I had to look up the panopticon reference, so I thought to share with others: ‘A proposed prison of supervision, so arranged that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them: proposed by Jeremy Bentam.’

I was never this rad, but there is always hope.

I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.

It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.

I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.

If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.

After using it since Lucid Lynx 10.04, I switched from Ubuntu to Mint last weekend. I’m lazy about distros these days, and I really didn’t want to switch, but Firefox instability was driving me nuts. The web browser must be reliable, IMO. It’s a fundamental requirement for a desktop OS, and this problem didn’t exist before snaps.

This is a positive take. No OS is perfect, but there are lots of reasons to give a Linux distro a whirl. Tech right now IMO has become disappointing, but Linux continues to be a shining beacon of fun and hope.

Did somebody say fire sale?

Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package’s installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.

Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.

I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.

Good one. No risk, no reward, right?

I’ve read this headline a dozen times today and everytime I smile.