SiS 6326 with 8MB.

It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.

The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that’s just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.

Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.

This has been the story of Linux since the 1990s.

BSD does the same thing. They famously stuck at the gcc 4.2 series about a decade too long because of licenses.

Nothing new under the sun.

Fun interview, I didn’t realize he was educated as an actual medical doctor.

Yeah, I remember almost 20 years ago, an older dude telling me that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and giving me a copy of a movie called Zeitgeist on CD-R. That dude would be in his 60’s or late 50’s now.

Before that, people like Art Bell made a living on AM radio late at night with things like the Taos Hum and UFO’s and paranormal stuff.

Like, a lot of early US settlers got sent there because they were batshit crazy and a danger to society. The Puritans were kicked out of England, and then they were kicked out of the Netherlands of all places, how does that even happen, before they ran off to America and did a bunch of crazy shit. We think of the “Salem Witch Trials” with horror and then sing “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride” without batting an eye, who do you even think the Pilgrims were?

So a bunch of criminals and wackos settled the United States, and when they got too crazy for their village, they just moved west, killed the native men, fucked a bunch of children, and made another crazy village. Pocahantas was like 12. And then if someone got kicked out of that village for being crazy, rinse and repeat until you get shit like Mormonism in Utah and Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and bombing the Olympics and speaking in tongues and sponsoring genocide through Biblical Tourism of the Holy Land.

America is a land of crazy people who have been rewarded for generations for being batshit crazy, and have an ability to not see things clearly in front of their face. This is really nothing new.

No, I didn’t want a dark Section 31 series based on the Discovery/Picard “Dark Trek” writing style.

Michelle Yeoh winning the Oscar was an easy cop out. Now she’s in another league in terms of salary, and Paramount can’t afford to pay her for a streaming series. Both sides go their separate ways and the idea is dropped.

Fortunately for us, she loves the character and wanted to do at least one final act. So I guess the compromise is the movie instead of the series.

And that is cause for optimism because it likely means the script was good enough to draw her back, and concise enough that the Section 31 thing won’t be dragged out.

Hey, we’re finally getting a new Trek movie, and it has a big name actress behind it.

I was kind of hoping that after 2023, she would decide to not do this. I think Michelle Yeoh is fantastic, generational actress; but I’m highly skeptical of recent Star Trek works. She is by far the biggest name to return to the franchise.

Hopefully, they have an excellent story to match.

I don’t disagree. It comes fast. Take care of yourself my friend.

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

–Gnome Web from Flathub

–Chromium in the Debian repo

–Chromium in the CalyxOS build

I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.

Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”

But for me it being closed is a non-starter.

Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.

FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.

Never heard of it.

Haha j/k, of course Safari too, good catch. Just a non-starter for me since I don’t use any of the platforms it’s on.

Geary from Flathub for all the day to day, manage my life and family and financial stuff.

And Alpine for my personal email account from 25 years ago.

Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.

I never got it to work at anything over 4k several years ago.

I went down the rabbit hole and ended up just selling. Apple only ever released the driver for macOS and for Windows 10 with Bootcamp.

Apparently it will work in X11 with a few setup changes per this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6477626#post6477626

About 25 years ago, I used something called mlvwm which was designed to look like System 7.

I ran this on a 486 and later on a Duron system with something called “bochs” that let me run a full System 7 in a container.

A quick search shows that it is still around and has been forked by a couple of people.

X1 Nano:

• narrower than the old 11.6 laptops and slightly taller.
• Higher than 1080 screen due to the taller ratio.
• IPS display
• 0.97kg without charger.
• Thinkpad keyboard and track point.
• strong Linux support

Here is the PSREF for the first generation. They are up to Gen 3 of this line now.

I was too young for most of TNG but stuck with TNG sometime in season 6. I was a kid with single digit age when they destroyed the Enterprise D in the movie and it really messed with me. Then I grew up watching the entirety of DS9 and Voyager, and outgrew it by the end of VOY. Strange New Worlds pulled me back in as an adult.

Agree; Gnome on Fedora is just more polished in general than Gnome anywhere else. So sasy to add another language and that input language works everywhere including Flatpak apps Qt apps, etc. Fedora is winning me over in this regard and I’ve kind of been a Red Hat hater these days.

The theme to Star Trek IV. Underrated.

Also like the Klingon theme.