Seems a hard sell to go subscription on such a niche platform. I wish anyone luck that could challenge the Apple/Android duopoly though.

As an aside, can we get back into desktop cubes again? With all the upheaval in Windows land it’s the sort of eye candy that can win over new Linux users.

Any distro should be fairly stable and supported on an older Thinkpad.

I’m currently using Debian stable on my X220 and it’s rock solid.

Using nano as a vim user is a lot less clunky than trying to use vim as a vim non-user though.

Or so I would imagine, all of the vim novices are still too busy trying to exit vim to share their experiences.

Compiz won over so many new users back then. Wobbly windows and desktop cubes may not have been super practical, but they sure looked impressive.

What is with Linux projects and confusingly pronounceable names? Even the name “Linux” itself has a fair bit of spoken variation.

Then there’s Ubuntu, and GNOME with the hard G to name a few.

The small phone debate is not just about the overall physical size, it’s also about how reachable UI elements are when using a phone with one hand.

For one handed operation, screen size does matter regardless of bezel size. The larger the screen becomes, the harder it is for the thumb to reach the top of the screen because the top gets ever further away from the thumb.

Yes, I had a few audiobooks on cassettes. In the 90s PG Tips (a brand of tea) had some sort of promotion that gave out free kids audiobook cassettes, I think we had the complete collection.

Language learning courses were popular on cassettes too.

Fish and chips, the UK’s national dish. Curry sauce or mushy peas optional. From a proper local chippy for the real experience.

There’s two main reasons to want a smaller phone. A smaller overall physical size so it fits better in a pocket, or a smaller screen so it’s more reachable when used with one hand.

I suppose the new flip foldable phones might satisfy the first but not the second.

It seems crazy when a list of the 12 best “small” phones have an average screen size above 6 inches.

The iPhone 13 mini has also been discontinued, and the reviewer discourages the iPhone SE 3, describing it the “smartphone equivalent of herpes”. So that removes 2 of the smallest of the “small” phones which makes the situation even worse.

Quake 2 also had a Linux port, as did Return to Castle Wolfenstein. iD Software was one of the few early supporters of Linux for commercial games.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein also had an official Linux port in 2002-ish.

You will struggle to find anything decent at that price new.

Plenty of good used options though, a used ThinkPad will have great Linux compatibility and be serviceable. They can be very cheap depending on how older hardware you can tolerate. There are other business grade laptops from Dell, HP etc that have good refurb deals too.

Digimon started as a Tamogotchi clone more than a Pokémon clone, the original Digimon toys were virtual pet devices.

Yeah, as someone who uses public transport having the noise nuisances get 600% louder really doesn’t sound too great.

If you familiar with Ubuntu and its derivatives, just use Ubuntu.

Ubuntu provides a server version called Ubuntu Server alongside the desktop versions if needed, and Ubuntu provides easy access to things like ZFS.

You can always switch in the future if you find you have server needs or preferences the Ubuntu doesn’t suit.

Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.

But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

I see a lot of people saying they have to use a GUI tool for partition management, and I’ve never understood why.

Text based tools like parted are fairly easy to use, at least compared to other terminal tools the same people are able to use for other tasks.

What is it about partitioning that needs a GUI when other tasks don’t? Is it the visual representation of the partition layout? A general fear of borking a disk?