FOSS Is Fun

Actually it is the same story with TLS 1.3 and TLS 1.2. A bunch of sites still doesn’t support TLS 1.3 (e. g. arstechnica.com, startpage.com) and some of them only support TLS 1.2 with RSA (e. g. startpage.com).

You can try this yourself in Firefox by disabling ciphers (search for security.ssl3 in about:config) or by setting the minimum TLS version to 1.3 (security.tls.version.min = 4 in about:config).

They aren’t as natural. E. g. you have to swipe the same direction to open or close the window overview, whereas with GNOME the animation actually follows the direction your fingers are swiping. But they at least reliably trigger the action you want to execute.

Since Plasma doesn’t have dynamic workspaces, I use it completely differently than GNOME anyways. E. g. I don’t make use of workspaces and use minimise instead. Therefore touchpad gestures on Plasma are much less relevant to me than on GNOME at the moment.

Until a couple of weeks ago I used Fedora Silverblue.

Then, after mostly using GNOME Shell for about a decade, I (reluctantly) tried KDE Plasma 5.27 on my desktop due to its support for variable refresh rate and since then I have fallen in love with KDE Plasma for the first time (retrospectively I couldn’t stand it from version 4 until around 5.20).

Now I am using Fedora 39 Kinoite on two of my three devices and Fedora 39 KDE on a 2-in-1 laptop that requires custom DKMS modules (not possible on atomic Fedora spins) for the speakers.

Personally I try to use containers (Flatpaks on the desktop and OCI images on my homeserver) whenever possible. I love that I can easily restrict or expand permissions (e. g. I have a global nosocket=x11 override) and that my documentation is valid with most distributions, since Flatpak always behaves the same.

I like using Fedora, since it isn’t a rolling release, but its software is still up-to-date and it has always (first version I used is Fedora 15) given me a clean, stable and relatively bug-free experience.

In my opinion Ubuntu actually has the perfect release cycle, but Canonical lost me with their flawed-by-design snap packages and their new installers with incredibly limited manual partitioning options (encryption without LVM, etc.).

In my opinion Plasma has gotten much better with the last couple of releases. Around 5.21 the defaults actually got pretty good and since 5.24 Wayland support is quite good, on par with GNOME in my opinion.

After using GNOME Shell for a decade I have recently switched to Plasma 5.27 on my desktop due to its VRR support (I have two 170 Hz QHD monitors). A couple of weeks later I also moved my laptops to Plasma, even though I wanted to keep GNOME on them, since Plasma has gotten so nice!

Just wanted to give a heads-up in case you haven’t tried Plasma in the last couple of years. ;) But especially if you rely on dynamic workspaces and don’t want to adapt your workflow (like I did when I switched to Plasma), there’s just no alternative to GNOME and it has gotten really polished and nice as well.

This has always been the case with Ubuntu. Ubuntu only ever supported its main repository with security updates. Now they offer (paid) support for the universe repository in addition, which is a bonus for Ubuntu users, as they now have a greater selection of packages with security updates.

If you don’t opt-in to use Ubuntu Pro, nothing changes and Ubuntu will be as secure (or insecure) as it has always been. If you disable universe and multiverse you have a Ubuntu system where all packages receive guaranteed security updates for free.

Please note: I still don’t recommend Ubuntu due to snapd not supporting third-party repositories, but that’s no reason not to get the facts right.

Debian has always been the better choice if you required security updates for the complete package repository.

Personally I have my doubts if Debian actually manages to reliably backport security updates for all its packages. Afterall Eclipse was stuck on version 3.8 for multiple Debian releases due to lack of a maintainer …

There are plenty of reasons to get rid of Ubuntu, but this isn’t one of them.

Before Ubuntu Pro, packages in universe (and multiverse) were not receiving (security) updates at all, unless someone from the community stepped up and maintained the package. Now Canonical provides security updates for universe, for the first time since Ubuntu has been introduced, via Ubuntu Pro, which is free for up to five personal devices and paid for all other use cases.

Debian is actually not that different (anymore). If you read the release notes of Debian 12, you’ll notice that quite a few package groups are excluded from guaranteed security updates, just like packages in universe are in Ubuntu. Unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn’t split its package repository by security support though.

Your’re right, ideally wear reduction should probably be done by the display itself. But considering how little manufacuters often care about OS-agnostic approaches, it might be necessary to have software workarounds?

Variable refresh rate (VRR), HDR, OLED (e. g. I’d like the panel to become grey and move items around a bit to lessen burn-in) all involve GNOME for hardware support.

Outside of that the toolkit’s file picker is used, as the system doesn’t seem to provide one (via the portal), so the only reasonable fallback is to show the file picker that you know is there, which is the one of the application’s toolkit.

Depends on the operating system. E. g. on GrapheneOS you install Google apps as user apps. Therefore you can uninstall them at any time and they don’t have system privileges.

I have seen other Android firmwares (MIUI?) where the manufacturer offered Google apps unofficially from their app store, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the same for Huawei phones nowadays?

Apart from that, you can, to my knowledge, install the Google search app on any Android device, even if no other Google services are installed as a system app.