Very weak argument

Another fork freeloading off the Mozilla security team’s work.

This problem is reminiscent of the web-browser conundrum. Perhaps the project is, by its nature, just too ambitious to be left to a small handful of volunteers. An organization, with reputation (and maybe money) at stake, needs to take the reins.

Currently, Flatpak still uses PulseAudio even if a host system uses PipeWire. The problem with that is that PulseAudio bundles together access to speakers and microphones—you can have access to both, or neither, but not just one. So if an application has access to play sound, it also has access to capture audio, which Wick said, with a bit of understatement, is “not great”. He would like to be able to use PipeWire, which can expose restricted access to speakers only.

Oof. Seems that snap (to take the obvious comparison) separates these two permissions. As it should.

So far, I’ve tried Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, Endeavour and Cachy.

Whereas in 21 years on Linux I have tried

• Debian

Just installed it (it’s even in the Debian-Ubuntu repo) and it’s an obvious improvement! Thanks for the tip.

Excellent question. You may find the answers disappointing. Personally I use xournal for pasting signatures (sigh) into PDFs. UX is rubbish but it works. I do a bunch of other stuff to PDFs with command-line tools, which is extremely efficient and fast once it’s set up. Doubtful this will fit your requirements, alas.

Yeah, thanks, been to all these places already,sleep included (except setsid in Wayland but I doubt that’s the crucial issue). And yes it does work, sort of - the problem is that the apps exit spontaneously at some point later - sometimes hours, sometimes days - which absolutely does not happen when I launch them in whatever “official” way. In the end I just gave up. Needing a sleep hack is a bit of a red flag after all.

Tangential. I tried everything to replicate the basic function of an app launcher in a terminal - i.e. launch a GUI app while leaving the terminal unaffected and have the app survive without spontaneous combustion at some random point later - before finally giving up. Yes, background process. Yes, disown. Yes, redirect all output to null. Yes, nohup. Yes, every combination of the above. Nothing really worked. So I now have a mystical reverence for the people who write app launchers.

Yes, and mine is that if it is still somehow “mainstream” then it is currently losing that status almost before our eyes.

About the computer claim, it obviously includes the workplace. Seriously, this is a silly non-debate. We have a situation of mass addiction to small touchscreens. It is now possible to do anything on these objects and it’s increasingly impossible to live without them (I had to install a damn app just to open a delivery locker this week). They are not laptops. For personal use, desktop computers of any kind are already an irrelevance.

small screens and the lack of physical keyboards are significant limitations

You’re preaching to the choir in this community, and I personally happen to agree with you. It’s irrelevant. The world has moved on.

What a generous and thoughtful post.

Firstly, chill, it wasn’t meant to be personal, sorry if the tone was hostile.

I was addressing you as an avatar of something I see a lot here (perhaps to be expected) and that frustrates me: a well-intentioned, probably very intelligent geek who talks earnestly about something (desktop computing) that I believe is now all but irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It frustrates me because the irrelevance seems obvious to me - from the stats, from looking around me in everyday life. And because every day we waste talking about desktop OS is a day lost in the already losing battle to save free computing.

PS: I didn’t downvote you. I don’t downvote, as a matter of principle.

With respect, I think this view is really quite out of touch.

About the Global South, we agree. Most people there have never seen a PC and never will. Already, the Global South is most of the world. The combined population of Europe and North America, i.e. the whole West, is now less than 10% of the world population.

But beyond that, who are these “mainstream” people you see buying PCs for personal use in the West, today, beyond students (PS: and gamers)? What are they buying them for when you now do literally anything on a mobile OS with more convenience (and indeed the mobile OS is increasingly a requirement)? Do you really think that in, say, 5 years, the obvious trend will have spontaneously gone into reverse?

I don’t want any of this to be true either, but true it patently is.

Mobile is not all that counts. I don’t know anyone without at least one laptop or desktop in the house (typically more)

This is, sadly, the response I was bracing for. You are in a bubble. The rest of the world, certainly outside the US middle class, looks absolutely nothing like your life. The numbers are clear. Outside of offices, computing now means Android and almost nothing else (yes that includes iOS).

To which my first thought is: who cares, because almost no normies are buying desktop computers any more. I say that as a desktop OS user.

It’s not a popular observation around here but the facts are stubborn. I so wish we nerds would wake up, put our own personal experience aside, and concentrate our energies on how to bring FOSS to the mobile platform. Going forwards, it’s all that will count. It’s already all that counts.

Yeah, all surely true and it’s always the solution given and it’s even the greenest one. But I just don’t think this is a real solution for normies, who tend to buy computers new (to the extent that they even buy them any more). And in this respect I’m like them, personally.

Hmm. Having trouble parsing your negatives but I think you’re saying “expensive”.

What bothers me is that a decade ago there were loads of Linux-compatible budget netbooks on sale at every big-box retailer, whereas there seems to be nothing today under 500 bucks/euro except Chromebooks, and nothing at all with a smallish screen except mega-expensive ultrabooks. It’s becoming a problem.

Great job. As I see it the real problem is that low-end Wintel laptops seem to be going away, replaced first by Chromebooks and soon probably by Android laptop edition, which presumably will have the non-Intel architecture and weird blobs and locked bootloader of any smartphone. Or is this too pessimistic?

I’ve been using it for a few years

undergoing a significant rewrite for the 0.4 release

I plan to try it when it’s ready. Some time next century at this rate.

There’s a sweet spot between CLI and GUI: TUI.