Man that’s a hard sell when the starlite is going for $627 https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite

$70 cheaper with better specs is a no brainer

The success of KDE depends on maintaining and attracting new developers. C++ is decreasing in popularity, with less people becoming willimg to learn it overtime. Adding more modern languages to the mix that are more pleasant to write with will help keep KDE popular with devs.

I think moving beyond C++ is critical for the long term success of KDE, glad to see it’s a new goal

Like many others, I have mixed feelings on this. If anyone is stopping by and doesn’t want to read through the linked forum thread, this is frameworks goal:

This isn’t a program to get people to go to conferences and rep Framework, it’s a program to give people who are already going to conferences and showing off their Framework some swag and opportunities to talk with the team. It’s not assigning work, it’s just saying thank you to people who are excited about Framework and active in the Linux community.

This isn’t a joke. Often times rewriting features like this will allow the code to be more streamlined and use the latest KDE library features. This is brining new features using modern and more maintable code that solves long standing issues. Fixing the old code sometimes isn’t worth the effort for a variety of reasons (based on unmaintained libraries, the original code might have been written a while ago so it’s had many revisions of fixes that necessarily complicated the code, etc.)

When my pixel 5a decided to stop using the screen, I was able to do a full phone backup using the OTG to plug in a keyboard. Ridiculous but was a fun troubleshooting moment

Maybe the most impactful, easiest, and most expensive thing is to get your information off of the internet. There are a few services that do this like incogni but I’d recommend kanary. The gist is they have a list of known data brokers and they send out requests to them, on your behalf, to remove your information from their services.

I’ve used incogni and kanary. I’m not a fan of incogni. They have a list of data sellers and blast each one with requests to remove your data, whether or not they actually have it. Additionally I’ve been asked many times to verify information they found to see if its mine. Its not, like not even close. Same last name but the first name, age, and location are way off.

Kanary’s been much better about targeting my specific information for removal. Its more expensive but I think they do a better job overall. I’m definitely more confident in them than incogni.

I have no complaints with the framework keyboard, is there a particular issue you’re concerned about? The track pad is almost apple quality. Certainly better than most laptops I’ve used.

Love my 11th gen framework, but there is an issue with the 11th gens where the CMOS battery will die rather quickly. If it does die then the laptop needs to be plugged in to turn on, even if it is fully charged. Framework is aware of the issue and will send a free replacement battery or, if you can solder, a mod that will eliminate the issue for good.

Still love framework and would definitely recommend them - but the 11th gen line (their first product) has a few gotchas

I was looking into this last night, what’s the current Dev status of termux? I saw the last release is from 2022 and there’s a call for more maintaiers.

I’ve been using Addy for years and it’s been great. I believe I’m on the lite plan and have never (to my knowledge) hit any limits. Definitely recommend.

Oh it hurts real bad

Not sure your budget, but you might be interested in one of these https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite

I’ll start this by saying I’m not familiar with either model, but as a general rule, always go x86 when you can. The Intel processor is going to be much better supported. You might get the snapdragon version to run, but it likely isn’t supported by mainline Linux.

That being said, touch screen support on Linux is improving rapidly, but still isn’t quite there. Make sure you’re aware of the user experience before buying so you won’t be disappointed.

Also, my unsolicited 2 cents, I would try to avoid buying lenovo. I’ve had the unfortunate responsibility of fixing a few of their products (an all-in-one and a few laptops, including a new thinkpad) and can confidently say their reliability, and repairability have greatly diminished. They use cheap parts and are in general, poorly designed.

Onshape hands down. Browser based so there’s no compatibility issues. It’s super easy to use and pretty powerful. Its free for hobbiests (the caveat being your models will be publically accessible). We use it exclusively at work and it’s been awesome.

Onshape.com

I’d love a good Foss CAD package but there are too many issues with the current ones for me to make the jump.

A (small) part of not putting all your eggs in one basket is also avoiding vender lock-in. Having your personal email with proton, and your password manager with them makes it very difficult to switch in the future if you need to.

On a side note, I use anonaddy (now Addy.io). It allows you to create email aliases on the fly. So when I sign up for a new account somewhere, I generally make up some email like “[email protected]” for the email and save that right to bitwarden.

Looks like simplelogin supports the same thing https://simplelogin.io/blog/subdomains/

PS. Using your own domain name is a great way to avoid vender lock-in =)

Opnsense has an arguably better UI, and more frequent updates.

You can look into the drama about the pfsense devs when opnsource forked it but the tldr is the pfsense devs were openly hostile in a variety of unprofessional and uncalled for ways to opnsense.

More recently, pfsense devs rushed the wire guard integration which turned out to be so problematic that the wire guard devs had to publicly comment that it shouldn’t be included inorder to prevent it from shipping. One of the reasons why opnsense forked a few years prior was due to bad code quality of pfsense.

Also my two cents, if you’re going to create this list to benefit the community and you don’t want to include too many options, then you’ll need to make informed decisions on which projects to include and why. Relying on the community is fine, and crowed sourcing knowledge is powerful, but don’t ignore large projects without researching them

Don’t forget opnsense for router firmware

Something I’ve been wanting to work on is a TUI wizard for configuring software.

The thought is most Linux server program use various config files, and in order to configure them correctly it generally takes a few minutes to a few hours to read through their documentation. But a lot of the configuration boils down to passwords/keys, file paths, network locations, a few different booleans, etc.

So the general idea is, for a program, the developer or the community can provide a config file telling the TUI wizard what arguments the config file needs, and this one program can walk the end user through setup and generates the config files. This would reduce the amount of time hunting through documentation and reduce bugs due to typos or invalid choices.

It could go a step further and auto generate keys or passwords if needed, validate entries (ie if the config needs an IP it could make sure it’s valid, etc)