Onihikage

The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

tl;dr

• Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
• Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
• If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
• Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!

If “nearly every app” that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we’ve moved the needle backwards.

You have to meet people where they’re at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn’t been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows except MusicBee RIP, but now I’m in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there’s a little less friction between me and better, freer software.

When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being “potentially unsafe.” This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.

Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to “no information except maybe dangerous” is beyond me.

Sidebery (FOSS, MIT license) has several features that could be used to help you merge thousands of tabs into one window without choking out your memory usage, and generally makes it really easy to organize a massive amount of tabs. It would take several steps. First, you’d right-click the panel (the top-level organizational unit in Sidebery, above the tabs) on each window and select Save to bookmarks (example folder structure: selecting Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/ for a panel named panel1 would save the tabs under Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/panel1; click a folder twice in the selection dialog to expand it). Then you’d close that window and repeat with each window, being careful with the panel names so as not to overwrite any other window’s tabs. Once you’re down to one window, create an empty panel, right-click it, and select Restore from bookmarks. From this dialog, selecting the top-level folder that all the other bookmarked panels reside in (Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/ in this example) will import every tab from every window that was bookmarked, grouped by the window name.

When Sidebery imports a panel from bookmarks, the tabs are imported in an unloaded state, so they have basically no effect on memory until you actually click into them and load them. I can restore about 50 tabs per second from bookmarks without my system even slowing down, taking me from 0 to 500 tabs in about 10 seconds. It’s not exactly a one-click option, but I wager it will be significantly faster and less prone to completely breaking than your current workflow, and a little easier to back up (even if window/session states get wonky, bookmarks sync pretty much instantly).

Once your tabs are all in the same window, you can load tabs you want loaded by selecting a bunch (ctrl-click, shift-click, etc., just like in file explorer) and refreshing them, presumably avoiding YouTube tabs (should probably download those with YT-DLP anyway if you want to keep them). Sidebery will actually limit how many tabs it reloads at once, so it’ll never choke out your system by trying to instantly load a thousand of them (unlike if you select “open all in tabs” in Firefox’s native bookmarks context menu… eurgh). Even if it isn’t faster (though I suspect it is) the browser is at least usable while that’s going on. I’m not sure how well this method preserves containers, mainly because I don’t use them, so if you do, keep an eye on that if you test it out. All I know for sure is Sidebery supports reopening a tab in a new/different container because that’s in the default context menu.

There’s more time savings than just window merging and tab loading, there’s the tree-style viewing, being able to collapse whole trees of tabs you aren’t actively paying attention to, seeing the full titles of 30-40 tabs at a time, no more sideways scrolling, a built in search bar to filter shown tabs by title, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and context menus… it’s actually incredible how much this addon can do, and not only does it have a lot of settings and customization that should let you tailor its behavior to exactly how you want it, you can even sync its actual settings through Firefox! (just make sure to set your device name) Only thing it can’t do is remove the tab strip to give you more vertical real estate, but Mozilla might be working on that.

I know what it’s like to be attached to a cumbersome workflow. I hope this can help streamline things for you a bit and make life with ~2,000 tabs just a little less troublesome.

Atomic means the core OS packages are in an immutable container such that none of its individual components can be updated separately; instead the entire container is replaced with a newer version when the system is updated. This makes it much less likely for something to break during normal use, and easier to rollback updates if something does happen to break. The ideal use case is a containerized environment where each app you use is installed in its own container, like Docker, or is otherwise self-contained such as flatpak installers, and doesn’t rely on any of the system’s packages.

I was in your shoes for ages, but HeliBoard has predictions and other languages out of the box. Voice transcription works if you have FUTO Voice Input. Gesture typing uses a swypelibs binary extracted from Gapps; you just have to download it manually since the app never requests network access (instructions are on the Github page). I started using it today and some of its features actually seem to work better for me than Gboard, like the swipe gestures on delete or space, and it has at least a few more features I’m pretty sure Gboard doesn’t. Give it a look at least.

Net Neutrality is about not policing content online. That’s kind of its whole thing:

These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want online without your broadband provider making choices for you. They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content. These policies were court tested and approved. They were wildly popular. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of the public support the FCC’s net neutrality policies and opposed their repeal.

The closest we get to online censorship is obscenity laws, which one might think applies to porn, but obscenity is actually defined much more narrowly than just “content designed to arouse”. Obscenity is basically stuff that even Hugh Hefner would find offensive, stuff the average adult would find deeply repulsive and abhorrent (not just a little bit, the exact language is “patently offensive”). Adult content in general (obscenity & indecency) is banned from broadcast media during daytime hours to keep kids from seeing it; subscription-based services are exempt from such rules, which presumably means that the adults who pay for the subscription are supposed to be the ones preventing kids from using it to view adult material, if such is possible. I expect this is why anything which does manage to qualify as obscene is typically very hard to get to unless you really want to see it, so nobody who might report it ever actually finds it.

It’s worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not, so having it will be a net reduction in the avenues through which content may be censored or policed. Now if only they’d ban ISPs from selling your data to brokers…

VPN subscriptions about to explode.

Naturally, they’ll try to ban VPNs next.

Blog commenter Frank Wilhoit made a now somewhat famous assertion that the human default for nearly all of history has been conservatism, which he defined as follows:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

He then defined anti-conservatism as opposition to this way of thinking, so that would be to ensure the neutrality of the law and the equality of all peoples, races, and nationalities, which certainly sounds left-wing in our current culture. It would demand that a legal system which protects the powerful (in-groups) while punishing the marginalized (out-groups), or systematically burdens some groups more than others, be corrected or abolished.

If that’s the case, it’s possible there could be an issue with your profile or some kind of config change. Have you tested it with troubleshoot mode, or refreshed Firefox?

Yeah, we only have to look at the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon to see what they consider an antitrust problem:

[…] Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance.

That isn’t what we see from Valve - in fact it’s the opposite, as Valve’s strategy with Steam is simply to provide the best service and be the gold standard. The competition is almost always compared unfavorably to Steam, because gamers know how it feels to use a mature platform that isn’t trying to abuse them.

Valve has even taken some steps that wind up increasing competition in adjacent markets, such as operating systems (Proton has contributed significantly to Linux popularity) and even handheld game devices (Steam Deck set off an arms race when electronics manufacturers realized Nintendo is asleep at the wheel). Steam is as pro-consumer as it gets, with the exception of GOG and possibly itch.

It has better customization, better performance, and tab groups. I used TST for many years, switched to Sidebery only a few months ago. You can do stuff like set it to where tabs only activate on releasing the mouse, so you can rearrange unloaded tabs without activating them, or make it so middle clicking the tab close button unloads it instead. You can also rename tabs!

What you’re missing is that “vertical tabs” in this context isn’t talking about tabs literally turned on their side. We’re talking about tabs that are still horizontal, but instead of arranging the tabs along the top of the screen, and shrinking their width when there’s no room left, they’re given a fixed width and arranged in a vertical list on one side of the screen. The best implementations of this (such as Sidebery, which the previous screenshot is from) also allow tabs to be nested in a collapsible tree structure.

You sound like you’d really like the tree-style tabs offered by Sidebery on Firefox, or that’s built into Edge. Give it a try!

There are several addons that organize the tabs in the sidebar with a vertical, tree-style layout, with nested tabs that can be collapsed, just like a classic folder structure. This is what GreyBeard was referring to earlier in the thread when he said “The tabs are in a tree hierarchy”.

Tree Style Tab has been around since 2007; Sidebery is much newer, and IMO looks and performs better.

Type location into the “find in settings” search bar on the settings page. First result should be the location settings from the Privacy and Security section of the settings. Click the Settings button there and enable the checkbox at the bottom of that settings dialog to block all future requests asking to access your location. If you’re in a Private window, or have any privacy addons that clear cookies or other site information when a tab is closed, that would cause the original issue, as location permissions are not stored in your Firefox profile but in a cookie. The checkbox I described above should prevent the location prompt regardless of your other privacy measures.

When you’re keeping things in a tree structure for visual grouping and using containers to manage different logins, bookmarks will lose the tree structure, and you’ll have to specify which container to open it in. If your workflow involves a dozen tabs per context, locating the bookmarks and reopening them every time you switch contexts is a significant time and productivity loss.

Consider the classic Evidence Board (also known as string wall, crazy wall, conspiracy board, etc.). Saving everything to bookmarks is the equivalent of putting your board’s contents into a drawer, then pinning everything back up whenever you need to look at or update that particular conspiracy. It works, but it’s cumbersome, error-prone, and wastes a lot of time; you’d only do this if you only have one board but multiple things to inspect. Leaving tabs open and simply unloading the inactive tab trees is like having multiple separate boards where you just roll them into a closet when you aren’t using them.

Sidebery has tab groups and natively supports containers, which is perfect for your use-case. Might as well be TST 2.0.

The very first version of Tree Style Tabs was published in… hmm…

2007

The shameful part is the fact that Edge-Chromium added a native tree style tabs feature over three years ago, and has been eating Firefox’s lunch. Vivaldi has had native vertical tabs for eight years! Mozilla’s leadership is asleep at the wheel.

since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though

You might be misunderstanding what we mean by vertical tabs - we aren’t literally turning the tabs sideways and putting them on the side of the browser. We’re placing the tabs, still horizontal, into a stacked, scrollable list on the side of the browser. The superiority of this display method for tabs on widescreen displays is not subjective, and here’s why:

1. Tab titles are not typically very long, but there tend to be a lot of them. This data is far more readable and accessible as a bulleted list than a long paragraph.
2. Beyond about ten to fifteen tabs, tabs displayed at the top, side by side, must either shrink and obscure the title, go off-screen and be invisible without scrolling, or stack in multiple rows across the top. A vertical tab setup can easily display 30-40 of them in a vertical list, all with the maximum visible amount of their titles which helps distinguish them from one another.
3. Modern desktop screens are wider than they are high, but webpage content scrolls vertically, often leaving a lot of empty space on the sides.
4. Eyestrain is reduced and readability improves when the width of the reading area is reduced. This is why text on the web almost never fills the full width of a widescreen display, why most books are taller than they are wide, and why newsprint articles have many narrow columns rather than filling the entire page.
5. Given points 3 and 4, tabs at the top of the browser window on a widescreen display leave slightly less room for the actual page contents, while tabs displayed in a vertical list on one side only cut into the white space that exists on the sides of the content, while keeping the titles readable and causing less eyestrain.
6. With one change, a list can become an outline with sections and headers, following your own train of thought as you branch out and expand on each idea. In the same way, tabs displayed as a list can be very easily displayed with a tree structure, allowing tabs to be grouped, collapsed, and generally organized in ways that are impossible for traditional-style top-tabs.

This is why Tree Style Tabs exists, though I prefer Sidebery these days, being more customizable and performant than TST. There’s no way I can ever go back to top-tabs.

I’d really recommend something like Fedora before trying to touch Arch. Arch is pretty much only one step removed from Gentoo, the difference being you don’t compile everything from source, but installing it is still a process of building the entire OS from the ground up. There is no GUI installer, you’re going to be in a terminal window punching in dozens of commands while the installation guide is up on your phone or a nearby computer. There is no real standard pathway to “a setup that works fine for most people”. The wiki is very noncommittal in many areas to the point of inflicting decision paralysis and wasting a lot of your time if you try to approach it as a Linux newbie, as well as throwing so many links at you that it can be hard to tell which links mean “you need to click this and follow the instructions” or “here’s background information on this thing we just told you to do that you only need to know if you’re curious”.

When I tried to install Arch, following the directions as precisely as I could understand them, I couldn’t get networking to function when booted into the OS, it only worked when I was running the USB installation environment. The default pacstrap you’re given doesn’t include the same networking packages as the installation environment, so any newbie just trying to follow the guide is expected to chase down nests of links and hyper-detailed wiki pages to figure out which networking packages they need, try to get them installed, figure out how they’re supposed to be configured, and in my case, still fail to connect to the internet. Also not included by default are the packages that download manuals for all the commands you’ll be learning to use, or a text editor which you need to edit config files, and editing config files is the only way to configure most of the system when you’re in a terminal. I hit so many stumbling blocks and started over so many times it felt like a hazing. Gave up after a full day of trying to figure out the networking problem and having no new ideas the next day.

Fedora (KDE Plasma/Wayland) worked really well out of the box with a proper GUI installer, I just had to do little configuration stuff like adding additional flatpak sources or learning how the console package manager works (dnf), and also to ignore any instruction that ever tells you to run dnf autoremove. Simple stuff like installing a web browser and basic apps was about as quick to set up as on Windows. The most trouble I actually had was with Discord - it would be freshly installed, briefly work, then on the next launch say that an update is available and demand I manually update it, with options to download an Ubuntu/Debian installer or a tar.gz (aka “figure it out yourself”) which never seemed to take. I ended up looking for alternatives that weren’t just using it in my regular web browser and discovering WebCord, which I’ve been very pleased with from a privacy perspective.