My company will let me purchase software, but it won’t let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it’s “unnecessary”. So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)

If you really are so hopeless with computers that you can’t figure out a modern popular Linux distribution, then you should not build your own computer, because that’s much more complicated.

Who is “we”, my friend? This all depends on your research and expectations. IMO Linux works great, but you should consider it before you buy a machine. Make sure your graphics card and other hardware is going to work. When in doubt, buy from a reliable shop that preinstalls Linux for you.

I find that the default settings and programs of Debian (or whatever major distro) do 95% of what I expect and want, and maybe 5% involve some customization. In other words, it’s much simpler than getting Windows or Apple and then purchasing or downloading all the extra programs. But this depends on what you wanna do.

What you said makes sense from a technical standpoint but not from a practical standpoint. If I’m losing good adblock on Chrome, but good ad block still works on Firefox, it would be easy for Mozilla to put up some blog posts or tweets or whatever to point out that they are a great option, because they’re adblock isn’t going anywhere.

This is an obvious concern for many users, Mozilla has the capability to issue a press release or anything at all, and they’ve chosen not to do so. Therefore, people are reasonably questioning why they’ve chosen not to do so. Free marketing but they’re throwing it away, and their best defense for doing nothing is essentially what you wrote, which is essentially to dodge the precise issue at hand.

I like it when the garbage identifies itself openly. We don’t need Chrome, but Chrome needs us.

The garbage is taking itself out

You didn’t tell us what you think the usual 9 to 5 pays. Are you asking whether a tech job pays more than minimum wage? Many of them do. Also, when you’re interviewing, and even when you’re writing a cover letter, try to avoid the term power user, and instead provide details of things that you’ve actually done. Anyone can call themselves a power user, but what does that even mean? If you say you’re a power user, if you’re lucky the interviewer will ask you for details, and if you’re unlucky they won’t, because they’ll assume you’re just grandstanding. So you’re better off providing a little extra information up front, and not gambling on them asking for it.

Perhaps the people who are talking should watch more Japanese cartoons. :-)

Except you oversimplified and it matters. The entire point of capitalism is to centralize money in the hands of a few at the expense of the rest. Capitalism itself demands continued growth, which is unsustainable.

All forms of government are subject to corruption, but only some forms of government are broken by design.

Except there are tons of alternatives that actually work. I watch plenty of YT videos with paid sponsors and if it’s done well, I don’t skip the sections because they are interesting.

What people dislike is obnoxious advertising, not advertising per se. Unfortunately, most advertising is obnoxious.

In other words, reality has already shown us what is possible. But it would probably reduce certain types of ad revenue, and big ad companies (i.e., Google) don’t like that.

Windows 98. In the meantime I’ve also used BSD, though not in a few decades.

“If I could talk to my great grandfathers, I would say that the old times are gone. So much has changed. When all else fades away, The Pirate Bay will remain. It will always be with us.” -Brule

Flatpak is one extra step. If apt or rpm already has what you want, which is true for many new users, why would we push them towards scary click thru action?

Isn’t this why we’d expect new users to use a built-in package manager? Because it avoids this exact problem?

Pushing someone new to Linux to use Flatpak? Shame on you.

From a practical standpoint, it’s hard to imagine what you could possibly be doing where it’s beneficial to have a thousand tabs open.

If I’m writing a research paper, I might want 5 or 10 tabs open at a given time. Let’s say I’m a little chaotic so I get up to 20. And then limitations on my working memory kick in, and having any more open tabs actually makes me worse off.

But then let’s suppose it’s a thesis that’s 50 pages long. So I might be relying on 40 or 50 references. I’m not relying on them all at the same time, right? So I definitely don’t want to keep those tabs open all at the same time.

What I could do, and what you could consider, is either bookmarking things or using archive.org to make a backup of the pages.

In one of the other comments you mentioned Facebook. That has me a little concerned again with your objectives. If it’s something private on Facebook that can’t be recovered later, and you need something reliable, then you have no choice but to do long screenshots or scrolling videos. If it’s not reliable, then why do you care so much to keep the window open? Just close the window, remember whatever you remember, and move on with your life.

Whatever you do, here’s a few rules of thumb… Your web browser is not an archiving tool. Printing to PDF is one way to archive things. There are other ways to archive things too. You don’t actually need to archive as much as you might think you need to archive. Most of the things that we think might be important now actually won’t be useful at all three months from now. Rarely would one actually want to have a thousand sources of information for any given task.

Depending on your situation, you might consider a totally different setup. For example, you could install WordPress or anything vaguely similar to it.

Right, that is your experience. And I’m telling you that there are cast iron fry pans that can defeat wire brushes, both manual and ones you attach to your power drill. (Of course it’s up to you if you want to believe me. There’s no particular reason to believe some random stranger online, but then again, there’s no obvious benefit for me to lie about it.)

Don’t worry. They feel the same way about you. :-)

That really depends on the condition of the pan. I’ve had some where power tools were insufficient.