using cinnamon. and yeah base software is largely fine. but non-base productivity apps are largely built in electron. cinnamon even offers a webapp tool so in some cases i can at least avoid it.

people who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.

the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.

the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.

the only…

i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.

not even “still on facebook”, since 2020, the surge of people moving TO facebook instead of away of facebook has increased tremendously.

the traditional second hand market sites are dying because facebook marketplace is taking over.

traditional websites and helpdesk/support channels are dying because companies are switching to facebook pages and messenger/whatsapp.

old school forums have more or less been entirely replaced by facebook groups.

alternative chat platforms have more or less died because of messenger.

branding is nearly gone everywhere and has been replaced by instagram.

the list goes on.

and imo the worst part is, facebooks policy and technical offering is inferior to the alternatives people are moving away from. and the only reason everyone is moving to facebook is because everyone is moving to facebook.

–

the day Mastodon offers Groups, I will be advertising the move to Mastodon and shortly shut down the groups I run. Though, Groups was supposed to be out already last year and yet we’re in 2024 and nothing is happening. If they had managed to stick to schedule it would have been a golden opportunity because a lot of people were looking for alternatives (but found none), when facebook went ham on their policy. but as there was no alternatives, everyone’s back on facebook just circumventing the policies (for now).

i think he stopped working on groups because mastodon officially announced groups shortly after gis preview. not that they have delivered it yet (release target, q4 2023 - an no word for 2 years now).

not at all. mint offers a bunch of features ‘exclusive’ to mint as an integration with their system. of course it’s all open source and you could install it on any other system. but the key important factor with mint is that everything ‘just works’ with a fresh install, no customization necessary - which is something that can’t be said about any other distro, including Ubuntu. it is the only distro i recommend for non-pc users as there is no chance they will brick it.

regardless, KDE is just a DE. you won’t get the same mint experience of course, since it isn’t officially supported (and indeed, only cinnamon offers the complete mint experience), but installing KDE on mint is easy enough if you insist on using it.

honestly, mistborn isn’t very good and there is no reason you can’t just immediately jump on stormlight. yes, there are tons of references and characters which does make stormlight awesome because you’ll go “omg no way! it’s HIM!”, but it isn’t strictly necessary because stormlight doesn’t actually assume you’ve read the previous cosmere books (few exceptions where brandon just teases too much it takes away from the plot, i.e. the mysterious scarf wearing woman. yes, we get it, it’s the princess from warbreaker, and she’s looking for one of the gods from warbreaker, that we’re also familiar with, and the god in turn is looking for his weapon). but ultimately these characters have their own story arcs and most of them aren’t immediately important to the plot and more like easter eggs.

now, i should point out that … i really don’t care for mistborn. and for now, it doesn’t matter. but after the next stormlight book, there will be an in-world timeskip, and then another 3-6 mistborn books, and then both the mistborn series and the stormlight series become one joint series.

but there is really no reason to read stormlight before mistborn in its current state because the only real way you’ll know for sure one of the hidden characters in stormlight is a particularly well loved character from mistborn is if you read the wiki. there is also a guest appearance of another character in i think the first book but it doesn’t make sense in the timeline and it’s inconsequential to the plot in every way.

well for one thing, one of the big bads in stormlight happens to die in mistborn.

Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.

My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it’s slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.

I’m recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.

MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.

Manjaro is another great option if you don’t want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it’s a lot less of a headache than what I’ve experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can’t).

i’ve been pushing mint for years because it truly is just that good. everything just works. easy to learn. lots of easy customization available by default for even beginner tinkering. there is no headache or issues with drivers, patches, or software, ever.

but unfortunately (most recent versions) have become more prone to heavy slow downs and the new store in the latest update is utter trash.