Yeah, that ship has sailed.

I use Fennec F-Droid on Android and LibreWolf on Linux/Mac/Windows.

The only mistake Billy made is giving anything to AdBlock Plus, the people who have sided WITH the ads, instead of uBlock Origin, the true MVPs of the ad blocking world. I guess uBlock doesn’t accept donations unfortunately, but still, ABP is shady and I would not support them.

I just donate by whatever means the project offers. Sometimes it’s paypal, sometimes patreon, sometimes GitHub sponsorship, sometimes something else like OpenCollective. Read the readme or homepage of the project to see what options they take.

Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.

Also, explicit confirmation of your customizations and of your order. You can double check yourself to make sure it’s all correct before submitting the order while the distracted and overworked employee at the counter could hit the wrong button or skip a customization and you often wouldn’t know until you receive the wrong item. Then you have to create more work for the workers to get your order remade.

Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You’ve got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it’s time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla’s bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it’s not adware.

Radxa as well. I have a Rock Pi 4B running as my home server and it has been a great Pi 4 alternative. I also have an Indiedroid Nova with RK3588S which should be better than the Pi 5 bit the GPU drovers aren’t quite there yet. Once GPU drivers are in it should be an incredible board.

Both Huaying and Delta fans are OEM, your Deck could have either fan. Valve has multiple suppliers for some parts.

Only buy routers that have OpenWRT support, problem solved. Why trust your entire network and all of the data transferred over it to proprietary garbage?

Is it so hard to just pay using credit cards? Why do we need dystopian biometric nonsense feeding the data mines in order to pay for food? Paying for stuff is a solved problem. Fuck everything about this.

No, that goes against the spirit of open source and will further hurt Linux gaming outside of the Deck. The Deck has been a huge boon to the Linux gaming community at large because it sticks to a basic Arch Linux core for the most part. Don’t segregate the Linux gaming community, instead force the shitty spyware companies to not embed their shitware deep into the kernel.

I don’t want to move my project to a group, which is the only way to use those minutes. It used to be that any public project with a FOSS license got access to the FOSS minutes but now only the ones they approve do, and as I said, there are restrictions like having to have the project under a group. At least gitlab-runner is self hostable, but it’s a depressing mess compared to what it used to be.

GitLab has gone downhill over the past several years to the point I cannot recommend it anymore. Requiring a credit card is a kick to the face of younger devs wanting to get their feet wet in open source. The CI minutes that free accounts and FOSS projects get is insultingly pathetic. Their open source program that you have to apply for is intentionally annoying, requiring you to manually get re-approved yearly and the benefits only work for FOSS projects under a group, not a personal account. It’s tolerable if you self-host your own runners and forget their shit excuse for a managed CI exists, but I’m also running into this super annoying issue where I get signed out of Gitlab almost daily and have to re-login and enter a verification code from my email. I have my project mirrored to Codeberg and if Codeberg had better CI I’d move completely, even if it were self hosted. Gitlab has gone way downhill since I moved to them after MS bought Github.

I would love to see gas stations putting in EV chargers, especially gas stations known for their food and snacks or travel stops that have restaurants because of the additional time taken to charge an EV vs. fill a gas car. Also it would be nice to see established companies run EV chargers that just let you pay with card at the “pump” like you do for gas rather than this app and account bullshit that all the mainstream networks have.

Hopefully this knocks down Tesla’s dominance in the charger ecosystem honestly, we need competition to take over that aren’t tied to a single vehicle manufacturer. Yes Tesla was going to open their network up to third party cars but they’re taking their sweet time in doing so. I hope competitors were able to swoop in and hire talent and take over broken contracts on abandoned charging station projects.

I find 1080p to be too small these days. For desktop use I like 1440p or 2160p (4K). For video, I don’t notice the difference between 1080 and 4K too much but for productivity it is a massive step up. My laptop is a 14" 1440p screen and I have an older laptop with a 13" 1440p screen. I use both with 100% scaling (no enlargement) and it’s fine. I don’t think it’s hard to see and I love having the extra screen real estate for coding and multitasking. Being able to have 2 windows side by side and still have enough room on each for a decent length line of code is great. For my desktop, I used a 28" 4K for a long time and being able to have 4 1080p windows open is amazing. 28" 4K is the same PPI as 14" 1080p, and I am already comfortable with 14" 1440p so from a reasonable distance it’s no problem. I went to a 27" 1440p for a while on my desktop after that because I upgraded to a 144Hz VRR display, but just last fall I again upgraded to a 32" 4K 144Hz VRR and it’s great. No problem with reading text at 100% scaling from a normal distance and it’s amazing for games. I do notice games being clearer at 4K but I mainly got the 4K monitor for productivity as I missed it and now that 144Hz 4K was available I wanted it back.

Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn’t ask for that you wish to sell me…that’s called advertising and I don’t care what dumb name you call it, they’re still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.

You can also use NVIDIA’s Pendulum G-Sync demo in Wine/Proton. Despite the name it does work for any VRR capable display/GPU and I’ve used it to test VRR on AMD and Intel graphics on Linux. As much as I dislike NVIDIA, it’s a pretty decent VRR test tool.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/

Youtube doesn’t care about the collective “you” that is its namesake. It hasn’t for over a decade. Itps all about the big studio level productions. It’s no better than the mainstream television networks at this point.