Honestly I can’t remember the details. It was a few months ago and it may have been just a temporary thing or a quirk of my installation. I think it had to do with some component relating to DBus not being present that I couldn’t figure out how to fix.

I had trouble using Flatseal to adjust permissions for Flatpak applications in Linux Mint. But that was a few months ago and may have been fixed. Other than that I never really had trouble with stuff being broken or unavailable in Mint.

I guess if you use very new hardware you might prefer a newer kernel than the one Mint uses. Or if you want the latest versions of packages, a rolling distro might suit you better. Or you might prefer a different filesystem. But if none of this bothers you, there’s no need to switch. Mint generally works well.

Dropbox is better value and faster, in my experience, than these others. And when it backs up photos, it doesn’t hold them hostage on its servers so you have to keep paying or you lose access to them, unlike Google at least. Nor does it try to trick you into saving files to it when you don’t want to, so you fill up your quotas and end up paying more, like OneDrive. I still think Dropbox is the best of the bunch. It will be a shame to see it go to shit.

The car was pushing the fast asleep (at the wheel) agenda.

I had to read the article just to be able to parse the headline.

the development/testing is done on Windows under VMs rather than a sample of real world hardware

And yet there’s a recent update that keeps killing my Windows VMs. They’ll run for a while then one day they install the update and won’t boot again. It really feels like MS have lost control of Windows testing these days.

Fascism can only function with the help of amoral profiteering corporations. Unfortunately there’s never any shortage of those under capitalism.

I think the point is that some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture so they can keep profiting off their polluting activities for now without having to invest in carbon emissions reduction. This is unrealistic and just an excuse not to tackle the difficult task of reducing emissions. We can’t afford to let the problem become that much worse before we attempt to mitigate it by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, if there’s ever a technology that can do that effectively (which right now doesn’t look likely). We need to focus most of our efforts on reducing emissions.

It’s probably not very funny to all the people in the Netherlands who are not right-wing idiots. Sounds like the Netherlands are experiencing something like Florida: when the problems get really urgent and bad, half the population fights hard to prevent action and preserve their delusion that everything’s fine.

Microsoft profits off genocide and intends to keep doing so.

And to those who say “well, the Earth will bounce back”: we’re much closer to the end of Earth’s ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn’t have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth’s biodiversity never recovers.

One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don’t know what the answer to that is, but it’s another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can’t simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.

You can’t really get addicted to fedi

Hmm… anxiously eyeing my Lemmy post history…

Sounds pathologically self-centered, and a recipe for a sad life.

Companies fight back to make subscription services easy to cancel

Maybe I’m misreading, but that seems backwards in the title. Companies are fighting to make subscriptions harder to cancel.

I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and “not responding”, or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.

If I were buying an e-reader these days I’d look at something like the Boox devices that run Android. You could install the Kindle and Kobo apps and a good third-party reader app (I like ReadEra), and have pretty convenient access to ebooks from any source. They are overpriced though.

I was on a Boeing plane the other day that was delayed while we watched a guy with a wrench and a rag trying to stop fuel leaking out of the wing. It wasn’t hugely reassuring.

The author asks many questions, but never the most important one: “Why don’t people like Windows 11?”

They complain about unprofessional communications then fill this article with whining like this:

Weeks elapsed with little to no activity, because they were super busy pretending to be doing something else out in the abyss of phantom world.

And they never seem to consider that maybe their own code wasn’t as great as they thought:

He finally built the coreboot ROM with our code, flashed it, and tried to boot the laptop, which displayed an FSP message. Max said he was surprised it made it that far. Why? We told them our code just needed debugging, but they didn’t want to believe it.

Why does the author expect it not to have problems? I know from experience that you can hand over your best, most thoroughly tested code to someone else and they’ll immediately find a problem you have never seen. How professional are these people if that surprises them? “But it just needs debugging!” is not the response of someone who knows what they’re doing and just needs a second pair of eyes on the code.

In the end this blog post backfires. They paint themselves as an arrogant and problematic client to deal with.

Edit: After reading the links in another comment on this thread (sorry for the instance-specific link, will fix if someone can advise me on a better syntax), and in this reddit thread this is evidently only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Malibal’s behaviour. Definitely a company to avoid.