Music lover and English teacher with an interest in slightly geeky things

mastodon / blog / listenbrainz

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I file all of this under “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

    • Qwant has claimed since 2016 that they have an index. That lie has earned them investments and funding. They do not have an index and they’ve said so after the fact. They also give data to Bing. They are not private but they say they are because the data they share is anonymized.

    • Ecosia is just a Bing frontend like DDG. Caron offsets never work. In order for Ecosia to work you need to see and click on some ads, so anybody using adblockers will not be helping. Their servers aren’t green either.

    • This is because Bing is going to raise their prices and now these companies need to lure in new investors to keep the lights on. It isn’t about sovereignty or data privacy; it’s just about money.


  • If you’ve just installed Ubuntu, stick with it for a bit. Get things set up the way you like them. Make a mess if you must. But don’t switch because someone on the internet said one is better than the other. Lots of the Linux sites are just content farms (that 9to5 site) and copy other sites and then people read those and they suggest what they read.

    Mint does have some bespoke tools that users like, but those tools can be installed on other distros.

    Anyway. First, play around, make a mess, clean it up, get used to it. Then figure out how to backup the configs before you reinstall a new distro.

    Other beginner distros are Zorin and Elementary.

    I’m a Debian user myself, but I’ve been around and have tried many different distros, WMs, DEs, etc. over the past 19 years. Keep messing around and you’ll find your comfort zone.


  • Wow, LXQt is just motoring along aren’t they. I use LXQt as my daily driver, but on good old Debian Stable I won’t be seeing this for years haha. Looks like it is only available in the AUR and on Pisilinux (which is cool because it’s only just been released!).









  • I ended up using Khal too. Hesitant at first, it wound up being good enough for me, especially when it comes to mass importing events. It syncs with my CalDav and phone when using vdirsyncer. 5 to 10 minutes fiddling with the config and haven’t needed to change anything in years.


  • I did this for several months. If you check out the Alpine community you’ll see that many people do this. So, it is not a dumb idea. Alpine is a “generalist” distro and comes packed with all the DEs and WMs you want. They also accept package requests and are usually pretty fast about it.

    I would recommend using the Edge branch just to have access to the newest packages, but keep an eye on the issue tracker before hitting update. Also, get on their Matrix and other accounts to follow different discussions.


  • Many have surprised me for different reasons.

    The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.

    First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so well, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.