Firefox + uBlock Origin + sponsorblock. Set it and forget it.

I haven’t seen an advertisement or a sponsored segment on my desktop in over a decade, and same with my phone for several years. I’m astonished how willing most people are to put up with a constant barrage of ads coming from devices they own

Firefox allows all addons now on mobile but for a while it was only a few selected addons (ublock origin being one of them)

I am currently using 19 extensions on mobile

Brave is a bad product as of now.

Firefox with ublock is at least acceptably performant on desktop and mobile without all the crypto/tracking downsides of Brave or the open unpatched vulnerabilities (as of this posting) of Chrome/chromium (that also affect Brave)

The name is awful. I’d rather see the posts here if that’s the name of the community

You should switch to Firefox with ublock origin.

Brave is a mess of a browser and a dumpster fire of an organization, even compared to the famously dysfuctional Mozilla.

You can look up your games on ProtonDB and see which will and won’t work. Pirated games are no different from retail compatibility-wise but there might be one or two extra steps

Wayland is a mess for me with Plasma 6 (Fedora) but i’m not going back to X11. Quite a few features i use(d) have been broken along the way.

On the upside high DPI support is getting better and better

Suspend and hibernate both work 100% of the time for me so far on both of my laptops, and have for as long as i’ve had them.

Thinkpad x270 Fedora (current) KDE spin

Thinkpad x250 Ubuntu 24.04 GNOME

Fully working since 2019 and 2016 respectively. I have not tested opening the lid after just 5 seconds so i can’t say for sure how long it takes.

My previous laptop before these (an x200) would sometimes fail to suspend and get super hot in my bag before running out of battery. I was using Gentoo at the time and i suspect i had something configured incorrectly. It only happened a few times but it was pretty frustrating.

nano but i’m a casual. i can use vi/vim in a pinch, but i’m inefficient. ed and emacs are totally foreign

i tend to use a graphical text editor like Kate unless there is a specific reason to do it in the terminal

Ah i see. You are right, new hardware would need new drivers.

If MS just released the source of W95 as GPL you could still use the existing proprietary drivers, but like now you’d still have to download them from each vendor.

Making it possible to study the code itself would allow WINE devs to audit their code for edge cases and get W95-era compatibility to pretty much 100%

Devices should be supported longer than 14 years. There is nothing about a 1st gen kindle that makes it incompatible with modern technology. For Amazon, an immortal entity, to act like 14 years is already gracious is nonsense. A 20 year lifespan (including repairs) should be the bare minimum standard.

Humans live 80-100 years. I shouldnt have to buy 6 or more e-readers (or 25+ smartphones) over my lifespan just to have access to one

Cutting them off from the online store is one thing, but the fact that they are bricked if you deregister or factory reset them is awful

I have a kindle keyboard that hasn’t been online in over a decade, but still gets regular use. i upload drm-free ebooks i own using Calibre. Now it will be impossible for me to give it away since it is forever zombie locked to my Amazon account

compared to clicking “next” on Fedora, Debian, or Mint

I’d say using a simple straightforward GUI is much easier than an arcane combination of commands and keypresses

I’ve never “debloated” Windows so idk about the top half.

The bottom half is accurate. Debian, Fedora, and Mint are easier to install than Windows 10 or 11. Not that Windows is difficult, it’s just a bit clunky and idiosyncratic.

I assume Microsoft doesn’t care much about the installer since it’s generally only used by OEMs, whereas for Linux distros it’s a first impression so it has to be polished.