I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.
I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.
By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.
I like that Linus is so strict on not breaking user space because this obviously aids with compatibility and it’s probably a big part of why rolling releases work.
But I sure hope Linus’ eventual successor won’t be toxic and…cringe. It’s hard to take someone serious when he’s raging this much.
Rolling release: openSUSE Tumbleweed Semi-annual release: Fedora KDE Spin LTS: Kubuntu (3 years), Debian (5 years), AlmaLinux (10 years)
I personally think semi-annual is where it’s at. You get packages that are mostly up-to-date (and with Flatpak user-facing software is up-to-date anyway), and you don’t have to fear that something will break/be incompatible with every small update.
Not sure I’d recommend getting anything resembling a computer with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage nowadays, but it’ll certainly still work.
I’d probably start with a minimal Debian installation (or Arch if you prefer being on the bleeding edge I guess) and then add GNOME desktop and whatever else I need afterwards. I don’t recommend checking the box that says “GNOME” in the Debian installer, as that installs a whole bunch of packages you’ll probably never use, and disk space is at a premium here.
Performance should be doable as long as you don’t multitask a lot, but don’t expect any wonders as 2 physical cores really isn’t a lot these days.
You can use watchparty.me as long as your upstream bandwidth is fast enough for amount of friends * bitrate, or you can selfhost it or get a premium account so their servers stream your file (so you only have to have bandwidth for a single stream yourself).
If I had to pick only one of the two, I’d prefer local blocking because it cannot only not load ads, but also remove the placeholder/frame the ad would’ve been in. It’s also better at circumventing anti-adblock scripts.
That being said, DNS-based blocking is great outside of browser use, and it blocks many ads and tracking attempts in mobile and desktop apps.
A combination of both is best, really. I use uBlock Origin in the browser (or AdGuard Pro with Safari on Mac and iPhone) and then NextDNS. NextDNS is configured rather conservative though, because it can cause things to break otherwise, and that’s hard to manage when you’re not the only use of your network.
This. Instead of making commits time-based (for example once per hour or once per day), make them purpose-based (say, add a database migration in one commit, and change the color of a button in another one). This also makes it easy to cherry-pick or otherwise backport specific changes to different program versions gor example.