Onihikage

The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

tl;dr

• Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
• Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
• If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
• Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!

If “nearly every app” that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we’ve moved the needle backwards.

You have to meet people where they’re at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn’t been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows except MusicBee RIP, but now I’m in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there’s a little less friction between me and better, freer software.

When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being “potentially unsafe.” This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.

Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to “no information except maybe dangerous” is beyond me.

The Billet Labs prototype water block being so poorly handled was a consequence of them growing too big for Linus to manage; he hadn’t internalized that they weren’t six guys working out of a house anymore, but a proper medium sized business that didn’t need to strain for every bit of content to keep from going under, and could afford to slow down a little to get things right. They ended up taking a break from the constant grind to reorganize after GamersNexus put out a big piece on all the things LTT was doing wrong, all the sacrifices they were making to quality and accuracy for the sake of pushing out more and more content to stay relevant, and how badly they mishandled the prototype.

Not sure Linus has forgiven GN for the “hit piece” but I think they really needed the shock of it in order to get them to actually course correct immediately rather than keep putting it off.

Putin: “I don’t see what’s so hard to understand. All you have to do for the fighting to stop is to give me everything I want.”

What a clown.

Not that I know of; Bazzite is completely based on Fedora Atomic Desktops, which are an immutable type of distro that makes the core OS a read-only image that all gets updated separately from system apps. The Ubuntu equivalent of Fedora Atomic Desktops is Ubuntu Core, but I don’t know if Bazzite has a Ubuntu Core-based equivalent. Bazzite is released by a group called Universal Blue, which makes prepackaged OS builds based on Fedora Atomic Desktops, with particular focus areas. Bazzite focuses on including all gaming-related tweaks, apps, configs, and optimizations out of the box, Aurora focuses on general desktop PC functionality, and Bluefin focuses on productivity, but in the end they’re all Atomic/Immutable distros based on Fedora. It’s worth poking through it all and picking one that best suits your needs.

I switched to Bazzite not long after the Recall AI announcement, shrinking my Windows partition to leave it for just VR stuff which currently doesn’t work well outside of Windows, at least on my system. It’s pretty great! Not perfect, but the problems I have on Bazzite are similar enough in quantity and degree to problems I had on Windows that I’ve basically switched out one set of weird OS quirks for another. The big difference is now I don’t have to think about the OS being disrespectful corporate spyware.

If it was source available under a CLA, would it make sense for them to specify that they will retain control over the “official version” of the software? That would seem to imply they will not have control over unofficial versions, presumably differently-named forks.

Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version," explains Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp.

This line gives me some hope that it will actually be open-source:

Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version.

Would they really bother to specify “official version” if it was only source-available and forks weren’t allowed?

Atomic means the core OS packages are in an immutable container such that none of its individual components can be updated separately; instead the entire container is replaced with a newer version when the system is updated. This makes it much less likely for something to break during normal use, and easier to rollback updates if something does happen to break. The ideal use case is a containerized environment where each app you use is installed in its own container, like Docker, or is otherwise self-contained such as flatpak installers, and doesn’t rely on any of the system’s packages.

Can confirm, I like building furniture more than I like writing code. I am… just sort of okay at both.

If it’s got N95 filters in it, but the design is flawed in such a way that air can just flow around the filters even with ideal fitment, then the mask as a whole is not N95. Now, maybe their design wasn’t flawed, we don’t actually know that, but N95 is a NIOSH standard only given to products that NIOSH has received and tested to be at a certain standard; Razer neglected to submit their masks to NIOSH in order to get an official rating. Razer could have performed their own tests and listed the level of particulates it blocks at various levels, but marketing it as an N95 respirator implied NIOSH had verified it when they hadn’t, which is fraud.

Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting.

I really would like nothing more than to get some tasty, tasty STAR voting up in this mess we call a democracy.

It’s a fun coincidence to me that corpophilia is one transposition away from a literal scat fetish. They may as well be the same thing, honestly.

Democratize corporations.

Now taking bets on the day Mr. Salehpour “commits suicide” in a hotel parking lot.

The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.

Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.

Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.

YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.

Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.

Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.

It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.

It has better customization, better performance, and tab groups. I used TST for many years, switched to Sidebery only a few months ago. You can do stuff like set it to where tabs only activate on releasing the mouse, so you can rearrange unloaded tabs without activating them, or make it so middle clicking the tab close button unloads it instead. You can also rename tabs!

What you’re missing is that “vertical tabs” in this context isn’t talking about tabs literally turned on their side. We’re talking about tabs that are still horizontal, but instead of arranging the tabs along the top of the screen, and shrinking their width when there’s no room left, they’re given a fixed width and arranged in a vertical list on one side of the screen. The best implementations of this (such as Sidebery, which the previous screenshot is from) also allow tabs to be nested in a collapsible tree structure.

You sound like you’d really like the tree-style tabs offered by Sidebery on Firefox, or that’s built into Edge. Give it a try!

There are several addons that organize the tabs in the sidebar with a vertical, tree-style layout, with nested tabs that can be collapsed, just like a classic folder structure. This is what GreyBeard was referring to earlier in the thread when he said “The tabs are in a tree hierarchy”.

Tree Style Tab has been around since 2007; Sidebery is much newer, and IMO looks and performs better.

When you’re keeping things in a tree structure for visual grouping and using containers to manage different logins, bookmarks will lose the tree structure, and you’ll have to specify which container to open it in. If your workflow involves a dozen tabs per context, locating the bookmarks and reopening them every time you switch contexts is a significant time and productivity loss.

Consider the classic Evidence Board (also known as string wall, crazy wall, conspiracy board, etc.). Saving everything to bookmarks is the equivalent of putting your board’s contents into a drawer, then pinning everything back up whenever you need to look at or update that particular conspiracy. It works, but it’s cumbersome, error-prone, and wastes a lot of time; you’d only do this if you only have one board but multiple things to inspect. Leaving tabs open and simply unloading the inactive tab trees is like having multiple separate boards where you just roll them into a closet when you aren’t using them.