The current gerrymandered system does not reflect the will of the people.

No, I left it a couple of times before. But every time I left Reddit for one of the new sites, I came back, because it only took a couple of months for those sites to be taken over by Christian conspiracy theorists. I ended up back on Reddit because it was the least bad discussion site, but there were still huge moderation problems and a lot of bots/shilling.

At one point, I posted something positive about a large country with an enormous population which is adjacent to my home country, and how they pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and suddenly found that everything I posted anywhere was automatically downvoted.

There was a lot of paranoia in some specific subs because it seemed the articles posted were curated by people with an agenda, who may not have even shared our heritage. So it was no longer a safe space for us to discuss our community’s issues. I got downvoted for bringing up inconvenient facts, like how bombs dropped by the US still kill and maim people in Laos every year.

In the end, outside of some NBA, Star Trek (again, dancing around/ignoring certain issues i.e. Why didn’t Star Trek fans like Avery Brooks or what he said with Far Beyond the Stars?), and tech discussion, Reddit was circling the drain.

I found more community, and culture sharing, on TikTok of all places. The community I found there changed my world view.

That’s the POS that they released back in 2015, premium glass with ridged metal sides, and they only supported it for about four months with software updates before declaring it obsolete because of the chipset.

Yeah, my wife had one of those. Google Keep would crash and it was generally unusable. I sold and moved to iPhones after that experience for the next 5 years.

Nice video.

I don’t get how the installer was a show stopper, or how it looks dated. It’s clean and simple and uses Clearlooks.

It’s not as customizable as YaST, but gives you a bit more flexibility than the Pop!_OS installer. A nice middle ground.

Also, there’s been the unofficial nonfree-firmware installer since years now.

The beauty is, once you install it, you can go years before you need to install clean again.

Flatpak will close the gap for current user-facing applications. It’s a nice option to have.

ThinkPad exists, and has exactly one post.

Yes. /r/DaystromInstitute was a level of Star Trek research and discussion that was well thought out, researched, and went beyond the usual “Who would win Borg or Dominion?” that most Star Trek forums fall into.

I lol’ed.

Yeah, this week OnePlus Nord N30 5g just released with an SD card slot and 3.5mm jack.

$300 with free wireless buds.

Yes, the LCD on the MacBook is where I learned of pwm dimming to start with. It’s a solved issue for most LCD manufacturers.

Most OLED panels in the consumer market pulse at 240Hz. I can’t see the flicker, but text is wobbly on the screen for me and I get headaches after a bit. Turn the brightness to 100 … no more wobble, no more headache, and no more pwm.

I already had Debian on everthing else, and once they committed to KDE 5.27.5 for bookworm, I decided to pivot there.

Tumbleweed is the best at what it does, but it’s not for me right now

Debian on all my machines because I no longer use openSUSE.

It went FreeBSD from 1998 until 2008; Fedora until 2011; OpenBSD until 2022; openSUSE Tumbleweed and now Debian.

EDIT: At some point, during my senior year of college, I used Arch linux for a semester. It still had a curses-based installer and I ran KDEmod on it with oss4 instead of PulseAudio or alsa. It was okay.

It’s the pwm dimming that causes eyestrain. Not everyone, but a sizeable portion of the population.

I found out about it from my doctor back in 2011 when my 11" MacBook Air was causing headaches. The screen blinks on and off at 240Hz which is enough for your eyes to recognize and try and adjust; but it’s not enough for your brain to register what you are seeing.

I used a W530 later on and it was very bad, headaches at anything other than 100% brightness.

Lenovo fixed the issue in 2016 on most of their laptops, and the Retina MacBooks have never had pwm dimming.

Notebookcheck.net tests all their reviews for pwm dimming.

• Headlights on new cars are too bright and blind other drivers.
• OLED screens cause eyestrain.
• The internet was better when there was a barrier to entry.
• Give me a 7-row keyboard on my laptop. The T61 was perfect.

I was hit once as a cyclist.

As a pedestrian, never hit but a few close encounters.

Its also about not using slave labor for the manufacture of your next phone, and about having an open unlocked bootloader with multiple OS options when standard support is no longer possible.

If its entirely about sustainability, we would keep the same phone we already have until it dies. Fairphone is good at this, probably the best in the Android market, although the iPhone is better because they support their phones a little bit longer if you include security backports.

Regarding the LCD; there are real problems with people having eyestrain from using OLED phones; it’s why /r/pwm_sensitive exists. So for a lot of people, myself included, Fairphone 4 hit all the right spots except the camera could use improvement.

I paid something like $700 for my phone. If I keep it for two years from purchase, that’s less than a dollar a day for my pocket tricorder and it doesn’t cause eyestrain for me.

Flatpak is kind of bringing the BSD mindset of base system versus end-user apps to Linux.

Back in the glory days of FreeBSD, one would have system libraries managed by the FreeBSD team, and then whatever libraries the ports system used in /usr/local/lib which were used for end-user applications. Everything not provided by FreeBSD came from ports and was installed in /usr/local (/usr/local/bin; /usr/local/etc; /usr/local/lib; etc) so you would have two versions of gcc, for example.

With Flatpak, you have your stable, or rolling base, whatever you are comfortable with. In my case, Debian. And it is fully separate from the end-user applications. This is something that I’ve really missed since coming to Linux from BSD. I can keep Firefox bleeding edge without having to worry that the package manager is also going to update the base system, giving me a broken next boot if I run rolling releases.

Conversely, I don’t have to wait for backports from my underfunded, understaffed distro’s security team, or ride Firefox ESR.

End-user applications are in containers. So what ffmpeg in the VLC flatpak has an exploit, VLC can only access your ~/Videos directory anyway. It’s not going to read your PKI certs or send your ssh keys off somewhere.

Use flatseal to manage permissions of each app.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.

FWIW, OpenBSD has done this for years with Chrome and Firefox, which only have ~/Downloads access.

Absolutely. Thanks for mentioning; I thought about editing the post to add it, but then didn’t.

Yeah, I saw some Voat-like posts here yesterday that were quickly removed.

It always starts with the fringe articles, then devolves into conspiracy theory. Good to see the moderation here is strong.

Yeah, I’m seeing that on Mastodon. I’ve been there for a couple of years.

It’s much more left leaning, a nicer community, and it looks like the servers are set up block Gab.

I never cared for Pop!_OS or system76 for that matter. Thought they were just doing to Ubuntu what Ubuntu did to Debian 20 years ago. A theme and some different default settings and getting credit for standing on the shoulders of giants, what’s the big deal?

But then my wife wasn’t feeling KDE, she hates Gnome … so I installed Pop!_OS on it and she gets it. Just the little tweaks they did made all the difference, and she is good to go. Plug in a printer, it downloads the driver and works. They made short tutorial videos for everything, less than 2 minutes; she watched them and now she is a tiling pro with the keyboard shortcuts.

So in this very specific instance, the Pop!_OS polish, the refinements and the tutorial videos and even having a theme that wasn’t all dark mode (which hurts her eyes), was all the difference in the world. I’m pretty impressed and I don’t have to do perform system maintenance for her; its the closest to a macOS install that I’ve seen.

This is what Gnome should have been.