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.
Are you intentionaly using NTFS for compatibility with another machine? If not, I’d use a Linux native filesystem like xfs or ext4 and add it to /etc/fstab
Keyboard centricity is a bonus to me. I don’t like having visible UI elements that don’t do anything for me (docks, task bars). I also dislike the trend of programs not closing when I close them (system trays).
In addition to these things, I value a degree of minimalism, and I’m a heavy user of virtual desktops.
I don’t need to cope with any of these potential downsides, as they’re not downsides to me in the first place. All of this said, the KDE community seems a lot more welcoming. I tend to suggest KDE Plasma for any people trying out Linux.
Hope this helps 👍
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention the most controversial one of them all. I love single click to open.
I use both GNOME and KDE. I do have a system tray, but it’s for a single program: fcitx-mozc. If I didn’t need to build ibus-mozc from source, I would just use that. iBus IMEs get their own spot in the top right without needing appindicators. That being said, I don’t need the system tray either as I can just switch between Japanese and English with CTRL+SPACE. But it’s nice to have some kind of constant indication what IME I’m using.
On the subject of a dock, though, I love the way GNOME completely separates it from the workspace. It just takes up space and I don’t have any utility for it. Windows and macOS only allow you to hide the dock; not remove it completely. I’ve accidentally opened the dock by moving my cursor to the corner of the screen way too many times and it is sooo annoying. This never happens on GNOME because it’s just not possible.
Also I tend to think it’s been designed for people who are more comfortable using a keyboard. I’m mostly a mouse person.
That’s absolutely true, but you can navigate GNOME completely with a mouse. If you’re on a laptop, you can use the trackpad to flick between workspaces with three fingers. Every aspect of the GNOME desktop is navigable with the mouse, including the Activity Overview. GNOME’s workflow changed the way I use computers.
One thing I miss from KDE is GNOME’s tiling. KDE’s is far more inconsistent. But there are a lot of things I like more about KDE too. I use it in basically the same way as GNOME.
No, kernel immediately stops execution of all normal processes once it gets into a kernel panic, and there’s no way for processes to hook into this functionality. It is intended to be the emergency stop state when the kernel realizes it doesn’t know what’s going on and it would be dangerous to continue executing. So it does the bare minimum to report the issue and then stops even its own execution.
There’s also a softer variant of the kernel panic called kernel oops that should let the user choose to continue if they think the risk of data corruption doesn’t outweigh losing all data currently in memory. But just like the kernel panic, it is handled completely inside the kernel and userspace is frozen until the user chooses to continue.
This is intended for situations where systemd runs into an unrecoverable issue while booting (for example you have misconfigured fstab and a required disk is missing). Without this, you just get thrown into the terminal with some error messages that might not make much sense to you if you don’t have a decent understanding of Linux. Now, you get a more newbie friendly message and a QR code that should bring you somewhere you can learn more about possible causes and troubleshooting steps.
Yeah, that makes sense. So it’s for the situations where you end up in an emergency shell.
Some better presentation of kernel panic would be nice (which I think is the closest equivalent to a Windows BSoD), but I guess it would require kernel support.
IIRC LDAC mode does not support microphone input. Still, if you want high sound quality, which you do, you need to use LDAC. I had some issues with my wh1000xm2 defaulting to SBC even though I specified LDAC. Disabling microphone input helped keep it consistently in the right mode. In KDE my settings working fine are the following:
That looks very similar to mine, except I don’t have AAC and aptX. I guess the WH1000MX5 only supports SDC and LDAC? As far as I know, I need to use the Headset Head Unit to get microphone input. After a system update some time back, it would switch automatically if I e.g. was on a Signal call. Prior to this, I would have to switch manually to get microphone input.
By the way, I am not entirely sure if I am running PulseAudio or PipeWire, as I get the confusing output below, but it seems to be PulseAudio. Is it likely to improve things if I were to switch to PipeWire?
<span style="color:#323232;">$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.80)
</span>
As for my Windows issue, it seems LDAC is not natively supported in Windows 10, so I guess it is using SDC. Could my problems simply be that I am trying to stream a too high bitrate? I will need to recheck my settings for stream quality.
You have pipewire. It is compatible with pulseaudio. I find it very surprising that you don’t show aac. I am not familiar with sbc-xq, but Apple products don’t support ldac and my understanding is sdc is not useful for audio listening, but rather calls. My M4s work fine on my desktop with an intel ax201 Bluetooth chipset. I have been using aac there, but ldac worked I think. I had problems with the usb BT adapter before that though.
Hm, yeah. Just checked in macOS, and it is using AAC there. So lack of AAC on my Linux device would mean it is not available here for some reason then I guess, and not an issue with the headset?
I can’t seem find a way to check the same on Windows 10 without using a third-party tool, and since this is a work computer, that is not an option for me. My guess is then that it uses SDC. Seems like AAC is supported natively in Windows 11 though, and the device is scheduled for a Win 11 install soon. Hopefully that will resolve the issue for me during work hours.
For now it seems to work better under Linux with LDAC though, which is my main use case. I swear I’ve had issues with this before, but I just streamed an entire album of high-bitrate FLAC tracks without issue now. Hopefully it stays this way.
It seems from your pactl info like you are running PipeWire, though I am by no means any expert on this. I think I read something a while ago that LDAC is not supported on Windows.
The mx5 only support sbc (minimum to support) aac and LDAC. They dropped aptx to only use their own high latency (and not that much better) codec. The headphone has BT 5.3, but does not support LC3 (an extremely good, low latency codec integrated in base bluetooth).
I do. Gnome is a special case because it doesn’t give you a lot of options. It’s take it or leave it, and it doesn’t follow the traditional mouse-centric desktop workflow.
But in my opinion it’s absolutely perfect for a laptop where you use the keyboard and touchpad. With a few key combos and swipe gestures you can fly through the UI and it only ever shows you what’s relevant at the moment.
This could well be an advanced video editor or an office suite if they take full advantage of the portals API without losing any functionality. Well, they can have the network permission, it would still be safe anyway.
So this is my setup, and it’s pretty cost effective. I have two 2Tb HDDs that are striped and one 500Gb SSD that’s alone. The games I play the most live on my SSD, any games I’m not really playing live on the HDD. Then I just move my games from one to another. I didn’t even have the second HDD for the longest time. I don’t bother with using the SSD as a cache anymore. There is no advantage in gameplay to striping a game, however updates and moves are faster.
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