rav3ndust

haha, that is certainly one way to achieve the goal. :)

i remember seeing this thread. will be cool for windows users to have a webkit option again (are there any webkit-based browsers there since safari quit being made for it?). i will certainly be interested in trying out the android version when it comes around and have been testing out the linux version since it dropped.

it's been in beta on linux since early this year

indeed! this is pretty much exactly how i feel about mine as well. i blog for myself, mostly. i enjoy the act of writing, just about whatever is on my mind at any point in time and inspires me to write about it. i know that i have some readers (like you, i've gotten very kind emails from people who have stopped by my site), and i am very thankful for those readers.

but even if i had zero readers, i would still enjoy the act of writing and putting it out there. i can go back to my blog and look through the years, and see how my outlook on things has changed, how i've grown over time. and the process of writing itself is just cathartic, at the same time.

and as you mentioned, it's fun! :)

if you're running ubuntu, and the app uses a systray icon, you just click on the systray icon. ubuntu has appindicators out of the box.

i saw this video the other day on youtube (veronica's yt channel is great if you haven't watched!), and cool to see other people doing it as well. it reminded me of a similar setup i have, dubbed 'protocol7', which is a tty-only setup tailored for this kind of thing and for use on servers/headless pi setups. i use it for writing, intentional reading/browsing via lynx, managing gemini capsules (and reading gemini capsules - thank you amfora!), and just all-round "cozy computing". tmux-heavy, and (to me) very comfortable to use.

my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)

oops, disregard. i just saw that the machine was also previewed on "the android show". i'd missed that until i saw it on YT a few minutes ago.

a little O/T, but i suspect these screenshots might be some of the first look at the upcoming aluminiumOS.

little offtopic, but speaking of, someone just made a coding agent plugin that makes it save tokens by speaking like caveman

that song is going to be stuck in my head all day now. lol

cool stuff. have already found and bookmarked a few interesting sites just going through the list.

submitted my own blog there as well. it is cool seeing human-curated directories coming back (not that they truly left, but i've been seeing more and more over the last few years around the 'indie web')

i do a little something like this on my own site, but it is just a simple directory of sites that i like listed by category on a single page.

to quote the old meme:

hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!

haha! my cats would love this. thanks for sharing

Don't do it like "let's play this game because it runs on Linux" do it like "let's play this game because it's fun".

Indeed! i have some online and irl buddies who aren't on linux that i've got playing games like veloren with me, simply because they are good games. i've got loads of hours in games like veloren, luanti, xonotic, pokeMMO, and osu! for example lol and encourage everyone to check those games out if they're up their alley. :)

i like a few multiplayer shooters, fortnite being one of them. i also exclusively use gnu/linux on my machines, so i got around this issue of games like fortnite/battlefield/etc issue a long time ago by simply doing what i've always done for years, playing these on xbox. i even 'stream' these games to my linux machine from my xbox if i want to play them from the computer with the xbox controller, and can join and create xbox live parties through the xbox web interface.

i only do this for those couple of games i play with friends that won't support linux because of the aforementioned rootkit it wants to run on windows machines. console for those games, and all my other games run happily either through steam+proton or natively on linux, and there are a fair few FOSS games with amazing multiplayer. i love luanti, xonotic, openarena, veloren, etc, and play them frequently with some friends. :)

very cool, always enjoy seeing people's personal sites.

here's mine, simple blog/now/digital garden/link directory, all that fun stuff!

https://rav3ndust.xyz

You cannot even buy Pinephones anymore

Sure you can. The Pinephone Pro is discontinued, sadly, but regular Pinephones are able to be purchased, I just double checked the PINE64 store:

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...

but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.

more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.

indeed, been preaching this kind of thing for ages. the main apps i keep on my mobile are my web browser, my comms apps (element, telegram and signal), and some other stuff from f-droid like retro music, ffupdater, newpipe, termux and stuff like that.

any social things i add as pwa through the browser.

not interested in any of those fast food or store apps. never selling ad-space (and privacy) on my own device to save $2 on a hamburger and some fries, and even if i did want them, chances are high they wouldn't run on my device anyway (feature not bug) lol

thankfully in my area, we have some good local places where you can order food just fine over their website. and if it didn't work over the website, i can simply do it the old-fashioned way, pick up the phone and say "i'd like to place an order for XYZ.."

not exactly, fitbit acquired pebble in 2016, and google acquired fitbit in 2021. so while google did end up with the IP in the end, they did the Right Thing this year and open-sourced PebbleOS.

i don't normally praise google, but i am glad their open-sourcing of pebbleOS here enabled this new revival of Pebble devices.

I plan on picking one of these new Pebbles up in the next batch. I loved my original Pebbles (I still have my old Time Steel). Before the Pebbles came back and PebbleOS open-sourced, the only real open smartwatch option we had around that I'm aware of is the PineTime, which I currently wear every day rocking Infinitime.

Will be fun to pick up one of these again and be able to hop back and forth between it and the PineTime! Great stuff, Eric and team.

I've somehow missed The General Magic (something I'm about to fix!), but Halt and Catch Fire was certainly great, enjoyed it very much

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'. :)

hey, this is cool. i had no idea sandisk was making mp3 players these days. thanks!

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 :(

coke(!) in the South

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?"

good times. miss those two.

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.

a small anecdote:

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.

on nixOS, if something borks, i can do a system rollback right from my bootscreen. easy-peasy.

on debian, i can create system backups/snapshots via timeshift and restore them if something breaks.

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.