I came here because of the clickbait title, ready to lambast thunderbird for the empty promises… But it turns out that they’re pretty clear on the specifics of what separates them from Thunderbird.

But I’m not gonna let that righteous indignation go to waste, so instead I’m gonma rip Sourav Rudra('s writing skill) a new one. Prepare your (writing skill’s) ass for a kicking Sourav.

Betterbird: A Thunderbird Fork That Promises Better Features

Better features?! Can I also have updated elements and improved aspects? Maybe superior components too??? Ah. A girl can dream.

Vague buzzwords and nothing more. “Better features” is not only subjective, but also vague enough to be almost entirely meaningless. Let’s hope the rest of the article does better.

Thankfully, the author included a shortlist of “Must-Know Bits.” I’m sure that’s a good summary of what’s to follow.

— Features many long-requested features.

I’m glad they’re finally listening to my request of compatibility with the Lovense remote control vibrator app’s API. Now I can feel good about receiving emails instead of stressed! They sure took their sweet time, it’s been long [time units] since I requested it!

How long and who requested? Or better yet, what features??? Why should I care??? Please, give me somethinbg concrete to grip onto!

— A more streamlined alternative to Thunderbird.

Streamlined! Wow! Is it also more efficient, and higher quality? Will they make it sustainable? Maybe it can also be more ethically sourved.

Could you be more vague please? This almost accidentally told me something about the changes they’ve made.

— Highly customizable, thanks to Add-ons and Themes.

Like Thunderbird? Like the addons you can find at the official Thunderbird site at addons.thunderbird.net?

Do they also plan to send and receive email in betterbird? Will it work with a graphical desktop environment? Will it be computer software? Or does the failure to mention these assumed “features” imply that it will diverge from Thunderbird in these key aspects?

Deeply shit lead-in. The rest of the article stands in stark contrast, being actually specific and informative. It’s like ol Sourav wrote an actually good article, then some idiot editor slapped it in ChatGPT and told it to fart out a title, subtitle, and highlights list. And then ChatGPT ignored all that and made the most generic tech article heading of all time.

FWIW, itsfoss.com: you should fire that editor for being a completely incompetent moron.

i have rm aliased to rm -i, it’s basically the closest to PowerShell’s -WhatIfthat a posix shell gets

was that translated into english from another language?

I love how they blended FAQ with meth-induced psychosis rambling.

I’ve gotta give them kudos for sticking to their very strict values, but holy hell is this hard to parse

OP, what’s your address? I have a “present” for you

Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.

BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).

If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.

(/soapbox)

My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.

It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).

It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs

I’m a 30-something woman myself. I’ve been gaming longer than I’ve had a phone. Here’s my two cents:

You’re already into videogames. Fuck what the haters say about mobile gaming not being “”“true”“” gaming (whatever the heck that means), they’re just sour they can’t game whenever wherever without investing a ton of time. Then again, maybe I’m just mad because I’ve recently invested a ton of time into Youtube’s playables.

If you want to get into PC or console gaming, I recommend starting off with popular E rated games in the genres you already know you like. Generally these games are more complex than mobile games, but this type will usually introduce difficulty curves to gradually transition you into their mechanics and complexity and teach you to be a master without having to look up training online.

If you want to branch out, start with genre-bending/-blending games. I’m personally a fan of puzzle-platformers, as those are my two favorite genres; while I’m not big on card games, they recently had an explosion in popularity, so there’s a blend of just about every genre you could want.

here’s the Programmer Readable version of that wall of text: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

Implementing Equality in Haskell:

    deriving (Eq, Ord)

After learning how easy it was to implement functional programming in Rust (it’s almost like the language requires it sometimes), I decided to go back and learn the one I had heard about the most.

It opened my mind. Rust takes so many cues from Haskell, I don’t even know where to begin. Strong typing, immutable primitives, derived types, Sum types. Iterating and iterables, closures, and pattern matching are big in Haskell.

I’m not saying Rust uses these because Graydon Hoare wanted a more C-like Haskell, but it is clear it took a lot of elements from the functional paradigm, and the implementations the designers were familiar with had descended through Haskell at some point.

Also, deriving is not the same as implementing. One is letting the compiler make an educated guess about what you want to compare, the other is telling it specifically what you want to compare. You’re making, coincidentally, a bad comparison.

When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?

These both can be answered in depth at Debian’s releases page, but the short answer is:

Debian developers work in a repo called “unstable” or “sid,” and you can get those packages if you so desire. They will be the most up to date, but also the most likely to introduce breaking changes.

When the devs decide these packages are “stable enough,” (breaking changes are highly unlikely) they get moved into “testing” (the release candidate repo) where users can do QA for the community. Testing is the repo for the next version of debian.

When the release cycle hits the ~1.5 year mark, debian maintainers introduce a series of incremental “freezes,” whereby new versions of packages will slowly stop being accepted into the testing repo. You can see a table that explains each freeze milestone for Trixie (Debian 13) here.

After all the freezes have gone into effect, Debian migrates the current Testing version (currently Trixie, Debian 13) into the new Stable, and downgrades the current stable version to old-stable. Then the cycle begins again

As for upgrades to packages in the stable/old-stable repos: see the other comments here. The gist is that they will not accept any changes other than security patches and minor bug fixes, except for business critical software that cannot just be patched (e.g. firefox).

I keep finding tracks to love on each album, but Controlling Crowds has too many, so I just recommend the entire thing.

Also Axiom is killer too, but that might just be because I’m a sucker for narrative concept albums

Robert Glasper - Black Radio

Sungazer - Perihelion

Unexpect - Fables of the Sleepless Empire

Frank Zappa - Civilization Phase III

Will Wood - “In case I make it,”

The Algorithm - Brute Force

Devin Townsend - Empath

Miles Davis - Bltches Brew

Oneohtrix point Never - R + 7

Panopticon - Autumn Eternal

King Capisce - Memento Mori

Cynic - Kindly Bent to Free Us

Archive - Controlling Crowds The Complete Edition Parts I-IV

Intronaut - The Direction of Last Things

SHT GHST - 1: The Creation

Dan Deacon - America

Opeth - Ghost Reveries

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

those still require root, they just don’t explicitly say so. They still pop up with a password prompt

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won’t make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it’s basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

The point of security isn’t just protecting yourself from the threats you’re aware of. Maybe there’s a compromise in your distro’s password hashing, maybe your password sucks, maybe there’s a kernel compromise. Maybe the torrent client isn’t a direct route to root, but one step in a convoluted chain of attack. Maybe there are “zero days” that are only called such because the clear web hasn’t been made aware yet, but they’re floating around on the dark web already. Maybe your passwords get leaked by a flaw in Lemmy’s security.

You don’t know how much you don’t know, so you should be implementing as much good security practices as you can. It’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model of security: you layer enough so that the holes in one layer are blocked by a different layer.

Plus, keeping strong security measures in place for something that’s almost always internet connected is a good idea regardless of how cautious you think you’re being. It’s why modern web-browsers are basically their own VM inside your pc anymore, and it’s why torrent clients shouldn’t have access to anything besides the download/upload folders and whatever minimal set of network perms they need.

image editing

imagemagick for basic transformations/compression/conversions, CLI (locally hosted) AI for the shops

ey b0ss

I live in a constant state of fear and misery

Do ya miss me anymore?

I know it’s not new, but I’ve been seeing a lot more “suggested” (read: sponsored) places along my routes these days. Either businesses are just now discovering the feature, or they lowered the barrier for entry. Either way, it’s annoying as fuck to have ads pop up that I have to avoid when moving the map around to navigate

Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment’s notice).

Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.

I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven’t tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.

I’ll just add to: don’t believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that’s way blown out of proportion. Arch isn’t breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn’t so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.

Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it’s unlikely to brick your pc, and you’ll just need to reconfigure some settings.

Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don’t look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds’ most powerful web browser.

Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war

I’ll have to give starship a try, seems like a cool way to handle customizing the prompt

as to the “omz is bloat and slows down your shell”:

1. How slow? Because I’ve never noticed. Are we talking about waiting for 15 seconds when I should only have to wait for 1, or are we talking theory and the difference between 0.5 vs 0.08 seconds in benchmarks?

Because I’ve never been inconvenienced by the speed of my shell nor terminal emulator, despite having tried all kinds of setups. Turns out that “blazing fast” gpu accelerated terminal really didn’t make much of a difference on human timescales. Now I’m at the point where I appreciate the features over the performance.

2. In reply to Brody’s point, I’m inclined to say “yes, and…?”

OMZ automates a lot. Sure, I could follow his way of manulaly sourcing dozens of individual shellscripts and making my own aliases and have a zshrc 1200 lines long… Or I could just let omz handle it.

Yes it’s mostly just a plugin manager, and…? Yes it automates a process I could do manually, and… ? Yes, it uses bindings that I didn’t personally write, and… ?

Fuck off with the clickbait “You’re living your life wrong, do this lifehack instead!!!” (and the lifehack is to reinvent the wheel) bullshit

Here’s a fun real lifehack: try things out for yourself, don’t just listen to and parrot other people’s opinions, don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Way more fun and fulfilling that way!