These fucking headlines.

Hey LA Times, how about

“Air Force conducts routine unarmed test launch of ballistic missile”

or something similar that doesn’t make me panic and think “wtf have these circus clowns done now?” Plenty of “shit-your-pants” scary headlines happening just now, no need to make up new ones just for the clicks.

Thanks for the summary. I signed up for it just in case, but don’t think I’ll end up using it. I have a similar experience with Mastodon, but then I was never really into Twitter, either.

I share your feelings on the importance of open platforms. While reddit may have been shitty for a while, the whole third-party apps thing was an eye-opener for me, and started me thinking about (and moving toward) open source.

My next big challenge will be to de-Google, but I’m increasingly up for it. Problem is I have a ton of site identities associated with my email address there, so we’ll see how that works out.

Like others here, I dumped Reddit and moved here (and to Mastodon) full time. I also moved to Linux full time on my home laptop and haven’t missed Windows one little bit. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with a couple of other distros of interest (currently Pop_OS) and am having actual fun using my computer again. Heavy emphasis on adopting as many FOSS alternatives as possible in ‘24, and starting to separate myself from the big G.

Sounds like a great experience! Congrats.

I switched from full-time windows to full-time Linux with Pop_OS and haven’t looked back. I’m very happy with it and enjoy finding FOSS alternatives to my former go-to apps. So far so good. I’m also keeping an eye on Vanilla OS as that sounds like a very cool project that is headed to beta by summer.

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but if you know of a program that already does the thing you want, you can search for a variety of alternatives on alternativeto.net. It lists paid and FOSS alternatives.

I used to be responsible for the app portfolio in a 1000+ user company, and every 3 years or so I would go back out to the market and try hard to replace Adobe, just for PDF operations. Couldn’t do it because so many products were integrated with them, often in ways we could not reproduce with other products. The best we could do would be to pay for a different product for 1/3 of the cost for Adobe, and then still end up having to carry a significant number of Adobe licenses for cases when integration failed with the other product. No-win situation, and just easier to stay with the evil we knew.

I hate them.

The longer this goes the more it reads like the onion.