The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.

You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)

Probably. In all honestly, if you are a hexbear user, I’d be keeping a careful eye on who owns the domain when it magically pops back up.

The best path forward is that developers make their linux drivers before they release their hardware to the market. You know, like what they do for windows.

There’s no silver bullet here. You have to wait for someone to reverse engineer the drivers if the developers of the hardware don’t care enough to supply even basic linux driver support. Either that or linux becomes so popular that it becomes senseless to ignore it (let’s be real though, MacOS is popular enough for this to be true and yet there’s still new hardware made that ignores that platform too.)

I mean, my issue is that most buttons on my huion are still non bindable, and some graphical interfaces cannot be interacted with in mouse mode and only register as touch. Lastly, occasionally programs completely ignore pen sensitivity, such as blender.

This experience was when I was last on gnome. I’ve been on budgie for a while as a result of needing a tablet for my hobbies.

The lack of proper tablet support in wayland prevents me from being excited for this. I wish there was more news on that front.

Centralization is a weakness

While I agree with the basic premise of this, I think this is all-the-more a good reason for design solutions around this problem to be discussed so that more competitors can exist. If the fediverse is to expand, there needs to be easy non-technical ways for users to start up a multitude of instances. More of these types of services actually reduces centralization, in that sense.

Corporate internet doesn’t even filter out “uncomfortable” shit for people. They have a vested interest in keeping people engaged whether it’s through love or hate.

This is a misconception I see all the time. Reddit et al try their hardest to make browsing feel like a roller coaster to keep up engagement.

Whatever reason they don’t isn’t a very good one when there’s already excuses being made around AT proto not being scalable beyond a single app.

ActivityPub works today and we are using it right now. There’s basically no incentive to make a new protocol if you aren’t willing to support more than 1 platform that uses it.

I’m not even a bluesky hater, but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel other than disliking the lack of agency that comes with making a (essentially) proprietary protocol. You have to wonder if they ever truly plan to federated at all or if it’s all just lip-service.

It’s very strange that you’ve made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.

Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don’t know what types of issues you’re running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?

It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they’ll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!

That’s what I’m here for lol. I mean this is how reddit was when I first started there. Same with digg

This is what people always miss. Generally, sites become popular because niche subcultures form outside of the “big” websites as they no longer really serve their purpose of connecting to like minded individuals. They never “start big”, they generally snowball from small hardcore users to larger more generalized userbases over time.

Young people don’t even understand that the internet isn’t only the 5 websites that have existed since before they were born lol

That’s probably a big part of it. We kind of designed the internet to become an information super oligarchy, even if it wasn’t intentional.

I’m 33 for the record so I guess I’m an older tech nerd. Nice. 😎

Regarding VPNs, I wish this was an easier way of doing it. Unfortunately it requires all friends to be tech savvy enough to understand why a vpn is necessary.

I do agree that developers should use their own software, but doing so on a smaller instance with strict active user limits is probably the right call – at least until you are certain the software has a “stable” version, but even then you probably will want to run a master branch instance that is much less stable and prone to errors. Until you can afford it, it’s probably not a good idea for developers to be spending a huge amount of time debugging in-progress features (which IIRC, firefish had a lot of those.)

I was on firefish’s previous instance, known as calckey, before I migrated back to Mastodon.

There were definitely warning signs that the project was facing maintenance issues in those days as well, and it felt that the Firefish rebrand was an attempt to “start a new”.

But just like my post on KBin’s demise, it should be a warning to those who want to make the software and host a “big” instance: Don’t do it. I think it’s smart to host your own mini instance for testing, but you should probably solely focus on the code development side of things to make sure that you aren’t over burdening yourself with managerial tasks. If your software is good, people will make spins inevitably. If people use it, then you will probably have enough people contributing that you can scale up your mini-instance if needed. But don’t jump in without the finances in place, because you’re essentially taking on two jobs.

I mean, yes. But also no, it sort of depends.

If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.

If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)

I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.

My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.

I would use BTRFS and Snapper over using Timeshift due to the lack of granularity it has. You should be able to back up any volume you want, not just the home directories like Timeshift does.

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Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

I’m currently using debian with Docker.

If I were to do it again, though, I’d probably just use either fedora or the server equivalent to silverblue (I can’t remember the name). I am so heavy on docker use at this point that I wouldn’t mind going full immutable.

I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.

It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.