Hell yeah, Keen is a classic, I gotta emulate it sometime to relive the memories

I’m not very familiar with Kodi, why do you recommend against it?

Oh that is beautiful, cool to see that manufacturers are interested in leaning into more relaxed designs based on the OGs. I’ve never been much into RGB-heavy peripherals and cases, so I’m excited to see more of these easy-on-the-eyes options.

I’m pretty sure you should be fine. Seeing as you mentioned you’re running Zorin in another comment, there’s a page from their support site that tells how to update. From my reading of it, it shouldn’t risk messing up your dual-boot situation unless you’re doing a fresh install (in which case, even that should be fine assuming you make sure to overwrite the correct partitions). You’re miles more likely to experience issues dual-booting after a Windows update than any Linux updates.

Side-note, while I understand that people are trying to help by saying you can run some other Linux distro for free, that’s neither helpful nor answers the question. I paid for a copy of elementaryOS once because I wanted to support the project, and their very fair pay-what-you-want scheme allowed me to use what was my first Linux distro for free.

I get that some people might be turned off by Zorin keeping some cosmetic features “locked” behind a pawyall, but they really aren’t – you can make all those changes manually with other apps/editing config files manually, it just isn’t as easy or seamless. But that’s the point of their business model, they save non-essential features for the paid version as an extra incentive to support their work on a solid distro, knowing that some people might either value the convenience enough, or simply want to support the development monetarily.

Okay, I think I understand your point better. While I still think his perspective on demanding users is pretty reasonable, I agree (and didn’t make clear enough) that Martin’s reaction here comes off less-measured than it should’ve. He definitely isn’t all victim, he’s stoked some flames and not done his part to de-escalate on many occasions, that’s for sure.

This whole saga really is a shame, the guy clearly is talented, and there certainly are issues with how the Rust4Linux integration has been handled. I really hope things can improve systemically here.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the projects you managed? Much respect for your open source work, shit’s not easy.

his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? … Surprised users wanted external display support?

I think this misconstrues his point: he was talking about a subset of users (“entitled users”), not calling all the users entitled.

To me, it seemed less that he was surprised users wanted certain features, more that he was burned out by the feature requests that spent time expressing personal grievances, making demands, or getting mad about the project’s pace. I understand that might come off as him being overly-sensitive, but I absolutely see why a constant cascade of FRs written like demands instead of no-BS questions would wear down on someone, especially while they’re simultaneously trying to deal with upstreaming.

he needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic

I totally agree here though, I just hope that this whole fiasco isn’t written off as the result of some vague burn-out. There really does need to be some change in kernel maintainer authority structure and the culture. That can only really happen if someone respected (e.g. Linus) makes some moves to encourage more cooperation/openness from certain C maintainers, and helps put in place better guidelines for how Rust contributions should be handled. It’s simply too disorganized right now, and that makes it too easy for individuals with power to let their egos get in the way of good progress.

Where did he show up, out of curiosity? I’m not seeing any activity from him on the Github issue tracker or his account here.

I had the same reaction when he suddenly dropped the “ulterior motives line” and my hopes became true.

Been watching his stuff for a while, and it was great to see a pretty successful artist find a way to make their pipeline work, and also talk about it.

Haha the edit about split keyboards, you know my every damn move. But really, I think you’re onto something there about finding a way to make your home row into a number row via some kind of layering. How exactly that’s done depends on what keyboard you’re using: if it’s an external keyboard then maybe you could use a QMK board and make custom layers for that. If it’s the keyboard built into your laptop, I’ve seen people mention KMonad working well for them, maybe that’s worth looking into.

They could’ve so easily solved this by making it just immediately jump to the search bar on tap, or hide that feature behind a long press like some other apps do if they’re really wanting to push people towards trending searches. I appreciate that it’s within thumb’s reach now but this is a pretty lackluster implementation

Yeah honestly if they could do a massive overhaul on performance and UX with the OSK then that’d solve the main complaint I’ve had with touch interfaces on Linux

I think it’s based on the xdg-desktop-portal accent color support, but there were specific hooks added to libadwaita to handle that desktop standard, at least that’s my guess based on this.

Definitely glad we have the major desktops all natively supporting accent colors now, it’s been a long time coming.

I use a mix of GSConnect/KDEConnect, Warpinator, and Syncthing. I’ve got a shared “dropoff” folder on Syncthing that lets me easily drop files from one device to another. You’re having issues with Warpinator but if you’re able to figure out the issue there, that’s my second go-to for one-time file transfers. KDEConnect is a bit more fiddly, but I use it mostly for sharing clipboard info and the occasional file when it’s stable enough.

This isn’t really a highly direct solution, but you could try increasing the screen zoom of the whole device by a notch or two. Somewhere in Settings > Display > Font Size/Screen Zoom or something like that may size up the UI enough that it’s comfortable for you. I think you can mix and match font sizes and screen zooms, so you can keep text from getting too big but size up the UI buttons. This will naturally affect all android UI, not just the music widget, but maybe that’s okay in your situation?

Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it’s made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.

So far I haven’t had any issues elsewhere I’m Fedora 40, but maybe that’s because I’ve checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.

You said it pal, not me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah seriously, I was surprised at how plain and illegible rpm-ostree felt in comparison to dnf, I really wish they put a little color or some extra separation just to make it feel less cramped and give people more glanceable info.

I think one worth adding is ZorinOS, it might feel more familiar and modern than Mint, and it’s worked well on the old hardware I’ve run it on. Still an Ubuntu derivative, so you can’t really go wrong with any of these.

I would say yes to this, but elementaryOS still doesn’t have in-place upgrades to the next major versions. I recall there being some progress on changing that, but I would wait till elementaryOS 8 before really recommending it.

I don’t disagree, the person you were replying to could’ve used better language that didn’t characterize Ubuntu as malware-infested and been more specific about what they were referring to. In any event, a couple scammy malware apps that were installed at the user’s discretion are not enough evidence that Ubuntu is a bigger malware risk than any other OS.

I don’t think people should avoid Ubuntu because their app store had the same problem so many others do, but I do think the fact that they make promises about the security of the Snap Store while also making the backend and review process less open than other Linux app stores is worth noting. Not to say there aren’t security incidents with other distros worth noting, but considering the popularity of Ubuntu, it’s not surprising it’s a bigger target.