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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I’d start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn’t in control of my system, Ubuntu was.

    I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.










  • Yeah. I grew up in the days of serial ports and parallel ports, and USB in general is so much better for most purposes. (I recall plugging my first mouse into the serial port…but wait! Where will my Hayes Smartmodem modem plug into then? Also, don’t plug and unplug things from the serial port while the computer is running.)

    And USB-C is even better. My tablet needs a charge? Well my laptop charger is right here… My phone is low and needs a quick charge? Well my USB-C tablet charger will give it a decent boost very quickly. No worries about getting it plugged in the wrong way, either.

    I have a docking station for my work laptop, so when I had to replace my personal laptop, a laptop that supported USB-C power delivery was mandatory. I don’t use it with the docking station very often, but knowing I can without an issue is great. My wife also has a Macbook that works on the docking station, too, in case she ever wants to use my dual monitor setup. All three laptops, from three different brands, are just plug in and go.








  • “If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user.”

    I’ve mentioned this a lot lately, but I used Slackware from the late 90s (3.x days) until about 2009 on my desktop and laptop, and about 2017 on my server. I just got tired of dealing with dependencies and switched to Debian (all three run Debian now). I had the CD subscription and would automatically receive the latest version about twice a year.

    Patrick Volkerding (if my memory is accurate) has my utmost respect, and I do feel a little bad about abandoning it, but I just didn’t have the time to deal with it any more.


  • That reminds me - for my Lenovo laptop, no issues at all with suspend and resume (just like Kubuntu). But my desktop was going to sleep when I first installed Debian, and it was NOT waking up gracefully; in fact I had to reboot it each time. Since I didn’t want it to go to sleep at all, I didn’t attempt to diagnose the issue beyond turning off the suspend mode in power management.


  • I just had to change a few things - KDE, dark mode, X11 when I couldn’t get screen power off to work under Wayland, and it’s basically good to go. There might be a few other things I changed, but in general out of the box was pretty close to what I wanted. It even installed the AMD driver for my graphics card.


  • That sounds like it’s mostly about the default install, and I don’t have a problem with them making the default a snap - as I said, sandboxing a browser probably is a good idea from a security perspective, and most people probably aren’t going to care about snap vs. deb installs, so why not go with the safer alternative?

    My issue was that it kept switching back to snaps even after I tried to go to .deb installations. It happened at least three or four times. It would be fine for several months, then something would happen during an update, and it would switch back.

    I didn’t have the concerns the article mentions about it automatically updating; it would only update whenever I told software in general to update.


  • I can’t find it at the moment, but a few weeks ago I made a comment that I didn’t really care for the paddle shifters in our car (it’s an automatic, but you can switch to “manual mode” and shift it manually), because I know it’s not going to let me do something stupid, whereas a stick shift will usually let me do stupid things that can damage the engine. That’s partially what prompted the measuring power as ability to screw things up comment. :)