This is a great summary. Thanks!

It looks like you are running XFCE instead of GNOME (the normal Ubuntu desktop). I’m not sure how that happened… but you an always just install another desktop.

For instance, you can try to make sure you have the ubuntu-desktop or ubuntu-desktop-minimal metapackage installed:

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-minimal

After that, the login manager should allow you to select the Ubuntu session rather than the XFCE one.

Still using mutt after two decades (with isync for fetching).

Yes, based on the diagrams on their blog, it looks like this only impacts Snaps.

From the Discourse Blog:

The Linux desktop provides XDG Desktop Portals as a standardised way for applications to access resources that are outside of the sandbox. Applications that have been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals will continue to use them. Prompting is not intended to replace XDG Desktop Portals but to complement them by providing the desktop an alternative way to ask the user for permission. Either when an application has not been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals, or when it makes access requests not covered by XDG Desktop Portals.

Since prompting works at the syscall level, it does not require an application’s awareness or cooperation to work and extends the set of applications that can be run inside of a sandbox, allowing for a safer desktop. It is designed to enable desktop applications to take full advantage of snap packaging that might otherwise require classic confinement.

So this looks like it complements and not replaces the XDG Desktop Portals, especially for applications that have not implemented the Portals. It allows you to still run those applications in confinement while providing some more granular access controls.

I used to use VLC for music, but these days I use Symphony to play local files on my phone. VLC tended to struggle when scanning or indexing large folders (which it did all the time…), while Symphony is a bit better at that. That said, I still use VLC for video and for casting things from my DLNA server (VLC supports Chromecast).

For ebooks, I’ve used Librera FD and that has been mostly OK. I’ll checkout the two you mentioned though. Thanks!

I think you meant Pop!_OS (is developed by System76). TuxedoOS is developed by Tuxedo Computers, which is a European Linux focused hardware company.

That said, the point stands… there are hardware companies making Linux supported devices.

I’ve been using Weechat-Android to connect to my self-hosted Weechat for over a decade. This is one of the killer mobile apps that keeps me on Android and I love it.

I also have a couple instances of thelounge that people use on mobile via the PWA (progressive web app).

Oh. I’m sorry if this was discussed previously… I only returned to lemmy a few weeks ago and didn’t see the story covered yet.

I think the WINE project was maintaining a fork of Mono that was used to support running certain Windows applications:

https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

So in addition to translating traditional WIN32 system calls, WINE also supports .NET applications, which a number of Windows programs require.

Depends on your perspective, I guess. To me, GNOME is now pretty mature, stable, and reliable. That is one of the reasons why I left Pop-shell for a more vanilla GNOME experience.

COSMIC has a lot of hype right now, but based on my experience (and others), it is not at all stable or ready as daily driver. That is not to say it isn’t exciting but at this point in time I value stability and being able to just use my computer and GNOME provides that.

As the Linux luddites used to say, not all change is progress :)

Hmm. Why is that?

I’m not 100% sold on sailing… then again I’ve played OSRS < a year, so I still have a lot of other content left to explore.

As a regular Costco customer, I enjoyed reading this article. Thanks for sharing!

Coincidentally, I received a firmware (EFI) update from Dell today via LVFS. Really nice that it works so smoothly on native Linux (no more manually downloading firmware to USB drives, or relying on Windows).

The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside. Meanwhile, the EC has thus far declined to comment to share its official reasoning for striking this funding from its budget.

Sigh. It appears that they are chasing after the latest “shiny” thing instead of investing in existing infrastructure. Not surprising, but disappointing.

Pretty happy that we opted out of the Slack AI “feature” at work.

+1 For xournal++. That is what I usually use for annotating slides and drawing with my wacom tablet.

Based on what I can tell (I don’t usually use Windows), a patch was released on August 13th. As long as you are current with your Windows Updates, this shouldn’t be an issue.

What are your thoughts on SerenityOS?

Ok great. I pulled latest-node and it appears to be working again. Thanks for the quick fix!