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.

There’s a lot of these in the UK, I can think of a bunch just in my own town. We seem to really dislike corners.

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.

Modern websites are so complex and dynamic now it makes saving their state next to impossible.

For a while I’ve been longing for something similar, but for going forwards and backwards in a tab. There’s been too many times when I hit back to look at something I missed, only to find it was some dynamically loaded element that changes when the page is reopened.

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.

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.

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.

But the plastic dino is a Stegosaurus…

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.

My ancient washing machine already has a notification system, no smart features needed. When it’s making an awful noise it’s still washing, when I can hear myself think again it’s finished.

That last part, what a waste.

A local school near me replaced the computer suite with new machines and just left the old ones in a big cage outside to rust. Something about being “too expensive” to properly dispose or recycle.

Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.

This will be handy, so many sites add tracking tokens to URLs now. I see the YouTube tokens a lot on links shared on Lemmy.

There are multiple dedicated ESP32 flashing programs available for most operating systems, there should be no reason to use any web browser to flash a microcontroller.

The fact this even needs to be said says a lot about modern web browsers, and software development in general.

User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.

The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.

I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.

Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.

Long before smartphones, Casio used to make an IR blaster watch. Nobody ever suspected the person checking the time was messing with the TV.

Firefox become popular originally because it differentiated itself from other browsers (well, mainly one particular browser) by offering great useful features that the others didn’t have. Many of them were targeted at power users who went on to evangelise Firefox to others.

These days Mozilla only seems to get publicity and attention for gimmicks, or for removing features. The few useful ideas it has produced, like Containers, languish in obscurity. In the face of Google’s aggressive moves with Chrome, Firefox has withered has a result.

A change of direction is sorely needed.