They won’t open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO

That’s an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:

https://github.com/popey/unsnap

Thanks for the list. It’d be interesting to see something like the Are We X Yet sites for Mozilla/Rust projects that tracks this sort of thing

You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it’s like tmux with nice defaults

There’s various well-known tracking parameters that can be stripped, like UTM parameters. Stripping all query parameters would break a lot of sites, like anything in the vein of http://example.com/site.php?id=123

I know it won’t happen, but it’d be nice if Linux switched to GPLv3. That would at least help somewhat here

VLC is the sort of software where if it can’t play it, I don’t know what else could. I guess I’d also try the ffmpeg command line tool to see if it can figure out what the video file even is, and maybe it could convert it to a regular format.

Also TBH such a video file would be interesting enough that you could probably post it here (if possible, or any metadata you can extract from it) and see if anyone knows how to play it.

Since Word documents are one of your bigger concerns, you can download LibreOffice on one of your current machines and try them out. That’s the same program you’d be using on Linux.

It’d have to be a pretty unusual video format to have issues. Similar to above, you can try VLC on Windows and see if there’s any issues.

Based on your description, I’d be surprised if you encountered any major issues. I’d recommend trying either Pop! OS if you’re OK with a slightly different UI from Windows, or Mint if you want something more comfortable. Note that you can create a LiveUSB stick of either of those, or any other distro. You can then boot your computer from it and take it for a spin to see if there’s any obvious issues.

Linus wrote git before anything like github existed, and the best way to do it was email. They just haven’t switched away from using email

Stable as in the UI doesn’t get changed often, or stable as in unlikely to crash?

Dunno what permissions issues you’re hitting, but I organize everything with beets on my desktop and then sync everything using syncthing to the main Music folder on my phone and it all works nicely. I use an old app that I think isn’t even available on the app store anymore named MortPlayer that uses the synced folder structure to organize things.

I don’t use m3u files, but I imagine you could just sync them to the main Music directory next to the music files and have it work out, I guess depending on which app you use

Can’t promise anything, but a few years has made a pretty huge difference here. If the game you want to play is on Steam and doesn’t have weird anticheat, it’ll likely just work. If it’s not on Steam, try Lutris.

If the game you want to play still doesn’t work, post here and say “LINUX BLOWS BECAUSE IT CAN’T PLAY THIS GAME” and then you’ll get a dozen different ways to make it run

Can you boot into an old generation and see if that fixes the issue? If it doesn’t maybe check if you’ve updated firmware recently

It’s rather refreshing to see a redesign that introduces a simplified interface but doesn’t forget about the power users. From a title like “A New Chapter”, I was expecting to see some Gnome-like “Here’s what we’re doing now and you’ll like it”

Have you used either of them before and have opinions on them vs HA?

For mobile with fastmail, I use fairemail. Works great with it, and provides a nice merged view with my non-fastmail work emails.

Snaps benefit Canonical. They’re trying to build their own walled garden, and anyone else benefiting is not a consideration.

Flatpaks are different, because they aren’t purpose-built to benefit a single company. I wouldn’t use them to install most things, but there’s a few places where there’s benefits for at least some people. It’s a lot easier to maintain large projects like Firefox on older distro releases for example. You get sandboxing, so that say a bug in Firefox won’t let malicious javascript take over your system. It lets vendors release closed source software that would never be included in your distro’s repos. These are all things that may not benefit you, but in theory they’ll benefit enough people that it’s worth it.

I’ve also moved onto NixOS so don’t use either one anyways. I think Nix or something like it is the future, even if you’re running a more traditional distro, though that might just be misplaced optimism, see the success of worse is better.

I found the solution on the archwiki!

Never used Arch before in my life, but the wiki is great. Rising tide lifts all boats and all that jazz

This site is specific to AWS, but you might find it helpful:

http://ec2instances.info

Looks like it got bought out by someone, so might be enshittified, but it’s worked nicely for me in the past.

Security is a gradient that depends on your threat model, etc, but unless you’re being targeted by a nation-state or something that should be plenty secure