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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1129 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Something like a decade ago I started dual-booting with Ubuntu as my main OS and Windows as a backup, "just in case". Originally I had to switch back and forth between them, either for gaming or for some piece of software that I could not do without and that did not have a Linux version. As time went on this started happening less and less, partly due to me consciously trying to avoid Windows, partly due to software moving to the web and making Linux releases moot, and partly due to Linux gaming getting better and better support from Steam. What started as keeping Windows "just in case" ended up "I haven't booted it in years, and the only reason I didn't format the whole drive is that there might be some cool stuff I have saved there and forgot about it". I suppose if I didn't miss it all these years it's not really that important, but I still haven't pulled the trigger. At some point I also got fed up of Ubuntu's bullshit, and switched to Peppermint, which is small, blazing fast, and since it's Debian-based, it was easiest to switch to from Ubuntu.

I haven't done this for my wife yet (for the same "shit saved on the hard drive" reasons), but I don't think non-techieness should be an issue. Stuff mostly works out of the box these days.

As for the chromebooks, anyone else looking to jump ship because of Manifest V3? Maybe I need to suck it up and just try out uBlock Origin Lite for a while, see how it goes.

Never owned a chromebook, does it let you install other browsers? If so, have you tried Brave? It started off pretty janky but nowadays I see it as "Chrome, except better". uBlock still works on it as of now, and it has it's own built-in adblocker that will work no matter what happens with 3rd party extensions.

Thanks for your experience!

Linux gaming

This was one of the main things that kept me from switching from Windows back before I got married. I don't really game much anymore, and it's instead the wife that is making me hesitate to switch...

At some point I also got fed up of Ubuntu's bullshit, and switched to Peppermint, which is small, blazing fast, and since it's Debian-based, it was easiest to switch to from Ubuntu.

I almost installed Peppermint on a random old device I have; downloaded the iso and everything. I was trying to solve some problems with getting Home Assistant running, but I eventually figured out how to get HAOS working on it. It does seem like a real contender. What made you fed up with Ubuntu?

Never owned a chromebook, does it let you install other browsers? If so, have you tried Brave?

Not really, but that was supposed to be kind of the point of the design. You can run Linux on it via crostini, and I've done that for a few things (just the default debian; I think you can install other distros, but I've never bothered). The GUI support is a little janky for some programs, and I've never bothered just living on a different browser in it on a regular basis. It kind of defeats the purpose, and I feel like if I was going to go down that route, I'd just say screw it and go full Linux.

I still haven't tried Brave at all. I've been sticking with Firefox outside of the Chromebooks. Nightly on my phone; I set that up a while back, because that was the only way to use extensions like uBlock on FF for Android, though I think that has probably been relaxed since then. I've not yet gotten to the point where FF is doing something annoying enough or Brave is offering a feature killer enough for me to make the switch.

What made you fed up with Ubuntu?

I don't know what exactly they did, but it started feeling bloated. Took forever to boot up, or start / close programs.

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