Flatseal: well that’s normal, it can’t control Flatpak’s access controls if it is itself sandboxed. Even if it was sandboxes, it could just grant itself everything.

For Xournal: it’s probably because it doesn’t support portals or whatever, so it can’t use the open file dialog to get permissions. So it needs to be able to get to your files somehow to open them.

In both cases, it just means its permissions model is more like regular applications you’d get from your package manager. If you install Xournal with apt/dnf/pacman it also won’t be sandboxed.

The point of sandboxing is you can run applications you don’t trust too much, or significantly reduce the blast radius if say, your browser gets breached: then it has another barrier to overcome to reach anything other than the browser’s own data. The lack of sandboxing doesn’t inherently imply the app is evil or will hack you. It just means it doesn’t have the extra protection around it. So like, probably don’t open sketchy PDFs in it, but I wouldn’t stop using the app solely because it lacks sandboxing.

There shouldn’t be any issues with that. Most distros handle “install side by side” situations out of the box.

Data partition probably doesn’t matter. Nobara might use snapshots for updates so you can rollback, not sure, but it also shouldn’t horribly break things for /home.

The thing btrfs does well is root and home can be the same partition, but different subvolumes. Technically you can even have multiple distros on a single btrfs partition by means of subvolumes, so there’s no unusable wasted space.

I would do btrfs, Mint won’t care about the filesystem having more features than it needs, and there’s so many advantages to btrfs.

E: I might leave homes separated and explicitly share some folders you want to keep in sync. Mint’s configurations could impact Nobara’s configurations and vice-versa. Especially if versions of things differ, maybe Nobara will upgrade some configs and make them unusable with older packages from Mint. You can just symlink your downloads and documents and whatever to a common shared data partition or subvolume dedicated to that use case.

Depends on how good the ISP router is. I’ve had one that had most of the advanced settings available, so I didn’t feel the need to change. For a while I had offloaded DHCP and DNS and VPN to a Raspberry Pi. It’s very much possible to make do with the ISP router. That ISP would let you passthrough the public IP to a box on your network which lets you do a lot of stuff without going into bridge mode, so I could make my server the target while still letting the router do the routing so if my server was down it didn’t take the whole network with it.

Then I got a bad one where it won’t even let you set up port forwards unless the device is registered over DHCP so my static stuff and VMs didn’t work. Got my EdgeRouter X back online to get my stuff done.

I do use VLANs and stuff now so it makes sense for me to use my own router. With everything getting breached these days, I have a VLAN just for my computers, another one for smart but trusted-ish devices (the TV’s gotta reach the NAS), one for IoT that’s completely shielded off.

What you’re missing out on depends a lot on what features you don’t have you could make use of. If you have like 3 devices using the network like I did when I lived alone, yeah you’re probably not going to miss out on the VLANs. But maybe you want to do ad blocking network-wide. Maybe you’d want to better prioritize interactive traffic like VoIP and video calls or games. Maybe you want a reverse proxy or VPN that works even if your home server is down. Maybe you want your kids to not hog all the bandwidth. There’s a lot of things a router can do.

So if the ISP router does everything you want and you’re happy with its performance, it’s fine. Just keep it in mind, when you start being like “I wish it had X and Y features” maybe consider an upgrade then.

If you have the option of not getting a router from your ISP, I would definitely recommend bringing your own. If they provide it regardless and you’d be replacing it through unofficial means, eh, if it works well…

Most modern operating systems randomize the MAC. DHCP does have extra fields such as the device’s hostname that can be used to counter that.

But as I said, that’s unlikely to be the weakest link. If you don’t trust the network you’re also likely in a public environment where people can just see you anyway.

I guess the hostname could be used to defeat MAC randomization if you use public WiFi like hotels, airports and coffee shops. You could probably identify repeat users if you cared enough.

But then your worry should be the security cameras not the WiFi, because that’s what’s gonna tie you personally to your device connecting.

The setting is “Keep launchers separate”.

Alternatively you can also remove all the launchers in the task manager, and just add the launchers directly to the panel. It will never move and will always launch a new instance.

virtiofs is amazing, got my entire Steam library on it. It’s like it’s not there, NVMe speeds no problem.

egui is cool but it’s an immediate UI kind of thing, that’s usually used in video games as you’re constantly re-rendering the whole thing anyway.

A more fitting UI library would be Iced, which is also what System76 is building their COSMIC desktop environment on.

It does claim to support the web too, although not via HTML which brings some accessibility concerns. I’d expect performance to be very good otherwise.

When I worked in a restaurant kitchen, we used to soak rags with water and freeze them in the walk in freezer, then once it’s nice and frozen we’d wear the rag around our necks.

There’s large blood vessels in the neck feeding your brain, so if you’re able to cool down the blood there, it’ll spread to the whole body surprisingly fast.

I actually managed to get cold in hot humid july summer in the kitchen with that method.

I get about 350-400 both ways which AFAIK is what my Unifi AC-Lite tops at since it’s WiFi 5 and it’s only got 2 antennas and tops at 80MHz channels. I get about 200-250 on my phone (1+8T) which I think is single stream.

Everything indicates me that’s as best as it can be with the set of hardware I have. Signal is solid, latency is solid.

You’ll need 802.11ax and/or more MIMO streams to get higher speeds, and/or 160MHz/320MHz channels.

You’re connected over WiFi 6.

I’m not saying to use native toolkits like Qt or GTK, those indeed have problems. What React Native does is somewhere in-between: it’s an abstraction that produces decent results between platforms including the web.

It uses slightly higher level abstractions that work a lot like the web for rendering, you still get your boxes and a subset of CSS properties. But on web it’ll compile to flexbox or grids, on Android it’ll compile to something like a LinearLayout or some other kind of layout the OS understands. On web a <Text> will compile to a <span>, on Android it’ll compile to a native text element. On mobile where you need the performance the most, you otherwise end up rendering a web page that will then eventually end up doing the same thing back to display it natively, but with all the downsides of a web view.

This performs way better with basically no downside for the web version, has the majority of the flexibility one needs for responsive layouts but it’s way more lightweight when you do target native. On native you can just render it all yourself for really cheap, like any native toolkit would. You’re your own toolkit.

They will never look native, but at least all the rendering will be native. Most companies have their custom UI theme anyway, native widgets rarely gets used anyway.

We’re talking Electron replacement after all, it’s not like apps made with it look anything native. But if at least they performed like native apps by skipping the web views and all the baggage it brings with it, that’d be great.

For the end user, its main weakness is that complex pages can be pretty slow to render if not coded well. It’s not that bad either. You wouldn’t be like “oh this is a React site, yuck”, they’re all like that these days for the reasons you’d expect.

As for React Native, its main issue is the communication between the JavaScript browser-ish environment and the Java/Kotlin native environment that can be costly because every has to be serialized (meaning, converted to some type of data structure both sides can understand) and deserialized, so complex screen updates don’t scale too well.

It’s easy for developers to accidentally trigger much bigger and much more expensive rerenders than expected. If you see whole second long page hangs on some websites as new content loads in that’s usually what happened.

For developers, it’s complicated, you kind of need to experience it to understand the footguns.

React was born to solve one particular problem at Facebook: how can we make it so any developer can jump on any part of the UI code and add features without breaking everything. One of the most complicated aspects of a website is state management, in other words, making sure every part of the page are updated when something changes. For example, if you read a message in your inbox, the unread count needs to update a couple places on the page. That’s hard because you need to make sure everything that can change that count is in agreement with everything that displays that count.

React solves that problem by hiding it away from you. Its model is simple: given a set of inputs, you have a function that outputs how to display that. Every time the value changes, React re-renders every component that used that value, compares it with the previous result, and then modifies the page with the updated data. That’s why it’s called React, it reacts to changes and actions.

The downside of that is if you’re not very careful, you can place something in a non-ideal spot that can cascade into re-rendering the entire page every time that thing updates. At scale, it usually works out relatively okay, and it’s not like rendering the whole page is that expensive. There’s an upper cap on how bad it can be, it won’t let you do re-render loops, but it can be slow.

I regularly see startups with 25MB of JavaScript caused by React abuse and favoring new features over tracking down excessive renders. Loads the same data 5 times because “this should only render once” and that turned out to be false, but it displays correctly. I commonly see entire forms being re-rendered every character you type because the data is stored in the form’s state, so it has to re-render that entire tree.

But it’s not that bad. It’s entirely possible to make great and snappy sites with React. Arguably its problem isn’t React itself but how much it is associated with horrible websites because of how tolerant to bad code it is. It’s maybe a little bit too easy to learn, it gives bad developers an undeserved sense of confidence.

I do like the YouTube integration. A good chunk of them have a link to a main long form video which is nice when you don’t want to watch a video in 50 parts. You can scroll and be like, that’s a cool project let me watch the full 30 mins video.

I wish we went the other way around: build for native and compile to HTML/CSS/WASM.

For me the disadvantage of Electron is well, it doesn’t have any advantage or performance improvement over the browser version for 99% of use cases, and when you shove that on a mobile phone it performs as horribly as the web version.

People already use higher level components that ends up shitting out HTML and CSS anyway, why not skip the middleman and just render the box optimally from the start? Web browsers have become good, but if you can skip parsing HTML and CSS entirely and also skip maintaining their state, that’s even better.

I had the misfortune of developing a React Native app, and I’d say thinking in terms of rows and columns and boxes was nice. Most of RN’s problems are because they still run JS and so you have to bundle node and have the native messaging bridge, and of course that it’s tied to the turd that is React. But zero complains about the UI part when it doesn’t involve the bridge: very smooth and snappy, much more than the browser. And the browser version was no different than standard React in performance.

I like that it’s not yet another Chromium one at least.

A lot of these are partial bans. Canada for example only bans it for government issued phones which makes sense, there shouldn’t be any apps let alone social media apps on those devices.

Probably move on to YouTube Shorts or Instagram reels. I don’t have Instagram but the YT Shorts are basically just TikTok crossposts anyway.

Ideally Pixelfed would win but that’s very hopeful, a lot of the creators are expecting to be paid.

There’s too much money to be made with the format for it to die yet.

It’ll depend a lot on your experience. I can just install Arch without reading the wiki at all in about 5 minutes for something fairly vanilla. If you’re comfortable with Linux then following the wiki won’t be too hard, took me maybe 2-3 hours on my first install before I had my DE and everything all set up (12 years ago). If you’ve never used Linux before and take the deep dive then it could take hours and days depending on how fast you can absorb all that information.

“Easy” is very subjective, there’s stuff that’s so dumbed down for the sake of “easy” that it makes my life harder when I need to do more complex stuff. I know people for whom linear algebra in 11 dimensions is easy for them to do and solve. Easy is relative to your own personal experience level and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Install it in a VM as a test run, you’ll see by yourself.

No, simply because even with pure CSS and even pure HTML you can find ways to leak some information about the browser. For example, a background image that only loads on 1920x1080, another for 2560x1440, and so on. Make hundreds of those for every possible resolution (they can be the same file on the server but at a different path), and there you go, you now figured that the client downloaded img/background/2448x1280.png from the server logs. You can use the same trick for fonts as well, you just apply the same trick on a box on the page that is sized based on text content. Repeat for every font you want to test for.

There’s just a ton of those little features that are for performance optimizations because loading a 4K background on a 480p phone is a bad experience for everyone involved. Sometimes you need to know the size of some elements to position other elements relative to it. You need the mouse cursor position to open popups at the right place. You need the window size to realign popups and modals. You’d have to go back to text based only sites like it’s the 80s and 90s to avoid that kind of fingerprinting.

And thus Tor’s solution: everyone’s got the same window size, same fonts and everything.

That’s the smart way to do math. I mean not with such small numbers but you’d do the same thing adding up large numbers, you break down the numbers and rearrange them in a way that’s easier to compute.

Algebra probably feels intuitive to you.

They’re also trying to teach that in math classes (it gets called “new” math) but the boomers are freaking out because “why can’t they just do normal additions like we used to, this is so complicated”. And the answer to that is, 99% of the time you’ll be doing algebra because we literally all carry a calculator in our pockets and sometimes on our wrists at all times and we never need to just do a long division. And that kind of thinking really makes it easy to break down formulas because your brain thinks in terms of moving stuff around in an equation.