quite excited for this. i had two pebbles back in the day (the original pebble, and the pebble time steel, which i still have in a drawer at home).
i've been using my pinetime as my only watch for several years now, and it does everything i need it to do. however, i will happily pick up a new pebble again if this happens. the battery life on each of mine was awesome, the buttons were handy for things like quick music playback without having to look at my watch, and it had a great little 'app store' with tons of cool watchfaces and stuff from the community. looking forward to this hopeful 'pebble resurgence'. :)
> an adapter where one end plugged into an audio output jack and the other end was an imitation cassette that went into the tape drive
When I was in my teens and early 20s, I used to have a 1997 ford ranger, and this was my setup in it. All I needed to carry was my phone or standalone mp3 player and plug it in, and set it to shuffle, and i was a happy camper. it was a nice little setup, and it was always fun when riding with others (playing the old game of "pass the aux cord")
Of course, now with this setup you'd have to carry a dongle around to achieve the same effect, since (most) new phones no longer have 3.5mm headphone jacks :(
> Of course, now with this setup you'd have to carry a dongle around to achieve the same effect, since (most) new phones no longer have 3.5mm headphone jacks :(
Using a phone would completely defeat the ability to control what's playing without looking. Use a standalone mp3 player. They still have audio jacks.
Haha. Can confirm. I am from Arkansas, and before they passed on, my grandparents usually kept a variety of soda in the house for us grandkids (they never drank it, they of course loved their coffee).
it didn't matter what kind of soda was actually in the fridge, every soda was a coke. my grandma would grab a dr. pepper or a pepsi and say "ya'll want a coke?"
That's why using immutable distros is awesome. Worst case scenario, you can boot the previous version.
I've been using Fedora Silverblue for a while and never got a borked upgrade. It's not without its own flaws, but if you can live with mostly flatpak apps, it's a pretty compelling package.
Funny you say this, my windows can't seem to recover from updating. Several times it has been stuck for more than one hour at which point I yank the power and try updating some other time. Even the most slower linux distros update in minutes and never failed me for more than a decade.
Something like gnome is so closed down that it couldn't be for everyone. I tried using a ton of plugins to make it workable but then things break with every update.
If Gnome doesn't work for everyone, what they had to do was make it work. There has to be a way. The vast majority of the market is using Windows and Mac, and somehow both have avoided the need for multiple separate DEs.
in 2019, my wife finally got fed up with windows 10. she used no software that was 'windows-only', so she asked me if i'd help her begin the move over to gnu/linux.
i made her live-drives of several different distributions, and showed her how to boot into them on her machine to play with the live environments. iirc, she messed around with ubuntu, solus, mint, and elementary.
she liked the fact that she had so much choice available to her. she eventually settled on mint cinnamon, as it has an environment she is familiar and comfortable with, and that was that. she's been running it ever since. and, keep in mind, my wife is someone who doesn't live and breathe computers like most of us here do.
i know there are the people out there who have disdain for the amount of choice we have in the linux desktop space ("fragmentation!"), but most people appreciate the amount of choice on offer.
It adds complexity, especially for new users and even more for corporations. There's maintenance burden as different DEs fall out of favor, things become incompatible, and you have to migrate. Even sticking to one Linux distro, the default DE can change across versions. If you want to troubleshoot online, you can't Google "how to do X in GNU/Linux," you have to specify the DE and version too. Vs with Mac or Windows it's quite clear what you're using and how you get help for it.
Most people don't even think that far though, they just want a name brand they can trust and understand. So the most popular desktop Linux is probably ChromeOS.
That's because GNU/Linux isn't an OS. The distributions are distinct OSes. They just have a lot in common.
> It adds complexity, especially for new users and even more for corporations. There's maintenance burden as different DEs fall out of favor, things become incompatible, and you have to migrate.
Corporations can easily mandate whatever distro and DE they please on their internal systems. Not an issue.
The maintenance burden is on the distros and they can choose which DEs they support. They don't have to offer them all. In fact some distros come with a single DE only.
I know the wishful thinking that Linux would be a single system that would make it big with consumers. But if that happens, people that love Linux now will absolutely hate it. It will be unrecognisable. All the power and control will be gone because consumers don't want that. They must want to pay someone and trust them.
Case in point: ChromeOS. It's exactly that: Linux for the masses. How many Linux fans actually use that because it's Linux?
Really? You don't mind Google's extensive datamining and lockdown of the OS?
I would never ever consider using that. I'm surprised also, in our company nobody uses chromeos. But we have thousands of linux laptops and hundreds of Macs.
I've considered a Chromebook at work where the real coding and builds are being done over SSH on a headless Linux machine anyway, but the fuss involved for just a basic shell and SSH were enough to turn me away. So I can't imagine using one for local development too, data mining aside. I know some people use it and it works with the right workarounds, but why bother.
Also idk why there's nothing as good as the Mac iTerm2 for Linux.
Um, you literally go to Settings -> About ChromeOS -> Developers, enable "Linux development environment" and after 5 minutes have access to fully featured Debian Linux.
The standalone (non-linux) ssh client is indeed not the best, it's okay.
i mentioned the two I thought people moving from windows would be most comfy with.
for them, taskbar on bottom + 'start' menu = "neat, i already know how to use this!"
personally, i use i3/sway tiling window managers, and also keep gnome around if i want a full desktop. personally, i love the amount of choice we have in the gnu/linux world. if something doesn't work for you, you can select from so many other options.
"but...but...fragmentation! those guys working on cinnamon/mate/etc should just join gnome or kde and make The One True Desktop!" eh. i don't buy this line of thinking.
There are plenty of informally agreed-upon defaults in the GNU/Linux world. For instance almost everyone uses Bash, Git is the dominant version control, and the default browser is usually Firefox-based. This doesn't mean alternatives shouldn't exist, but they aren't neck and neck. Somehow no DE has won yet, and that's a serious usability problem.
i'd say, in a way, we have 'informally' agreed upon a default desktop.
the flagship edition of ubuntu? GNOME.
the flagship edition of fedora? GNOME.
RHEL? GNOME.
installing debian with its defaults? GNOME.
while KDE ships on a few distros by default, and Mint ships with Cinnamon as its flagship, by-and-large, GNOME is what you're gonna get from your "major" distributions.
i haven't had a chance to have a play with the alpha yet, but there is a project that is working on making nix "easier" for beginners. its called snowflakeOS: https://snowflakeos.org/
There was a bunch of recent drama surrounding a woke takeover and/or fork of the Nix ecosystem. Browse /r/NixOS if you want details.
I haven't followed it closely and I don't want to misrepresent, but as I understand:
- They pushed the founder of the project out of the BDFL role he'd held for 21 years, and
- They started a new "governance" process that included evicting people who disagreed with their tack/tact. It was done in the name of "inclusivity," but it sounds like the bar for excluding people they disagreed with was very low.
The Snowflake guy (Jake Hamilton) is part of the takeover crew. He's got a fork in-waiting if the takeover of mainline Nix doesn't go the way they want:
The controversy started with questionable sponsorship decisions for NixCon, which brought the entire project leadership under scrutiny as it wasn't the first time this had happened.
This, along with some more long-term issues contributed to the creation of an open letter[^1] criticizing the BDFL of Nix. How valid you consider the criticisms is not for me to decide, but I don't think dismissively reducing the issue to a "woke takeover" is helpful.
i 'de-googled' my life quite a bit a long time ago - switched to an android distribution with no G services (lineageOS), moved from gmail to tuta, switched search engines, and like mentioned here, the one i can't fully leave is youtube, for the moment.
i like odysee a lot as a platform, but it can't fully replace YT just yet for me, as a good deal of the channels i watch are still YT-only. i'd say my video-watching time is split maybe 80% yt, and 20% odysee at this point.
