Good to know. Thanks for updating. I don't do social media myself. Would never have known without this.

I don't do them either, and never have. His Mastodon felt safe enough to check with my tinfoil hat on. :grin:

I think he mainly posts his personal stuff on bluesky though, seeing as that's what he links in his "About the author" bit.

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Liam is fine. From his mastodon:

PSA: away for a couple days, no news from me till Wednesday night / Thursday.

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Sorry, devs, please hire a skilled artist.

Heh, I was sure some people would hate the style. I don't actually mind the doodles.

Going on my endless wishlist.

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I don't really understand what Bazzite being Cloud Native means. Does this mean that Bazzite is unable to function if the computer is offline (i.e., no network or internet connection)?

The author says that "Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native". No, that's what makes them an open source project. The author used a buzzword they didn't quite understand.

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Ladybird Foundation

That's a fine charity I'm sure, but if you want to support the browser project, you'll want to donate to the Ladybird Browser Initiative [External Link] instead.

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I know use cases will vary wildly from person to person, but for me, my definition of "daily driver" phone would be:

If I had the banking app requirement, I'd be out of luck, but the rest of your list is covered by Jolla's Salfish OS on Sony Xperia phones for me and my wife. It's not perfect, but everything pretty much works like I expect it to work, and my (subjective) user experience is better. Very limited choice of hardware obviously, but I don't really care as long as I can always find something that's supported and affordable.

Native software selection isn't perfect, but the Android app support is good, and anything that doesn't absolutely require Google's services tends to work just fine. I've only got Signal, the Steam app and KOReader installed that way myself, everything else is native. Oh and we've never used WhatsApp. It might not work I suppose.

The fact that the phone runs a very familiar Linux stack with Wayland, PulseAudio etc. is a fun bonus. There are some closed UI bits and hardware driver blobs I suppose, but at least I can switch to dev mode, start up a terminal and ssh away or check some logs, divert audio to my desktop via a remote audio sink or whatever, if I want to. I rarely do, but still, it's there if I feel like fiddling. :grin:

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I don't see the web the same as I see operating systems. Linux / Windows you have to specifically install and set up on your systems (or buy pre-installed, whatever). The web is just...there, already set up and your system goes and looks it up. I'm simplifying for the comment, I know the web itself runs on different systems, I'm speaking for the end-user and for web-developers.

And how much of the software ecosystem is built on top of browser engines these days? As you know, a huge swathe of all mobile apps and an unnecessarily big chunk of desktop software as well are built with web technology and rely on browser engines to provide the "runtime". Browsers are almost like operating systems on top of operating systems now. Even more true on ChromeOS and specialized stuff like LG's WebOS.

I can't really agree with your view of the web in general, from any viewpoint but especially that of a developer. The times when IE was the only platform that mattered were horrible for web developers. There's no reason to believe it'd be any different the next time around. I'm glad Mozilla (and others) saved us from that nightmare.

Having one main web "system" (browser in this case) that everyone tests against and builds against, to me, is just better than having to go and test the same thing across many different browser engines.

That's what standards are for. But if there's only one dominant implementation provider, they're free to ignore standards and break their implementations as they see fit, as everyone has to adjust to their quirks anyway. We've seen this happen.

And now, having Chromium be a little less "just Google" with actual support for others getting involved - this is better for everyone in the end. We all want to rely on Google less for various reasons, this is a step in the right direction for that.

This we can agree on. Although Meta and Microsoft aren't exactly names I trust either when it comes to important stuff like privacy and business ethics.

I have no idea what Opera does these days. I used their browser back before Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox took that spot.

Oh, and every-time i use Firefox, I always end up going back to Chrome. I just never have a good experience with Firefox personally.

My experiences are the opposite (and just as subjective as yours).

Plus, I've never subscribed to the thought of just having to support something (Firefox in this case) because it's smaller. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.

Of course not. I'm arguing there's value in choice and competition for users, developers, and everyone else.

Besides, I don't trust any of these particular corporations to put any resources towards a feature or fix that only benefits the user. Their angle is and will always be to extract profit from us. And if there's no open source competition, they're even less cautious about stripping functionality that hinders their ability to exploit us. However, if another popular browser implements let's say popular privacy features to attract users, those are worth innovating / investing in to keep users from switching away.

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Well, Linux isn't a niche market for decades now. It has more than 60% of market on servers and if you consider smartphones as well it is the most used (Android).

This is why I explicitly specified desktop Linux, in the context of market shares that Liam set in the comment I replied to. And I added that wink at the end of the sentence to indicate that I wasn't entirely serious about the comparison. I just thought it might resonate with Liam.

However, I was entirely serious about the rest of my comment. Monopolies are harmful to progress and innovation, even in the free software ecosystem. We might not be talking about traditional capitalistic markets here and it's not a zero-sum game, but competition and alternatives should be supported and encouraged, not dismissed.

Also, I prefer Firefox. :whistle:

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Why would they jump into supporting a browser that has a less than 3% share.

I suppose for the same reason you might want to support a desktop operating system that has a tiny market share. :wink:

This *should* be a net positive for everyone.

I don't see how this actually changes anything, but why would it be a net positive for everyone? I don't see how it makes anything better for those of us who don't like the idea of a single software platform growing so large and dominant that nobody bothers supporting anything else. We've seen where that leads.

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They'd better use fwupd for their updates, like 8bitsdo...

Sadly 8BitDo hasn't done that since early 2020.

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