Congrats on the new gear! I have a 2-in-1 Dell laptop and a Surface Go 2, both running Debian 13. In laptop mode, I really like GNOME, in tablet mode it’s… fine. The biggest problem is the GNOME OSK, which honestly is not great. It frequently needs to be manually triggered (instead of automatically opening when clicking in a text-entry zone) and it’s missing just about every modifier key unless you’re in terminal mode. And GNOME (in its infinite wisdom), decided that the user shouldn’t have the choice of when to put the keyboard in terminal mode. There is one extension, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5949/gjs-osk/, which helps, but it just duplicates a hardware keyboard virtually instead of providing a fully featured mobile-style keyboard.

On my tablet I use Phosh, which can be installed on top of GNOME and provides a mobile-forward UI and a much better OSK. The Phosh-tablet metapackage in Debian 13 doesn’t take up much disk space and, IMHO, will give you a much better touch experience than vanilla GNOME (if you don’t mind switching back and forth depending on whether you are in tablet mode or laptop mode). Other than the inconvenience of switching back and forth, the only bug I’ve noticed is that maximize/minimize/close buttons need to be restored when switching from Phosh back to GNOME Shell.

The only messages Trump has are lies and bigotry, and even his supporters aren’t buying his lies anymore. Normalizing his demented horseshit as some kind of coherent economic message is how we got to where we are today.

There are two types of gerrymandering, packing and cracking. A packed district is where you concentrate voters from the opposition party into one district. You give up a seat, but the remaining districts swing more heavily in your favor. A cracked district is what you are describing, where you dilute the margins of the opposition party by breaking up their strongholds into multiple districts and combine them with areas that vote in your favor.

This was not a “middle of nowhere” district as it included a chunk of the city of Nashville and its suburbs. It was a classic cracked gerrymander as Republicans split Nashville into multiple districts and combined them with large swaths of red countryside (see also the notorious Austin gerrymander in Texas). The margins can sometimes be close enough in a cracked district for the opposition party to win, but in this case it was unlikely as it was Trump +22 in 2024 (in spite of including some of Nashville).

Posting from a Surface Go 2 running Debian Trixie with Gnome+Phosh. Everything except the webcam just works on the stock kernel (for webcam support you need the patched Surface kernel). Vanilla Gnome is fine, too, if you use a hardware keyboard. I run Phosh because the onsceen keyboard is much better than Gnome’s.

I don’t think a bullshit investigation of a high profile, decorated veteran is going to go as well for the fascists as they think it’s going to.

Yes, mostly rain on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. Rain and 45 F is pretty much the default for winter here; you’d probably like it. I don’t mind the cold (within reason), but the constant cloudiness gets to me. I miss the sun already, and the rainy season has just started.

The weather. Moved from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest. I like it here, but even after three decades the winter gloom still gets to me.

First thing that crossed my mind, too.

It depends on how many of the gerrymandered districts are packed (large Democratic majorities) and how many are cracked (Democratic population centers are split up into multiple districts with small-ish Republican majorities). Cracked districts can be won if Democrats turn out in record numbers. Packed districts just produce more lopsided majorities in favor of the Democratic candidate.

Of course, this gerrymander is only one of the voter suppression tactics that Texas Republicans will use to lower Democratic turnout.

They can have him. He’s already done far too much damage here.

I use Keep for checklists and disposable notes, and Joplin (similar to Obsidian, but open source) for my “forever” notes. I look for apps that give you the option of exporting notes in a common format (currently markdown), and I have notes that have followed me through several changes of note taking programs.

You’re already using Obsidian, so my suggestion is… Take notes! Take notes on cool software you’ve discovered, take notes on your settings and configurations, take notes on any issues and bugs you’ve had to fix, take notes on how to use unfamiliar programs, take notes on Linux terminology. You have a huge personal knowledge base from years of using Windows. Linux is not hard to use, but it takes time to become second nature to you.

I’m a huge fan of the Laundry Files books. Just finished Season of Skulls, the 3rd book in The New Management trilogy. It’s a little less bleak than the first two books of the trilogy and very funny.

I’m now reading War Bodies by Neal Asher.

an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.

GNOME does have a launcher, which works just like the launcher on Mac and Android. You can even select whether to see all your apps or only the most-used ones. I do agree that a taskbar/dock with intelligent auto-hide is a must, though (at least for my usability). That’s also not to say that some folks would rather have a Windows style launcher, and there are several DEs that provide that.

Thanks for the reminder about VLC. I don’t use it much any more, but back in the wild west days of audio/video codecs (some of which were paid), VLC would play everything.

I don’t have an answer for you, but maybe you and your friends could get together and start your own? The beauty of the fediverse and all that.

The web pages for Lemmy and kbin have the ability to filter by subscribed communities, as well. I think what most of us are thinking of is a way to view the “All” feed that gives more weight to the smaller communities, which would help us discover new communities to subscribe to.

Limiting myself to free as in freedom (no ads, not free to use because you are the product): KeePass/KeePassXC, GnuCash, Firefox, LibreOffice, digiKam, GIMP.

In my opinion, microblogging isn’t really a conversational platform. It’s a creator and audience platform. That format has its place, as well, but Twitter/Threads/Mastodon/etc. isn’t a replacement for forums.

A qualified yes. I love the overview, which is, IMO, the most elegant way to launch applications and manage workspaces of any OS or DE. I also love the general look and fluidity of the environment and how it gets out out of your way when you don’t need it. But I preferred the pre-GNOME 40 vertical workflow to the new horizontal workflow.

There are also three must-have extensions that make GNOME usable for me:

• AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support. GNOME can wish away tray icons if they want to, but the tray hasn’t gone away and is still necessary for some applications.
• DashToDock. Makes app switching more accessible and adds right-click to close.
• Gnome 4x UI Improvements. Increases the size of the workspace thumbnails so you can actually see what’s in them (like it was before GNOME 40).