You misspelled “sketchy.”

An alternative would be to run gonic or Navidrome - both are OpenSubsonic servers, and provide synced lyrics support. Then use the ostui client which plays music and displays synchronized lyrics.

My experience with Brother was also good, until it got tipped during a move and came out simply covered in toner. We don’t really need a new printer, but I’d buy another Brother LaserJet in a heartbeat.

My Canon regularly gives me grief. My Epson Ecotank, OTOH, has been painless.

Shamelessly shilling my OSS project, rook. It provides a secret-server-ish headless tool backed by a KeePass DB.

• Headless server
• Optional and convenient integration with the kernel keyring (on Linux), for locking the server to only provide secrets to the user’s session
• Provides a range of search, list, and get commands
• Minimal dependencies and small code base make rook reasonably auditable

You might be interested in rook if you’re a KeePassXC user. Why might you want this instead of:

• Gnome secret-server, KDEs wallet, or pass? rook uses your (a) KeePass DB, while most other projects store secrets in their own DBs and require (usually manual) sync’ing when passwords change.
• One of the browser secret storage? Those also keep a bespoke DB which needs to be synced, and they’re limited to browser use. Rook supports using secrets in cron jobs or on the command line (e.g. mbsync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, etc, etc).
• KeePassXC? KeePassXC does provide a secret service that mocks Gnome secret-service, but you have to keep KeePassXC (a GUI app) running even if you only rarely use the UI. Rook can also be used on a headless machine.
• The KeePassXC command line tool? That requires entering the password for every request, making it tedious to use and impractical for automated, periodic jobs.

Rook is read-only, and intended to be complementary to KeePassXC. The KeePassXC command line tools are just fine for editing, where providing a password for every action is acceptable, and of course the GUI is quite nice for CRUD.

Broadcom, as you’ve discovered. That’s the one brand that I’ve always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They’re horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.

Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn’t supported but Bluetooth does.

A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I’ve not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).

Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I’ve come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It’s an awful piece of software to have to work with.

Yes - agreed on a points.

I think what the blogger of trying is to use OSS wherever it’s possible. There are clearly parts which are not, but there are OSS BIOS alternatives to proprietary ones, OSS firmwares for some devices, OSS phones, OSS routers, and so on. By “maximizing” they just meant doing everything that was possible. Using an OSS-only operating system and software is the bare minimum and - as you said - is something many of us do: that’s the easy part. Going the next step and replacing your phone, tablet, BIOS, and everywhere it’s possible to use OSS is the “maximizing” part.

I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it’s almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife’s laptop and she’s been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full -Syu upgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it’s not a core package.

You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven’t tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven’t tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.

I agree that Arch isn’t the best “first linux” distribution.

There isn’t one. It’s just increasingly unnecessary.

I, personally, have an issue with people taking millions of LOC of software written by other people and given away for free, slapping a logo on it, and selling it to people who don’t know better, but thre licenses generally don’t prevent carpet-bagging.

IMHO, selling an OS your organization built most of is fine. Selling support, or hosting, is also ethical. Selling Libre software is not.

Native apps are being replaced with web apps.

Are they?

A few years ago it seemed for a while that Electron was cropping up everywhere, but it’s been tapering off over the past couple of years. I don’t think I’ve come across a new Electron app in the past several months, and every project that did start out as Electron now has several native alternatives. Riot/Element is a good example.

The trend I see is away from web apps. It’s still a popular platform and for anything that is fundamentally networked I’d agree that few native apps are being developed. I haven’t seen a native version of the Home Assistant client interface, for instance. But for web apps to replace native apps, there’d have to be a trend to either move native apps to the cloud, or for platforms like Electron to surge and displace native toolkits. I observe that the reverse of the latter is happening; and for the former, while there are a lot of cloud-ifying projects, I don’t see that they’re replacing native apps.

My first glance at the photo - before reading the title or fully parsing what I was looking at - I thought it was a Wolverine cosplay.

The article wasn’t about just running Linux: it was about trying to maximize use of OSS software in their personal compute. They write about using an OSS BIOS, OSS phone - everything that can conceivably and possibly be done.

I don’t recall if they talk about their modem, or switches; I think it’s just their personal computing devices. Still, it’s an interesting journey. I’m really nervous about replacing the BIOS; LibreBoot and CoreBoot look interesting, but I’m not in a place where I can afford to brick my computer.

Maybe we could set up a battle royale; tell them the side that wins gets all of the other sides’ paramilitary equipment.

On your phone, too? Your router? Modem?

Or maintain a repos. Which would force people to create an account on one of the free VCS servers, pay for an account on a non-free one, or run their own.

He also never, ever let anyone into the factory (until the events in the book), so public safety concerns weren’t an issue.

Now, the Oompa Loompas… they’re not naturally sterile, because they’re wearing clean suits later, but it could be that they are more buoyant so their safety if they fall in is less of an issue.

Wonka has magical technology. He’s probably perfectly sterilizing the chocolate later in the process.

Yes! Augustus fell in; he didn’t intentionally go swimming in it.

I think this is an effort by Fedora to deprecate X11 without pissing off a large chunk of their userbase by announcing deprication by fiat, as other distributions and projects are.

If XLibre is mostly one guy, who has demonstrated alarming gaps in his understanding of C, and who has a history of pushing regressions, the X on Fedora will become unstable and people will voluntarily switch to Wayland. Between those and people who will switch out of protest because of the maintainer’s politics, eventually there’ll be so few X users Fedora can say, “see? Nobody’s using X, so we’re going to deprecate it.”

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it’s easier to believe than that Fedora’s leadership is choosing to depend on an essentially one-man-fork with QC issues and a maintainer who keeps his controversial politics up front in the project README, before any other technical information.

But my shiney!!

This has bcachefs vibes. I don’t think anyone questions Overstreet’s C competency, but his habit of pushing last minute changes without sufficient testing and ignoring the process to try to sneak in changes outside approved windows displays a similarly cavalier mindset.

Laxity about QC is not a great trait in a project maintainer.