do not have solutions. Yet.

And, as always with FOSS, funding is a big part of the problem. The recent funding boosts the GNOME foundation received have also led to some increased funding for work on Wayland and friends. In particular, accessibility has been almost nonexistent on Wayland, so that also means that if an app wants to ensure certain levels of accessibility, they can’t switch to Wayland. GNOME’s Newton effort is still very alpha, but promising.

While big apps like blender and krita get good funding, they can’t necessarily solve the problem themselves by throwing money at it, either. But the more funding Wayland gets to fill in the feature-gaps and ease adoption, the sooner we’ll be able to move away from xwayland as a fallback.

Wayland and its whole implementation process certinally aren’t without fault. There’s a lot of really justified anger and frustration all around. Even so, staying on X11 isnt a solution.

While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.

If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.

Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.

Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.

Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.

I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.

But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.

Don’t feed the troll.

Especially not one that uses mental illness as an insult.

I tried to use Copilot but it just kept getting in the way. The advanced autofill was nice sometimes, but its not like i’m making a list of countries or some mock data that often…

As far as generated code… especially with html/css/js frontend code it consistently output extremely inaccessible code. Which is baffling considering how straightforward the MDN, web.dev, and WCAG docs are. (Then again, LLMs cant really understand when an inaccessable pattern is used to demonstrate an onclick instead of a semantic a or to explain aria-* attributes…)

It was so bad so often that I dont use it much for languages I’m unfamiliar with either. If it puts out garbage where i’m an expert, i dont want to be responsible for it when I have no knowledge.

I might consider trying a LLM thats much more tuned to a single languge or purpose. I don’t really see these generalized ones being popular long run, especially once the rose-tinted glasses come off.

Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”

Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.

The page title isn’t necessarily visible on the web page that sets the title.

Clicking is not always a simple task.

I shouldn’t have to leave my current page just to figure out what another tab is.

Again, just because you feel something is useless or easily avoided doesn’t mean that all internet users feel the same.

Tooltips are a standard accessibility feature. Just because you may not find them helpful doesn’t mean others do not benefit. The delay is to ensure they don’t get in the way unintentionally (but still allow usage) for those who do not need the accessibility benefit at all times.

+1

the UI could be improved (I always end up hovering for tooltips on controls) but it works really well.

I also like that tabs will stay in the stash by default on close, so its great for opening a bunch of reference sites really quickly without worrying about losing them

Closest thing to the old firefox experiment from a few years back.

If you know how to add a real “delete” entry that would be great.

At least in nautilus 42 the preferences let you enable a permanent delete option in the right click menu, if that’s what you are looking for.

I’ve been using florisboard for a few months now. You will have typos. Auto-correct for obvious things would be nice… once you install a dictionary its not awful, but the dictionary struggles with simple typos since it isnt usually taking rhe surrounding words into context of the misspelled word. I think the only dictionary i could get installed was from libreoffice? So could just be a lack of common mobile typos in the dataset.

Florisboard does support things i actually used from gboard like a function row up top with undo/redo, activating voice options, and a clipboard with history. It also supports things like apps that support the autofill hints similarly to how itd pop up on gboard. Of all the foss options, it was the only one that had these modern expectations, so i also think its the best bet for a gboard alternative people will actually switch to. Anysoft and openboard are way too minimal (not a bad thing, just not what an avid gboard user is looking for)

Swipe on floris is ok. It definitely triggers when you don’t want it on occasion. And the lack of autocorrect makes recovery miserable.

I tried openboard too, but i could not get openboard to a reasonable size on the screen. Pixel 7 pro is fairly big… and i use the smallest text scaling… but even the smallest layout options put the top row out of reach of my thumbs.

not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird

The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.

UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.

I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.

I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.

(My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)

I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.

I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.

Petco carries a “sofresh” litter that you can refill. Its unscented and does just fine keeping smells down. If i smell anything then i probably forgot to empty it.

Not particularly low dust but also not any worse than purina or others i’ve used. And its cheap due to refilling. I have a few petcos that i pass weekly regardless so its pretty convenient for me, at least.

If you are feeling like social media may be a negative factor in your life at the moment, then take a break. Intentionally stepping away for a week or more helps me from time to time. There is also nothing wrong eith deciding to skip lemmy/kbin/etc for now and only using a server/platform that you find most helpful. Some people hate mastodon but love firefish. Theyre both pretty much fully federated eith each other and offer microblogging, but the experience is different. Kbin and Lemmy have some key differences, too, which can chsnge how you experience the fedi.

I think, especially with lemmy and mastodon, that the time i spend is positive. I avoid the busy generic communities and spaces and focus on ones specific to interests. But sometimes fedi drama or a bad actor that moderation was slow to handle can make for a bad time. Or even just bad news in the wider world can make the fedi less of an escape.

With mastodon, i picked a server with a heavy presence of people in my career space and social similarities, but also with a decent amount of diversity, and that has meant that the moderation and especially the local feed are more likely to be neutral or positive than negative. Honestly, time spent on mastodon, for me, tends to be almost exclusively uplifting and informative because of that server choice. I value several mutual connections highly. That’s not to say there isn’t negativity or that I am in a box… thats why diversity was important to me. I rarely found twitter to be uplifting and it was only sometimes informative, and i never had mutuals on twitter that were this active and made social media worth it to me.

If you are seeing a lot of stuff you’d rather not, changing up your server could help. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts on different servers, or even following the same people from different accounts. There’s nothing wrong with being on a server that is more aggressively moderated if that gives you a better experience for YOU. You could have an account for casual use which is intentionally less dense on content to avoid doom scrolling, for instance. Federation means that you can use these platforms as isolated or loose forums in addition to or instead of being connected to the wider federverse.

I mostly used reddit for a small handful of communities. It would not have mattered to me if those communities were on reddit or on forum software. i did most of my browsing from mobile, and i almost never used the website unless i was using it as a search engine. That definitely led me to use reddit far less than if it was an ever present tab on my computer.