Espi

What does this even mean. Chromium or Webkit are not “native” to an OS. OSs don’t magically include browser engines, its not a critical component of an OS either.

Most OSs do come with browsers preinstalled, but they are programs just like any other. You can remove Safari from macOS (albeit its pretty hard because root is read only and signed), you can remove Edge from Windows. In my desktop with Windows 10 the only browser I have is Firefox (not even Edge), does that make Gecko the “native” browser engine?

If anything, the native browser engine for Windows would be MSHTML from Internet Explorer.

So… Is a manual transmission not the correct solution? should I move so I can drive a manual?

One way or the other. Cars are the real problem there.

Does anyone know of a Spotify client that works on ARM? I put an Orange Pi 5 as a smart TV box but Spotify doesn’t work in the browser because no Widevine on aarch64 Firefox.

The poor Orange Pi can also barely play video without dropping frames, the GPU drivers are awful. I might try to uninstall them and just do software-rendering everything.

Wow, I really like WD SSDs, I got an SN850X and it’s blazing fast. I really like that you can change the sector size as well, most SSDs don’t bother with 4k sectors and just leave you with 512b ones.

If you use modern hardware it doesn’t behave quite well and gets worse battery life. If you use any tools from Microsoft (WSL, Office, Windows Terminal, etc) most of those are incompatible or a pain to install. If you use anything from the Microsoft Store, including Game Pass, since it just doesn’t include the Microsoft Store.

I have an installer for Opera 12.18, the last one to use their Presto engine. Every once in a while I test it out to see how it has aged.

It’s not pretty haha. It barely works.

I really like Kagi. If their browser is half as good as their search engine is its going to be fantastic.

Wipr is pretty nice.

I can’t believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let’s not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.

Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.

In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.

The perfect plan

step 1: spend billions buying an extremely recognizable brand
step 2: rebrand it

I actually can’t believe he is going forward with this. Twitter achieved the goal of becoming a verb, “tweeting”. Companies kill for that, and he’s just throwing it away? all the mindshare and recognition? for what?

Functional fractional scaling on GNOME.

I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.

Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don’t care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.

Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I’m really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a “tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don’t do anything” option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.

I’m also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn’t really get tearing ever.

I love it. I have used it for very long time with and without extensions. I love the overview in particular, pressing meta and having everything presented to you is fantastic. I used it by mostly running maximized windows, then each time I wanted to switch to another program I pressed meta and clicked on the app I wanted. I used workspaces to keep separate groups of programs for each workflow separate too.

If I used extensions it was small things like Appindicators and small cosmetics like blur my shell.

Now, I don’t think GNOME scales very well if you use tens of windows at once, you would need to use too many workspaces, which are slow to navigate, and/or have tiny windows in the overview, which are hard to click because their position is unpredictable unlike traditional taskbars, where the programs are always visible and never move on their own.

My workflow never involved too many windows, so I never had problems with it.

Something else I wish would change is that the top bar should go away or actually do something other than show the time. I would say either just take it away entirely and only show it in the overview. Or turn the clock into a notch. Or just make it a half-traditional taskbar, with the clock and options moved to the right and the left side showing as many programs as they fit in thin bars.