I had a Jolla smart phone, it was pretty great but it also quickly became apparent that the company had no real intention to make Sailfish the Android-compatible, open and privacy-friendly OS I was hoping it’d be. Selling licenses to customers to put the OS on third party hardware really killed it for me.

Kinda surprised they are still around, but I guess knowing the right magical words to whisper to investors is a good enough business strategy. They’ve done it with blockchain, now it’s AI.

Oh, I see, thank you! Never noticed the cursor changing back when I put it over another window in XFCE, but I also never looked for that. I really just want that brief feedback, especially when I’m using a touchpad.

That only has nothing, static (icon), blinking (icon) or bouncing (icon) though. I find anything involving the icon jarring, especially because it keeps lagging behind the cursor. And yes, this is incredibly minor.

KDE nerds: Is there a way to get a normal app launch indicator (cursor with a loading icon/hourglass) instead of either nothing or the little hopping icons that don’t animate right?

Void and Alpine are great for their simplicity and speed, I’m using those two exclusively outside of work.

Weasyprint kinda is that, except that it’s meant to be rendered to PDF.

Not an answer, just a warning: This is par for the course when it comes to Rocketchat, every major version seems to come with another piece of nagware, another limit, another thing paywalled. I run a server for the non-profit I work for and they haven’t even replied to my mails about maybe offering a more affordable licensing tier before Enterprise.

We don’t need a lot, just push notifications (which they have to pay for, so absolutely fair to limit) and LDAP integration that isn’t intentionally gimped. A supporter tier with no real extra features (we don’t need their customer-facing-type features) and very limited tech support would be really nice, but I guess they don’t want our poor people money. Gotta try just really hard to squeeze something from that stone instead.

Example: First they removed automatic LDAP syncing, then they blocked people from still doing it with cron. You now have to enter your admin password every time to sync “for security reasons” unless you pay at least $10 per user and month or something ridiculous (for a non-profit) like that. Not that you’d know from their website, they’ve removed all pricing information from there.

They’ve also limited the amount of (free, third-party) add-ons you can install while also adding a new feature that lets users see and request add-ons from admins. So many dark patterns.

Rocketchat narrowly won out over Matrix when Covid started but it sure as hell wouldn’t now.

The big reason why I’m still on Xorg and will be for a while is XFCE. I’ve tried everything from KDE Neon to Sway but they are either missing features I want or were too buggy to bother. Should try Budgie again when 11 comes out though, that seems to be close to XFCE in terms of scope and is supposed to work well with Wayland by then.

every distro I install I am eventually greeted with something just completely breaking for no reason whatsoever

This happens on Windows too and the fixes you have to apply aren’t less esoteric.

For example: User complains that Spyder won’t start on her brand-new laptop. Installation seems perfectly fine, nothing wrong there, no corruption or obvious missing bits. Dig around in the Windows log files, find some fairly generic error. Do a bit of googling, eventually decide to just search Github for issues mentioning Spyder not loading. Turns out the laptop is just too new and the AMD graphics driver Windows installs on its own has issues with the IGPU. So replacing that with newer the version AMD distributes fixes it.

Or, with Windows 11, if you want the start menu on the left and the Explorer context menu usable: Sure, just open powershell and run these commands to create new, weird registry keys to force it, btw these are not supported by Microsoft, you’re on your own.

I’d rather choose the OS that doesn’t have the audacity to charge money and then blast me with ads in the start menu.

Can this be the new GNU/Linux copypasta?