Mastodawn

The more servile, extortionist, and enshittified Windows becomes, the more I love coming home (or to work!) to a nice #Linux desktop.

The more petty and mercenary #Apple becomes ($999 monitor stand!!!!), the more I love mining ebay for $150 machines that become viable daily drivers.

It's a good life.

* R.L. glances at the #Firefox icon on his dock/taskbar

* ~Whimper~!

GOTTA find some way of disenshittifying the web, y'all.

P.S., When I say "Linux," I do so inclusive of all other FOSS OSes. #RunBSD? Of course I do! Do you like #Haiku? Haiku is cool! Do you run #FreeDOS? Rock on with yo bad self! #KolibriOS? Why not?!? #9Port? Uhhh.... *backs away slowly* ;)

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Steph

🇨🇦Feb 28, 2025

@rl_dane I'm on Linux at work too! 😎

💪

Leon Miller Feb 28, 2025

@rl_dane 2 browser engines is not enough!

We have more than two!

At least three quite viable ones: Blink (booo!), Gecko, and WebKit.

Then the next tier is up-and-coming engines: Servo and Ladybird.

Beyond that... there's stuff like Dillo, Netsurf and various mainly text-mode browsers for casual use.

I already use text-mode browsers on my non-work machines as much as possible.

Chawan is a very usable terminal browser with excellent sixel (image) support and pretty good CSS support.

chawan: TUI Web Browser

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👨‍💻Mar 1, 2025

@rl_dane I’m excited to get back into a Linux machine…I’ve decided-ish on a spec for a framework to save towards (between two…but they’re both around the same price point) and hopefully I can buy it by summer and throw up a Windows dual boot on it. Thinking I’m going to do Fedora for full driver support with Framework, and i3 as a WM because the perfect square windows tickle my brain nicely

Dual boot sounds like unnecessary pain, TBH

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👨‍💻Mar 1, 2025

@rl_dane There’s a few simulation programs I need to run for class work stuff that are Windows only (and that I’m currently using very shitty alternatives for because I don’t have that access…). PSPICE to name one

E.E.? I vaguely recall PSPICE from the 1990s.

Can you run it in bottles? In a VM? from a USB stick (Rufus)? :E

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👨‍💻Mar 1, 2025

@rl_dane Yeah EE 😅 PSPICE is still the relevant free software for student use, although I’m stuck using MATLAB’s simulation stuff right now because Mac (awful performance issues…)

I guess I could run a live stick…all I’d really need is to be very very careful I’m storing actual files on the nvme and not on the USB lol

There’s also the move I’ve seen of live booting off an expansion card for windows, but those expansion storage cards are fairly pricey for an already expensive setup…

I guess you could just save the files locally on the USB stick and fetch them from Linux.

Are VMs not a viable option?

QuickGUI makes it dead easy to spin up a windows VM

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👨‍💻Mar 1, 2025

@rl_dane I just worry that a VM would lack enough performance…but I guess I’d have to give it a shot first with the specs I get. I’m getting a pretty beefy machine, but windows is a hog for every resource possible

Yeah, running windows in a VM is kinda painful.

If you ever travel back in time to 1992, find a kid name R.L. in his first semester of E.E. at UT Austin, and...