I’ve never had any trouble running adobe software on Linux.

I’ve also never tried, but still the statement is technically correct.

That’s a new metaphor for me. I like it! And I want some chips now. Either the British or American kind.

Give up on nvidia, IMO.

I feel like most everyone* who cares about distros likes Debian. It may not be the right distro for your use case, but you’re glad it’s around.

* I’m sure even Debian has it’s haters. But I think it’s a minority.

Found it mentioned as an alternative when Reddit announced their API changes.

They can be slow to adopt changes. I think the Mozilla foundation getting more funding, staffing, and refocusing on their browser would be the better solution.

While Chromium is an open source project, it is still developed and maintained by Google. For something as important as a web browser, I think it’s imperative that there’s an option outside of their control.

That’d certainly be a good feature, but it feels to me like it’s a fairly niche need. And as per that post, it’s also a big technical effort. I can see why there isn’t anything in the way of development updates.

That is me being a bit of an apologist for Firefox though. If you consider Firefox unusable because of that, then that’s a pretty valid frustration.

Still, I’d encourage you to try and find a way to make it work for you because Chrome is evil.

I and anyone I’ve heard say the word says it the same as the English pronunciation in this random video I found searching for how to pronounce it. For whatever that small sample size is worth.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3pMOHP3Uu54

I use rsync for this purpose and the only notable bottleneck is my download speed, fwiw.

Reel Big Fish - Sell Out

Tool - Hooker With A Penis

It doesn’t copy data, no. Symlink is short for symbolic link. So it’s a pointer to another location. But it might be useful for you. Taking a guess at your goal, here’s a relevant example.

Say you moved all of your emulation stuff stored under /media/largehdd/retroarch. You could then symlink that directory to ~/.config/retroarch like so:

ln -s /media/largehdd/retroarch ~/.config/retroarch

That data is still stored on the large drive but will now also show under that symlinked directory.

I use file syncing (Syncthing) and symlinks to keep configs for some apps synced between devices. I don’t for Firefox, but it might work.

Could I maintain the same OS install for the life of a device? Sure. Can I resist disro hopping? Nope!

I made it, I think, 3 years on a Fedora install once.

I’m guily of the hopping on the bandwagon from Void to NixOS. But out of curiosity for NixOS not frustration over Void. Void is awesome, it fits the completely subjective picture in my head of what Linux should be.

Apology not needed.

I agree with you. The ozone layer is a great example of this being successful. And there are other examples of this kind of issue elsewhere. Like the we have to push for user repair rights or against planned obsolescence (which one could argue this is planned obsolescence, in thinking about it).

A small number of informed users won’t disincentiveize companies from abusing the masses. Because most companies are garbage so of course they will if they can. And regulations are the solution. I’m not suggesting we ignore that. But those of us who are informed can still incentiveize those companies that do treat their customers well in the interim.

I concede to the point though. I said, in effect, that supporting businesses that treat us well will help. But I suppose it’s more accurate to say that will, at best, stop things from getting worse.

Setting legal precidents and regulating the industry are musts to curb this behavior. But we also have power as consumers. The ol’ “vote with money” if you will. There are too many uninformed consumers for this to have a huge impact, but keeping our money away from bad publishers and giving it to good ones will help.

Maybe you can do something with the tampermonkey extension to catch when that audio is triggered and have it do an api call that your script catches?

I don’t know if that’ll actually work, I know of the extension but have never it used nor am I skilled with Javascript but it seems feasible.

This doesn’t fit the question exactly but I feel it’s in the same spirit, and a kind of interesting solution, I think.

Back in the early days of scryptcoin mining, I had a few gpu mining rigs running Linux. Occasionally they would hard lock and I’d have to power cycle them.

What I ended up doing is getting some usb to serial adapters, wrote a python script that ran on startup and would send a character over serial at a set interval in a loop. That was hooked up, if I recall correctly, to an attiny85 using softwareserial and some ttl to rs232 conversion. It would listen over serial and if it didn’t receive anything with a reasonable time frame it’d flip a relay that cut mains power to the pc, then flipped it back. A deadman’s switch, of a sort. It worked great!

I wouldn’t call ChromeOS Linux anymore than I would call MacOS FreeBSD (oversimplified comparison, but it works for my point).

It may be based on a Linux kernel but it contains closed source code that’s needed for essential functionality, and we don’t get to choose hardware independently of the OS, nor a different OS for the hardware.

It’s an ecosystem that’s hostile to user rights and in my opinion doesn’t fit the spirit of what Linux is.

Edit: I suppose that’s a bit gatekeeperish? But I don’t think Linux adoption should be achieved at the cost of user freedom and choice. It loses what makes it special at that point.

Yeah, I see a fair amount of gatekeeping and condescension in Linux communities. I also see a lot of people who truly want to be helpful, but that aspect is there.

I’ve seen Linux compared to car ownership a number of times, and I think that’s an apt comparison. I have the knowledge to use and perform basic maintenance on a car, and I have no interest in learning more. It’s a tool made for a purpose. Some people love to tinker with cars, and I can understand that. I love Linux and enjoy tinkering with it, but it generally won’t “just work” for most users. Yes, if you’re setting it up for your grandparents and they just need a web browser or something like that it’s probably fine but most users that aren’t Linux savvy are going to run into issues.

Linux is becoming ever more usable, and I think usage will continue to increase alongside that, but I don’t see it ever becoming a major personal desktop platform. Wouldn’t mind being wrong, but Linux will be fine, regardless.

That was more ranty than I had expected!