I think I have a prototype of a browser extension somewhere on my computer whose only function is to hide the comments button on Phoronix.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and containerization (as well as Debian often being well-supported by upstream projects for script or package-based install), I feel like the age of Debian packages isn’t that annoying anymore; anything important gets security patches, and it’s easier than ever to use 3rd party software without breaking your system. I will add that Debian seems to be much better these days at making sure either a reasonably up-to-date version ships with a release (and can be kept secure during a stable cycle) or not shipping it at all as to allow the user to install it themselves.

I remember back in just 2021 when it took months after Firefox ESR 78 went EOL for them to update Bullseye to 91; recently, it only took them a few days after 140’s EOL to switch to 153 (and 91-115 and 115-140 happened without much note either), which isn’t perfect, but much better than it was.

If you need to install it on a new laptop, backports often has you covered. I ran a backports kernel for about a year on Debian Bookworm to get my laptop’s Wi-Fi modem working; I was able to quit using the backports kernel once Trixie came out.

No, not until 2027. I don’t really know why this meme was posted at this exact moment.

Eh. They’re actually pretty on top of security patches for pretty much any internet-exposed server software.

The OpenSSL incident was a long time ago at this point.

Uploading a gz source archive to a Git repository is absolutely cursed. Still, looks like a cool project.

I’ll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.

I could never get Gnome Network Displays to work, but it’s worth a shot.

Looks like that site is dead and has being an AI slop domain squat.

XFCE!

In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I’d choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.

Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be… weird. Like, I don’t quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it’s very opinionated and doesn’t like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.

I think KDEnlive is good as well, definitely the least terrible FOSS one. I never used Premiere Pro on that advanced a level, but for basic effects, keyframes, and title cards, it does quite well.

The main proprietary, “professional” one on Linux is Da Vinci Resolve, but I’ve never used it on Linux, since KDEnlive is just fine for me.

Honestly, in my opinion, every video editor is terrible to some extent; it’s having to deal with enormous amounts of data every second more than almost any other program on a computer, and even a semi-usable editor is a mind-bogglingly impressive feat.

Of course I don’t mean those art-stealing cannibals over at Adobe allowing them, I mean the Wine software allowing them, as it semantically implied.

Like I said, I wouldn’t touch Adobe with a 39.5 foot pole, but Photoshop is unfortunately necessary in those relatives’ industry, so getting on a high horse and telling them to use GIMP or Krita is not going to accomplish anything.

I’ve gotten used to GIMP and used it for a lot of cool thing (especially G’MIC for getting CD liner note scans looking quite good), but it’s just not a solution for serious professional use.

Not necessarily. It’s often less Calc’s capability that is at issue, and moreso its compatibility with imported sheets. Calc tends to have every feature I need when I make a spreadsheet.

I think the main issue I’ve seen is when people need bug-for-bug (or nearly so) compatibility with VB macros.

I personally never want to touch anything Adobe ever again, but for my father’s and grandfather’s use cases, they still need it, so if it ends up working well, maybe it’ll finally allow them to use Linux.

True. At my tech helpdesk, I’ve seen people who keep their Macs on very old versions even if their hardware supports much newer (and non-Tahoe) versions and suffer problems because of it.

For instance, the other day, a woman’s Microsoft Office quit working because she was still on Ventura, which no longer gets security updates. This was on what I believe was a 2022 Macbook.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple’s update system. I mean, the Windows approach is objectively wrong, but automatic update systems need to be at least a bit aggressive.

I believe 3.0 finally moved to Python 3. Resynthesizer was also totally rewritten for 3.0, but I don’t think it’s in Python anymore (?).

Post system specs here just to be safe. If it’s an older machine, there could be various hardware failures. “Monitors” makes it sound like a desktop, but you should clarify just to be safe, and perhaps indicate if has PCIe slots or is more of a mini PC.

Also, what do you mean by “monitors going dark”? Are the backlights on, or are they absolutely dark?

It’s probably not Secure Boot. I mean, worth a test, but it sounds like the issue occurs in the middle of a running session, which is not consistent with the issues sometimes presented by Secure Boot.

It’s solidly okay. I wish it were in brush form like Photoshop was, and I wish it were better-optimized; it’s written in Python and a bit slow. I think Photoshop GPU accelerates this.

Still, usable for a lot of things.

I usually use my device’s native boot menu these days; booting through GRUB usually triggers the Bitlocker screen.