This is how I explained Matrix to my mom: its like an email address, but for chat. You can chat at me, even if we aren’t using the same server, like someone can send an email from Gmail to Hotmail. She got set up and promptly went back to texting me every dang time.

The big one is no Snaps. You can get them, but I prefer flatpaks which I use on LMDE.

I’ve been enjoying LMDE. Mint without Ubuntu.

Didn’t I see something about someone bringing it back? They should call it Miley CyrOS.

I have been on Fedora since 33 or 34, and quite like it. I will say that I have had upgrade woes twice though. I set up Nextcloud on Ubuntu using snaps about 10 years ago, and it’s still kicking, although it goes down every time it decides it’s going to update itself. Win 11 at work: Randomly, half our fleet stopped loading Teams chats last week, and six machines lost their UEFI boot entries today. Big fan.

I was thinking of posting something about all the tracking and control in… Linux, but then decided why bother?

I find that straight Debian takes a bit more work to get to daily driver territory than some other distros, but I do like the balance of Linux Mint Debian Edition. Plus, I had a weirdo problem with LMDE once, and Clem actually responded himself with a fix, so thumbs up there!

I think a lot of the hate is snaps. Ubuntu has pushed a technology on the users that is unpopular before (Unity) and largely ignored the criticism, which is a Windows-like behavior. I can attest that snaps really sucked on old hardware when they first rolled out. I haven’t really used Ubuntu since 22.04, so I can’t comment on the current state of snaps, other than to say that a buddy swears they are way faster now. It’s a rock and a hard place situation for Canonical though, because if Firefox from apt crashes, Ubuntu gets hate, not Firefox.

I went to high school with a guy we called Yukon Jan. (Jan is pronounced Yawn.) I wonder how he’s doing…

I am! I’m guy from all of Canada! I haven’t been to Yukon.

As a Canadian on Lemmy, I keep running in to the same couple of people… Hi, lady from Calgary, and guy from Ottawa! Nice to see you again!

I’ve been running Mint Cinnamon on one for years, and it does just fine. I can’t imagine you’d have any trouble.

So, I’m running a rando Chinese eGPU on a ThinkPad t15 gen… (Whatever an 11th Gen Intel is.) I had to spend a bit too get a nice long thunderbolt 4 cable, and I had to fart around with getting it to sleep and wake up reliably in Fedora… And my cat crashed my system totally by unplugging it mid-game in an attempt to chew on the cable. Otherwise, once I got it working, very happy with it. Had to go over all the settings when I went from Fedora 43 to 44 though. Edit: spelling.

Today I learned that Jellyfin does music. Had Jellyfin and Navidrome both for years, never even tried sticking my music library into Jellyfin. I use Substreamer on my Androids.

This! I also have an old GPU in it, passed through to whichever VM I want to game on! Total pain to set up, but then also a pain to use! I forget why I did it…

I don’t actually use the arr stack, but if you set up Tailscale it won’t hurt anything else by being set up. I just know that it’s pretty straightforward to use, so I thought I’d throw in a good word for it.

Nobody is addressing tailscale so far, so I’ll throw my two cents in: I have tailscale on my phone and my laptop, and I have a bunch of stuff running at home, and they all act like they’re on the same network as long as I’m logged in. There are a lot of alternatives out there, but I find it quite useful. I have immich for my pictures and pihole for ad blocking using docker. The basic docker tutorials are worth following. All I really use is docker ps, docker image docker compose up (-d), docker pull. Nano to edit the yaml files I find online. Unhacked so far!

I had a Dell laptop that made a whiny noise in Debian because of something with the sound card/driver/?, but if I plugged in headphones it immediately stopped. I fixed it with alsamixer. I forget the specifics, it was a while back. Shot in the dark, but if it isn’t happening due to load, maybe it’s a sound issue?

I’ve used Remmina from Debian Gnome. I had to turn on dynamic resolution update, and had to pick a color theme that was different from the default, but then it worked fine.

I run a Pi400 every now and then… It’s not setting any speed records, and starts to lag out after 10 tabs, but it runs all day on an external phone battery. There’s the odd app that nobody bothered porting to ARM, but I have more trouble with Arm Windows than Arm Linux.

I had a pinebook 1080p, same exact experience. Fine, not fantastic, good battery life. It keeled over and died after a year though.