• 2 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2024

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  • The long and short of it is this:

    • Linux is the kernal, the bit of the OS responsible for interacting with hardware and organising processes that run
    • GNU packages are a collection of small software programs that are present in virtually every Linux distro (things like bash, grep, and libc) that are needed to make the OS do useful things.
    • together they make up “GNU/Linux”, which is often shortened to simply Linux. Which is fine, people will understand what you’re talking about from context, and only pedantic asshats will correct you in general conversation. This is the internet though and you’re bound to run into a pedantic asshat from time to time.





  • I disagree that Nix is a solution in search of a problem, in fact it solves arguably the two biggest problems in software deployment: dependency hell and reproducibility (i.e. the “It works on my machine” problem)

    Every package gets access to the exact version of all the dependencies it needs (without needless replication like Flatpaks would have) and sharing a flake to another machine means you can replicate that exact setup and guarantee it will be exactly the same

    Containers try to solve the same problems, and succeed to a somewhat decent extent, although with some overhead of course.

    I’m not trying to criticize you or your setup at all, if Debian alone works for you, that’s fine. The beauty of open source and self hosting is that we can use whatever tools we want, however we want. I do though think it’s good practice to be aware of what alternatives are out there should our needs change, or should our tools change to no longer align with our needs.



  • It’s hard to recommend any Chromium-based browser in 2026 as Chromium no longer supports Manifest v2 extensions, breaking support for essential content blockers like uBlock Origin.

    Even Brave, which has a built-in adblocker not based on extensions, is loaded with AI and Crypto bs, and as far as I’m aware, the adblocker portion of its code is closed source. This isn’t even mentioning the horrific political opinions expressed by the CEO of that company.

    I keep a copy of raw ungoogled Chromium around for webUSB firmware flashing, but that’s it.

    If I were you, I would try and figure out what is causing firefox-based browsers to run slowly - i.e. toggling on/off hardware acceleration in browser settings and see if that makes a difference.