lproven

There is a fork that doesn't need Google accounts. It's called Fyde OS. I tried it:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/08/21/fydeos-offers...

The only modern Linux distro that feels to me like Linux used to feel in the 20th century -- minimal, fast, simple, clean -- is Alpine Linux.

I miss the PC version of Raspbian. It was my go-to OS for reviving very old PCs.

A: An immediate cessation of funding and a stern letter from the Ethics Committee.

I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played.

It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian.

ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.

Don't be daft. Of course there was. It could save programs onto cassette as well as load them from cassette.

The ports are labelled MIC and EAR because that's what you connected them to on the cassette recorder.

Someone tried to instigate that on Mastodon recently. It didn't work.

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116959309031485270

Spread the word. Contact the developers, ask them.

The forks I know about:

• Waterfox -- https://www.waterfox.com/

• Librewolf -- https://librewolf.net/

• Floorp -- https://floorp.app/

• Zen browser -- https://zen-browser.app/

• Mullvad -- https://mullvad.net/en/browser

• Konform -- https://codeberg.org/konform-browser

Others:

GNU IceCat – https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Mercury – https://thorium.rocks/mercury

I fear it would be hard to get some of the earlier forks on board... these are all based on much older codebases:

• Palemoon -- https://www.palemoon.org/

• Basilisk – https://www.basilisk-browser.org/

• Seamonkey – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

GetRight, then DownThemAll, and now, Multithreaded Download Manager:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610538

It started 9 years ago.

That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.

By 3-4y later this was worldwide.

So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.

But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538096

It's more complete and has loads of apps now. It fixes the main problems BeOS had.

https://github.com/rcarmo/haiku-arm64-build

"how people pronounce words ending in that"

You did not restrict which people you were talking about, and that's a critical omission. Nobody in my daily life, in real life where I live or on TV or radio, would ever say "missal" when they meant "missile".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678

(No comments.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494856

  > Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining

  Why thank you! :-)

  There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
  uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
  plenty of broken links and things.

  Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)

> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)

Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.

I was very vaguely notionally Church of England until age 11, although still had to go to Chapel daily from 12-17. I have never been to Mass and I don't really know what goes on in a Mass. I'm not even sure if Anglicans have Mass.

My local Canon certainly had plenty of small-m mass: big lad. Nonetheless, when he scattered my father's ashes in the sea, he got caught by a wave, and proved that despite this he could run backwards up a shingle beach, wearing wet robes, at surprising speed.

Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where the drivers could handle multiple cards. You couldn't do it with ATI or S3 or any of the other commodity GPUs back then, but any old Matrox with any other of around the same generation worked. They could have dissimilar amounts of memory and things and it still worked.

About 20 years later, I was working at SUSE in Prague, and we had lots of old nVidia cards available in the office spares pile, and lots of spare LCDs around the 22" - 24" size range.

Two screens was easy: most nVidia pro-range cards can drive 2 outputs.

I had the desk space and available screens, so I decided to try 3.

Then the nightmare began.

Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it.

But nVidia's own drivers are tied to specific GPU generations, but those generations are not marked on the card or in the easily-accessible specs anywhere. It's mostly a case of installing the card, booting Linux, seeing what the driver describes the GPU family generation as, and then Googling to try to find which of the random pile of cards to hand is a matching GPU family and generation.

I never got 3 screens working together adequately, and the combinations crashed my OS often.

For emergencies I kept a Windows partition and its behaviour with mismatched cards is quite funny in an annoying way.

1. Boot

2. Identify first card

3. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it

4. Reboot

5. Find second card

6. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it

7. Card 1 now does not work. So...

8. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it

9. Reboot

10. Second card now does not work.

11. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it...

It would sit there taking 10min or so per loop until you pulled the plug.

With Linux, it's just a case of:

Human IDs GPU; manually installs driver; sees if both cards work.

The answer is, generally, "no", so:

Swear, remove one card, substitute, try again.

Eventually I went to the IT department who gave me an elderly, huge, AMD card. 2 full length slots, 2 cooling fans, and a decade old so rubbish performance by 20-teens standards. But, 4 display outputs, and use any combination you want -- and native FOSS drivers, so no need to manually install anything.

Joy, peace, and calm descended.

Then a couple of months later, COVID... and working off a little Dell laptop with only an Intel onboard GPU and one external screen. I did in the end get 2 external screens and the built in screen working, but only using an X11 desktop that didn't do much fancy 3D rendering (Xfce) because it didn't have enough VRAM for triple-head and compositing.

  I guess I have mainly met older kiwis!

  I slightly know Terry Stewart of https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/
  from mailing lists, and while I don't follow any Youtube channels as a
  rule, I used to enjoy his videos:

  https://www.youtube.com/@tezzaNZ

  I probably heard more NZ English from Terry than anyone else!

  Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance
  in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of
  RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15
  inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display.

  I think I kept those cards, as a pair, in my next 3 or 4 PCs – I know I was
  still using them about a decade later, because when I switched from SUSE to
  Ubuntu in 2004, Ubuntu's very screen-config tools couldn't configure 2 GPUs
  and so I had to keep SUSE around for several years in dual boot. Every time
  I made some screen config change or whatever, I booted into SUSE, set up my
  Matrox cards and then copied `/etc/X11/xorg.conf` into my Ubuntu partition,
  then I could reboot into Ubuntu and use them.

  Ubuntu finally caught up around release 6.06 or something.

  I didn't stay on two 14" displays for long... then two 15", then a 17" plus
  a 15", then the widescreen luxury of dual 17" Idek Iiyama displays. :-) 

  I stopped playing video games much decades ago, so I never cared about what
  3D performance was like. Nor did 99% of my consultancy clients. As 3D cards
  gradually became the norm, I used to install the free Microsoft-advertising
  version of the Computer Artworks "Organic Art" screensaver:

  https://cuttlefish.org/archive/earlysites/artworks/organic-art/index.html

  ... just so the 3D card had something to do. It looked impressive, and when
  Windows 2000 was new, watching how smoothly the screensaver ran was quite a
  treat. When the app first came out it was like a slideshow.

  What was good news for me was when LCD flat screens started to appear: lots
  of people and companies started throwing out even high-end high-quality CRT
  screens, and big ones too. For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays
  which cost a fortune new. I filled my garage with good quality CRTs just as
  spares. I had a small and rather sickly cat and she vomited a lot. There is
  a nice big warm flat space on the back of a big CRT ideal for a cat to take
  naps on. She killed dozens of monitors, by vomiting into them, but I had so
  many spares that for several years I simply didn't care. I sent them to the
  recycling and grabbed another one from the spares.

  > Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication.

  No it doesn't. If you're careful about how you speak and how you write then
  it takes next to no additional effort at all. I used to do this with all of
  my online responses, and it's been fun to do it again in this thread today.
  Note my responses in this comment thread as a whole. Even though I have not
  done this more than once or twice this century, it barely slows me down. At 
  a guess, maybe it adds 10% or so to the time it takes to type a comment...?

  > Imagine the backtracking required...

  Virtually none. For some lines I might occasionally have to go back a three
  or four words, that's all. It's quite fun: some dusty rusty old bits of the
  old grey matter have been woken up and exercised, and they're rather liking
  being up in the sunlight again. :-)

  Dude, it's a text prediction engine. It can no more "enjoy" a process than a
  stapler enjoys poking wire through paper. 

  Don't kid yourself. It's the first step down a slippery slope, one that ends
  in assigning gender to a bunch of statistics, falling in love with it, and a
  lot of terrible software, writing, pictures, and so on. It's a machine. Make
  sure not to anthropomorphise inanimate machinery.

  Only for Americans. In British English, it's "MISS isle", and "MISSul" is
  a church book. I'm not Christian and I am not sure of exactly what's in a
  _missal_ but it's prayers or something.

  I do not know if American English even has missals. They're old fashioned
  things these days, I think. But in my dialect, "missile" and "missal" are
  two different words with 2 different sounds, which means that when I hear
  Americans talking about the fast moving weaponry what I hear is that they
  are launching prayer books at someone. It's not a very common word and so
  I keep forgetting.

  A shibboleth is a little more specific: it's the pronunciation of one
  specific sound in a different way that marks out a person as from one
  specific group. 

  So, some of the go-tos... New Zealand English tends to turn an /i/ in
  even stressed positions into schwa (the sound on the end of "little",
  or "umbrella", or "gopher", and one of the key sounds to master for a
  non-native learner who wants to improve their English accent). When a
  Kiwi says "fish and chips" it sounds like "fush and chups", "swimming
  pool" becomes "swumming pool", and this is _the_ way to distinguish a
  Kiwi from an Australian, because to the rest of the Anglophone world,
  NZ English sounds very like Aus English.

  Canadians tend to pronounce the "ow" sound in words like "about" in a
  way that to my British ear sounds Scottish: it becomes "aboot". So if
  I hear someone speaking with an American sounding accent but they say
  "I found oot aboot something," I ask them if they're Canadian. I tend
  to find most Canadians and New Zealanders are delighted if someone is
  able to tell, so ask very early on and you can make new friends. :-)

  I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
  pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
  to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
  English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
  they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
  not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
  leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
  and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a". 

  But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
  of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
  start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
  form of vowel.

  This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
  they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
  they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
  they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.

  "Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."

  Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
  extra ones where they shouldn't be.

  I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
  a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
  more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
  good thing overall, I reckon.

  (Wondering how long I should keep this up...)

:-o

I am honestly amazed.

IMHO KDE is fugly and it always has been.

    Heh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like
    this. :-)

    In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I
    recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of
    a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the
    top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and
    then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2
    letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top
    as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones
    to choose from.

    4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see...

    I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having
    own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it,
    and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st
    I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under
    Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the
    time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not
    use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk
    couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped.

    If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this
    is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At
    the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if
    you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter
    words on the fly.