FOSS Is Fun

You can use Waterfox if you want a Firefox fork that supports Chromium extensions.

It is still around, but most mobile Linux enthusiasts have probably shifted their enthusiasm towards completely open-source mobile Linux distributions (Sailfish OS has a proprietary UI).

Sailfish OS was my daily driver for quite a while. I ran it on up to two Sony Xperia X Compacts and liked it very much. I also owned the Jolla phone. The X Compact was never officially supported, but since it is similar to the officially-supported Xperia X, someone adapted it and you could even use the Android compatibility layer and receive regular OTA updates.

The two things that made me leave (I’m now running GrapheneOS on a Pixel 5):

• Officially (= with the proprietary Android compatibility layer) you can only install it on Sony phones, where you can’t unlock the bootloader without permanently damaging the phone, i. e. wiping the TA partition. The last Sony phone generation where you could backup the TA partition was (at the time I made the decision) the Xperia X series.
• Jolla decided to not port the Android compatibility layer from Android 4.4 to 8.0 on the Xperia X series. Instead they wanted you to buy a new Sony phone … See the first point to understand why that was not an option for me. ;)

I think Sailfish OS might have seen more success in the consumer space, if Jolla didn’t mess up their hardware department. They failed to bring any successor to the Jolla phone from 2013 to market and they also failed to launch any other hardware, e. g. Jolla Tablet.

It is also beyond my understanding why they chose Sony phones and not Nexus / Pixel phones, which are meant for developers and enthusiasts and can easily be bootloader-unlocked and flashed without permanently modifying / damaging the devices. They also didn’t officially port Sailfish OS to the Pinephone (yet?), which is another popular platform for mobile Linux enthusiasts.

Anyways, the dream of Sailfish OS lives on to this day on my Pixel 5, since one of the last things I did on the platform was extracting all the ringtones. Whenever someone calls me, I am reminded of how excited and hopeful I was back in 2013 when Jolla launched Sailfish OS and their phone. :)

Flatpak apps can be uninstalled without leaving a trace: flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.google.Chrome

But you might need some global overrides to make all apps write their configuration into ~/.var. Personally I globally revoke apps the permission to access filesystem= host, home, xdg-config, xdg-data.

That was actually the main reason that made me switch to Flatpak. Previously I used VMs to try out software, but with Flatpak I know that I can get rid of the application completely.

Windows actually has a package manager preinstalled.

On any up-to-date Windows 10 and 11 computer that has the App Installer app installed (it should be preinstalled), you can use winget to manage your applications. Winget has the Microsoft Store and a community repository preconfigured and you can add additional sources, if you want.

You can use it via a terminal:

• Install a package: winget install Mozilla.Firefox
• Update all applications on your computer: winget upgrade --all

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Yes, but it doesn’t work.

• Bing claims that the parameter site is supported: https://support.microsoft.com/topic/ea595928-5d63-4a0b-9c6b-0b769865e78a
• Bing claims that the boolean OR is supported: https://support.microsoft.com/topic/b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930

So according to Bing’s documentation, the search parameters for this example are the same as Google’s parameters and my search string should work just fine.

But look at my Bing example: I am looking for Wikipedia pages that either contain the string Chicago or Linux or both. Instead of the expected result, Bing gives me results from pages other than wikipedia.org.

The exact same search works just fine with Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+Linux+OR+Chicago

DuckDuckGo is even worse in my opinion, as it doesn’t support boolean OR searches at all.

I am currently trying my luck with Brave Search.

But I am to this day quite dissatisfied with any Google alternative, as they all either lack boolean search capabilities, filters for search results (e. g. by site or by image size) or a combination of both.

Bing claims to support the site parameter and boolean searches, but it simply doesn’t work (go to the second page, if needed): https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+Linux+OR+Chicago

Same for all the other alternatives I’ve tried to use. I am honestly wondering how people are able to find anything with, for example, Bing or DuckDuckGo …

Are you only doing simple searches, like “nearby restaurant”? How do you search for something that has multiple valid names (OR) and you want to limit search results to before:2015, if the search engine doesn’t support search operators?

I miss the days, when Ubuntu was still a fun distribution to recommend to anyone.

Their initial idea of creating “Linux for human beings” was great and they were leading the way in user-friendly installers, graphical distribution upgrades and making the Linux desktop more accessible to everyone in general! I especially loved their predictable release cycle. Having the choice between an LTS and a more recent version is very useful and with Ubuntu you can make that decision again every two years. Very practical!

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I use Muzei and the Bing Wallpaper plugin, so I get a new colour every day. ;)

I absolutely adore Material You. In my opinion it’s the best Android design to date. It is important to me that apps support it, along with automatic dark mode detection and themed icons.

The only downside I heard about it is that the accent colours can be used to uniquely identify a user (i. e. tracking). This seems to be the reason for GrapheneOS shipping with a black wallpaper by default.