No. Currently Firefox is the only browser that can run Spotify and Netflix on my machine. Neither Chromium nor Epiphany do that.
Firefox needs to stay functional for “normal” people who consume DRM media, use Google and visit Websites that break if you block their trackers.
Otherwise its market share drops to zero and webdevs will stop testing for its engine, giving Google full control over the web.
There are more than enough options out there for people who want full privacy.
But good point, there would need to be a “security” switch or else, that you select and that actually hardens the browser.
Vanilla should always work, and I agree I sometimes need a vanilla profile.
Firefox profiles are also horribly integrated into firefox. Like there is no GUI way to switch them, without entering “about config”. People think Firefox has no profiles and think thats a Chrome thing, which is fucked up as Chrome copied that
There is a profile GUI but it’s true that it isn’t integrated into Firefox. You have to start it with firefox -ProfileManager. On Windows I recall it used to add a start menu entry for it but not on Linux.
Firefox Flatpak, RPM, and Windows have this entry. firefox -p is enough and works cross platform.
But it is no button so people dont think it exists. I heard tech people say “Chromes profiles are better than Firefox containers” as they literally didnt know this core feature.
Thunderbird has profiles too, Element web also. Both have no GUI at all.
This doesn’t work well in practice when switching between Gnome and KDE. Both change configuration in /home, which might break theming and results in strange behavior.
Logging in with a different user for each desktop environment does prevent such issues. Or alternatively deleting the right folders in ~/.config should fix it too.
In that case, wouldn’t it be possible to try this on any distro? Just make a new user per DE? Also, I think what they’re pointing out is that you can change DE and rollback to where you were before
Installing multiple distros at the same time would cause issues because of additional software most DE’s come with (image viewer, …). But yes, it’s possible to switch DE by uninstalling the desktop package group and installing another quite easily. Especially with btrfs snapshots it’s simple to roll back.
Yes, it’s possible to rollback with ublue but that won’t roll back changes in the home directory. So if you switched from Gnome to KDE and then back to Gnome the additional configuration from KDE might conflict with Gnome (especially theming breaks easily).
wow. I gotta check out nixos. That is incredible. Do you happen to know if fedora silverbue or any of the other immutable distros do this, or is this something specific to nixos?
I did some research yesterday and it looks like silver blue has some rebase command that does something similar. Universal Blue is using that to make it easy to switch between DEs, netting a very similar result!
Well, you can roll back with a switch too; no reboot required.
The VM protects you from accidental state modification however (i.e. programs enabled by some DE by default writing their config files everwhere) and its ephemeral nature makes a few things easier.
My approach has been to slowly learn how to play to the strengths of Linux and not pine after anything on Windows because ultimately I’ve gained a lot more than I’ve lost.
The one piece of software I haven’t been able to avoid keeping around is Sigma Studio, so I have a 10 year old shit top for running it, but it also runs in a VM if I need it. Thankfully I only need to use it once or twice a year.
If you rely on multiple pieces of software for important everyday activities and they aren’t usable in wine or a VM, you probably have no choice but to use the operating system that is the best vehicle for those tools. Doesn’t stop you from also using linux for other stuff, but I can understand how that’s not the same as going all in.
This new entrant in the immutable space is not a replacement for ordinary Ubuntu
Not yet the replacement. It will be and I bet Canonical is targeting 26.04 LTS to do that. This is just the next step of trying to force all their users into Snap, just like when Flatpak was banned from being in by default of community-supported but official Ubuntu variants such as Xubuntu.
to answer to question in the title, on top of what was already said: i just code them myself. of course, it doesn’t work for everything, but for simple programs, i can write a script or a proper thing that does the specific task i need!
The same thing I’ve always done - booted another OS that works with that software. No need to artificially limit yourself.
Once upon a time I remember running Dos, windows, os2 warp, and linux on one hard drive. Those were the days…. Ya ya, I’m going back to my retirement home bedroom…
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