Until recently, Wayland development was rather slow, especially in the areas where more specialized software run into issues that force them to stick with X11. Since Wayland does a lot less than X11 and is more componetized across multiple libraries designed to be swappable, some of these areas simply do not have solutions. Yet.

And, as always with FOSS, funding is a big part of the problem. The recent funding boosts the GNOME foundation received have also led to some increased funding for work on Wayland and friends. In particular, accessibility has been almost nonexistent on Wayland, so that also means that if an app wants to ensure certain levels of accessibility, they can’t switch to Wayland. GNOME’s Newton effort is still very alpha, but promising.

While big apps like blender and krita get good funding, they can’t necessarily solve the problem themselves by throwing money at it, either. But the more funding Wayland gets to fill in the feature-gaps and ease adoption, the sooner we’ll be able to move away from xwayland as a fallback.

Wayland and its whole implementation process certinally aren’t without fault. There’s a lot of really justified anger and frustration all around. Even so, staying on X11 isnt a solution.

While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

The appearance of similarities between Generative AI and the unconscious mind do not mean there is any actual equivilance to be had. We gotta stop using the same terminology to describe generative AI as we do humans because they are not the same thing in the slightest. This only leads to further unintentional bias, and an increased likelihood of seeing connections with the unconscious mind that don’t actually exist.

Wonder I’d they’ll allow reordering the buttons and possibly adding other items from the … Menu or extensions. I kinda doubt it since customization on mobile has always been limited, but then again, the old UI had no extra space to work with in the first place.

What drives me crazy about its programming responses is how awful the html it suggests is. Vast majority of its answers are inaccessible. If anything, a LLM should be able to process and reconcile the correct choices for semantic html better than a human… but it doesnt because its not trained on WIA-ARIA… its trained on random reddit and stack overflow results and packages those up in nice sounding words. And its not entirely that the training data wants to be inaccessible… a lot of it is just example code wothout any intent to be accessible anyway. Which is the problem. LLM’s dont know what the context is for something presented as a minimal example vs something presented as an ideal solution, at least, not without careful training. These generalized models dont spend a lot of time on the tuned training for a particular task because that would counteract the “generalized” capabilities.

Sure, its annoying if it doesnt give a fully formed solution of some python or js or whatever to perform a task. Sometimes it’ll go way overboard (it loves to tell you to extend js object methods with slight tweaks, rather than use built in methods, for instance, which is a really bad practice but will get the job done)

We already have a massive issue with inaccessible web sites and this tech is just pushing a bunch of people who may already be unaware of accessible html best practices to write even more inaccessible html, confidently.

But hey, thats what capitalism is good for right? Making money on half-baked promises and screwing over the disabled. they arent profitable, anyway.

Right, and then not watch YouTube or Netflix or anything on my… TV… Good plan!

Roku was such an easy recommendation for a long time… Non-complex UI, long support for updates, not owned by google or amazon… Far cheaper than LG and Samsung… (Not that Samsung’s UI is anywhere near as easy as roku)

But now I guess thats done. Unless an alternate firmware exists or this doesn’t hit older TVs I guess I’ll be looking for a new TV… Which is a shame because my current 4 year old roku TV is more than capable.

I picked up one of the ARZOPA ones and they are fine. Not the best looking, but good enough for a second monitor on the go. I used to take my ipad 9.7" with me places for this purpose and even though the image isnt as good, its way less effort to carry around.

I wouldnt use it as a single monitor regularly, nor for gaming.

I had to keep using the usb-c cable that came with it. Not sure if its a specific protocol that my thunderbolt 4 cables dont support or not. Minor inconvenience i havent looked into further.

Don’t feed the troll.

Especially not one that uses mental illness as an insult.

I tried to use Copilot but it just kept getting in the way. The advanced autofill was nice sometimes, but its not like i’m making a list of countries or some mock data that often…

As far as generated code… especially with html/css/js frontend code it consistently output extremely inaccessible code. Which is baffling considering how straightforward the MDN, web.dev, and WCAG docs are. (Then again, LLMs cant really understand when an inaccessable pattern is used to demonstrate an onclick instead of a semantic a or to explain aria-* attributes…)

It was so bad so often that I dont use it much for languages I’m unfamiliar with either. If it puts out garbage where i’m an expert, i dont want to be responsible for it when I have no knowledge.

I might consider trying a LLM thats much more tuned to a single languge or purpose. I don’t really see these generalized ones being popular long run, especially once the rose-tinted glasses come off.

Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”

Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.

The page title isn’t necessarily visible on the web page that sets the title.

Clicking is not always a simple task.

I shouldn’t have to leave my current page just to figure out what another tab is.

Again, just because you feel something is useless or easily avoided doesn’t mean that all internet users feel the same.

Tooltips are a standard accessibility feature. Just because you may not find them helpful doesn’t mean others do not benefit. The delay is to ensure they don’t get in the way unintentionally (but still allow usage) for those who do not need the accessibility benefit at all times.

https://whatpwacando.today/ is a nice site to test things out. You should see the option to install on Firefox for android, as well as verify what features work.

Glad it finally landed in main, I’ve been using nightly to install PWA’s for a while. It worked fine, but having the two different browsers to juggle for initial install was a pain.

+1

the UI could be improved (I always end up hovering for tooltips on controls) but it works really well.

I also like that tabs will stay in the stash by default on close, so its great for opening a bunch of reference sites really quickly without worrying about losing them

Closest thing to the old firefox experiment from a few years back.

Having as many followers as he does on the fediverse right now is difficult. There aren’t any tools or options to reduce the flood of notifications you get or do do any sort of sane filtering (especially on mastodon) so i totally understand why he often reacts the way he does. You cant feasibly block or de-federate when your reach is so large.

The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.

Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”

Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.

If you know how to add a real “delete” entry that would be great.

At least in nautilus 42 the preferences let you enable a permanent delete option in the right click menu, if that’s what you are looking for.

not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird

The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.

UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.

I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.

I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.

(My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)

I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.

I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.