I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

For some reason, Mint doesn’t provide access to the power profiles out of the box… no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called “Power Profiles” and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

I’m starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today’s society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

It’s the normalisation that disturbs me the most, the gradual slide into what would once have been seen as abhorrent.

Show some of the headlines from just this last week to people in 2015 and I expect most would recoil in horror. The GoP’s presumptive nominee openly using racist dog whistles; a court case where the judge warned jurors to never reveal their identify because of the fear of reprisal from the GoP nominee and his followers; the raw fact that he sexually molested a woman in the 90s; his instigation of civil war on the border in Texas… To name but a few.

All of this stands shoulder-to-shoulder with articles discussing his political prospects, his strategy to win over voters, how he is polling among white, middle-class women… as if he is in any way a normal candidate.

We need to take a step back, to think about what is happening here. Sadly, the very people who need to listen are the very people who can’t listen, people for whom any negative discussion of this candidate would merely serve to strengthen the narrative and reinforce the reality they’ve conjured into being.

There would seem to be no way out of this situation that won’t take decades, and which doesn’t stand every chance of being derailed whenever an election goes the wrong way.

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else’s. That kind of colours my judgement.

In the North East of England, the North York Moors.

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

North Yorkshire, in the UK.

That and the woke mind virus.

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we’ll never know…

Yep. Even when clicking the single checkbox captchas, I try really hard to click it “just like a human would”. Which is weird, because I am a human. I think.

I had a similar need, and it prevented me from moving to FireFox for a long while. Luckily, I did manage to get fx_cast to work, and it’s been flawless ever since. In fact, I’d say it work more reliably than Chrome’s casting!

I use it for work. Other than having to think for a second to find weirdly hidden menu items, it’s fine. At least for my purposes, as a .NET dev. One thing I love about it is Windows Sandbox… really wish Linux would could up something similar.

Yeah, it’s weird. I’d been trying it on and off since 1997, and always bounced off because of some annoyance or other. Now… nothing. It’s very low friction.

It’s interesting how far Linux desktop has progressed recently… I don’t hate Windows, in fact I think it’s a great OS for most purposes. But I happened to try Linux Mint a few years ago in a fit of pique about being excluded from the Win11 upgrade for spurious reasons… and it just kind of stuck.

Two years later and I am full on Linux now. Don’t even have a Windows partition (though I do keep a VM). And I’m about to buy a new laptop that I intend to buy without an OS, it will never be touched by Windows, there’s just no need.

For my purposes, Linux does everything now. OS, software, the games I want to play… I never even think about it. Also, everywhere I look, I see Linux - my Steamdeck, my MiSTer, my Pis, my Miyoo Mini. It’s everywhere…

Don’t drag the Sinclair into this American mess!

Pretty good. It’s my default morning scroll, at least.

I’ve got a lot more comfortable with it since using Alexandrite on desktop and Sync on mobile.

The only thing really missing at the moment is content. It tends to be good for the high profile stuff, but a bit lacking for the niche stuff. I still sneak back to the other place on occasion to catch up on smaller communities… hopefully that will come with time.

Amazing! Thanks! (and I love the inline settings links!)

As a diehard desktop user, I seldom use mobile clients other than for brief looks. However, just got back from a week long holiday where I used Sync exclusively for my morning scroll - and it was was brilliant!

My one remaining quibble is with the way that links in comments are inexplicably a couple of font sizes bigger than surrounding text. Anyone found a setting to change that?