I hate to admit sometimes that the Chrome experience (especially on mobile) can be a lot smoother and quicker to load, but Firefox wins every time on extensibility. But to your point yes the hate directed Firefox’s way can be well, a bit much.
I believe Firefox is completely FOSS.
Looks like it is! I was under the apparently false impression that it was only partly.
Well, because FOSS apps are usually the best/most user friendly option even if they’re not always the most popular. If you woke up after a 30 year coma and had no prior commitments to using any particular software, there would be absolutely zero question that Linux is the best OS today.
An OS is a complicated thing, yet the FOSS option is the safest, most user friendly, and most versatile. I’m just a little surprised there isn’t a browser that checks those boxes too, since the browser is a widely used thing. But I’m guessing because Firefox exists the number of devs willing to give the time investment just isn’t as many.
I’m not under the impression that a web browser is a simple thing to build but with Linux advancing the way it has in recent years it continues to surprise me that the “best” browser out there isn’t FOSS.
Hopefully that is about to change!
+1 for this recommendation. Gnome is going to feel more familiar to a MacOS user and Silverblue is very resilient.
That alt text is just TOO real
Eh, I would have agreed a few years ago. But now default Ubuntu boots up basically looking like MacOS with the browser (firefox by default, not Chrome) right there in your face ready to launch. For someone truly not aware how to use a computer beyond a browser it couldn’t be much easier (except booting directly into the browser). The only thing preventing that from catching on is that those people don’t even know what an operating system is, let alone that it could be changed.
The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it’s just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there’s a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there’s a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser.
This is more or less describing one of the many immutable distros that only run programs with flatpaks. It’s entirely feasible if someone wanted to make a distro with even less functionality, but why?
Man I am the complete opposite. I need my browser to display the Web with tons and tons of tweaks and adjustments and filters in place to make it actually readable for me. Rawdogging the Web in 2025 is wild.
Using a camera on public property in the EU is broadly very legal.
Thanks for the explainer, that last point is really great actually and I’m surprised that Amazon/Google etc are pushing for Matter if the data isn’t sent to the internet.
I love the notion that even Twitter users had too much empathy and the platform wasn’t getting Nazified fast enough on it’s own so they had to program a robot to go around and spread propaganda.
Not sure if you are looking for blogs but I this guy is a good writer: https://rys.io/en/index.html
I am just getting started on this journey but zigbee seems great and I like that it works fine even if the wifi goes down. I’m not sure what the drawbacks are or the benefits of Matter.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I also think the goal of the AI companies is not to actually create a functioning AI that could “do a job 20% as good as a human, but 90% cheaper”, but to sell fancy software, whether it works or not, and leave the smaller companies holding the bag after they lay off their workforce.
Right? It actually makes me feel insane that the topic of “humans working less” is never in the selling points of these products.
Honestly I suspect that rather than some nefarious capitalist plot to enslave humanity, it is just more evidence that the software can’t actually do what the people selling it to big corporations claim it can do.
This bit at the end, wow:
Gartner still expects that by 2028 about 15 percent of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents, up from 0 percent last year.
Agentic AI is wrong 70% of the time, but even assuming a human employee is barely correct most of the time and wrong 49% of the time, is it really still more efficient to replace them?
For YouTube tutorial videos I have no issue with relying on GPT, but I think it’s important to recognize that the translation of art is art. I don’t feel good about the idea of something without a soul or perspective interpolating a work of art from one culture and language into another that might be wildly different from where it started.
That all said, I think Crunchyroll and anyone else using AI art without disclosing it absolutely should be honest about it.
From someone waking up from a coma without experience with Windows or MacOS, Linux truly is the most user friendly. It may not have been true five years ago but in my mind it is without question true now.