I started with Ubuntu (when it was left, right and center in my country) but soon gravitated towards Debian. The old packages can be a pain sometimes ( I even tried running Debian Unstable for sometime and ironically that is quite Stable as well) but other things are quite sane.

The distro isn’t hard to use (though it does not hand hold like Zorin OS, say) compared to likes of Gentoo or Arch and deb packages are quite common (for third party software).

I ultimately(distro hopped a lot) settled on Void Linux but Debian, IMO, is still slightly easier. The only Achilles’ Heel is the woefully sore update cycle since the focus is on stability.

Sony also has the headphone jack I think. But Sony’s phone releases have gotten ahem much less frequent. I don’t think even the company is treating it with much foresight (I forget the last time I saw a Sony phone in somebody 's hands).

When million dollar AI companies pirate everything in the world

Silence

When one single person pirates something

Jail time

I wish it was available in more parts of the world. I don’t mind the mid range specs (they are decent enough for my use case). The long update cycle plus presence of microSD slot is a good thing. Does it have, by an chance, the good old 3.5 mm Jack as well?

It is. As if the layoffs (not helped with penetration of AI considering significant part of Indian tech sector is for low level jobs) were not bad enough, there are billionaires advocating for 70 hour work weeks (with one person even going for 90).

Technology was supposed to liberate us and give us more time for leisure, not the other way around.

It is not a power profile problem since I have looked into that. Even under normal circumstances, simple stuff like having tons of tabs open cause it to creak. Yes the hardware is not cutting edge but my previous laptop was worse (4 GB Ram) and whilst Linux showed it’s limits then, it never came close to crashing ever. I don’t think my Debian install in the past ever freezed on older laptop.

But it is bonkers on this model.

Mumbai is an exercise in public transport gone wrong. The suburban transit system there, despite running to its fullest capacity, creaks and is literal life threatening. Ironical because Mumbai is one of the richest cities in India and yet lives are a penny there.

Delhi is India’s national capital. Sure, the metro there also sees heavy crowds but one would need to be actively suicidal to somehow die there (the tracks and platforms are automatically gated at many stations). Both serve the common people, but one is emblematic of being faster, modern and most of all, not being a death trap.

So why did Mumbai did not copy Delhi’s success? Well, first they started off with a monorail project that has lower speeds, lower capacity and incompatible with the newer subway/metro tracks. To say it’s a disaster is an under statement. They quickly changed tracks (pun intended) and switched to conventional metro system. But the latter is so bare bones and much smaller than what the city needs.

Every single year Mumbai delays it’s metro, the suburban system will continue to creak and people continue to lose limbs and/or die. Investing in this fancy road instead of modern public transit isn’t just prioritising the rich; it’s saying that the poor and middle class lives don’t matter.

This issue did not affect my previous laptop. However, under heavy load, my current laptop sometimes freezes and even REISUB sometimes failed to work. The only way is to force power off via button.

This persisted across all distros from Debian based to Fedora to current Void.

Other times, laptop will stutter to a near halt post some complex process and even after said process(like a Handbrake task) is closed, continues to act as if the resources were never freed.

I only used Windows 11 for a single month b/w 2016- current (other wise, distro hopping was default) and it was stable. I can’t pin point the actual root cause (driver issues, kernel level problem) but still persist with Linux (Windows has its own stuff of problems that we all are aware).

I have used Digg since couple of months (it was in private beta). As of then, the only AI they used was for providing summaries for articles/links which is not the worst use case. Of course, app is slow, communities are restricted to a few set of default (Atleast until couple of weeks ago) and worst of all, low user activity. Like, till a month before, it was impossible to see any post that even got 100+ up votes (they have a ranking/leaderboard system where it showed the deficiencies in the system).

Sure with public beta, user activity will go up. Digg till now had one advantage and that was literally no trolling (but when you have such minimal activity it is not surprising).

The site and official app both aren’t exactly lean and I don’t think third party official alternatives(apps) are available (or will be) yet.

There is no one reliable distro. Mint, itself is based off Ubuntu and also releases LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).

If reliablility is measured in terms of how stable a distro is, then likely Debian with it’s conservative approach to packaging updates comes to mind (No wonder large number of distros are based off Debian only).

I would even argue as long as someone isn’t messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon( meant to showcase KDE packages) or Linuxfx (or whatever it has renamed itself to, one of the few shady ones IMO ) or Trisquel OS (a GNU certified distro where running into dependency hell isn’t new); it will suit user’s case.

Debian, Slackware, Void, Zorin, even rolling release like Arch (basically any one that meets the user’s use case is reliable)

Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again!

80 W wireless charging

That even one ups the Oneplus 50W that requires a custom charging pad (or something I think). I find it quite ironical that wireless charging on some phones is now more than twice as fast as that on Pixel series (Wired)

Opera did ditch their own browser engine long time back and are now just a skin on Chromium [like many other browsers]. Opera, for some reason, has multiple browsers running. Neon isn’t their main offering as of now. They technically have Opera GX [gaming focused version] and Opera Air [released some months earlier though I haven’t used the latter] as well.

Dawn (newspaper in question) seems to have come downhill. They used to have a respected name amongst Pakistan’s newspapers. I wonder how many other newspapers (across the world, in general) are slowly getting on this AI trend.

Yes, I am aware. Two images ; one shows a similar perspective like yours and other a view towards the outskirts / fort side.

There is no way to be sure. Either case, it can be a case of Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice [in this case: baiting] what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity”.

Amongst the apps mentioned as bloated on Windows were Teams, Discord (major offender) and WhatsApp. The latter is a curious case because a Universal Windows app existed (now being deprecated I guess?) that was more memory efficient than the Web wrapper.

And in case, someone in interested there is a terminal client for WhatsApp (and Telegram) called nchat. Sure, it is not at feature parity with web client (images is a big problem, for obvious reasons) but the simple fact that a third party client taking so little resources exists is a damning indictment of Meta. It shows that resource efficient clients are possible (provided the parent company junks the metaverse).

It is a generic one at a forum. The screenshot is from the comment section of Windows Latest site.

Back in the day on Reddit, some subs had a rule where names had to be blurred or removed. Since then, it is reflex for me to just cut out the author’s name (not that it mattered in this specific case).

If you have Spotify Premium, try a third party client. Even GUI clients like Spotify-qt are memory light [though not at feature parity] whilst terminal clients like ncspot, spotify-player take 1/10th the memory. The latter even supports Spotify connect.

First NSA started snooping, but I didn’t care because it did not affect me.

Then Israel started snooping, but I didn’t care because I was not the target.

Then India followed in the footsteps but I didn’t speak and instead tacitly supported it.

And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.