Hacker News Reader

neilsimp1on FirefoxPWA: Progressive Web Apps for Firefox

I've been doing this manually for a while by creating a FF profile for an app, adding some userChrome.css to hide some of the chrome at the top, and creating my own .desktop files to open FF in the new profile.

It's a bit tedious but it works.

I'd love to try this if I didn't have to use a FF extension to do it. It looks like it does it better than I have been doing it.

Also the name should be changed.

neilsimp1on A Git Implementation in Awk

Yeah, but you gotta admit, this is cool. It may not be the most practical or useful thing, but it is cool that someone made Git in AWK.

neilsimp1on Phrack Issue 70

I've never heard of Phrack before, but a plain text-based zine is a prime candidate for Gemini/Gopher if I ever saw one.

neilsimp1on Firefox vs. Brave: Which is the better browser for you? – Mozilla

I feel like choosing a browser is like choosing a political candidate (US) - I don't choose the one that I like, I choose the one that is least bad.

FF is still the least bad.

neilsimp1on Steam Top 50 Games: Over 70% now work on Linux

And with the Steam Deck coming, Valve is working hard on solving this problem. I think by next year, I will never be needing to boot my Windows VM.

neilsimp1on Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

I only had to scroll a few more lines down from your post here to find an example supporting your statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28486717

neilsimp1on Problems with Oracle SQL

I disagree with you but I'm not sure why you were downvoted.

neilsimp1on Ask HN: It's 2021, where do I go to buy a prebuilt Linux compatible desktop?

Plenty of good options nowadays:

https://shop.puri.sm/

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

https://system76.com/

https://frame.work/

https://pine64.com/product-category/laptops/

https://minifree.org/

Lenovo, Dell, probably some other large OEMs have them too.

neilsimp1on PureOS – a pure Linux phone experience

Maybe. But you're also financing the development of free software that is used not only by Purism but other companies and FOSS groups.

neilsimp1on The Firefox browser UI is a web page (link only works on Firefox)

Off topic a bit but I was recently a bit bummed to learn (but not all that surprised) that `about:config` does nothing in FF for Android.

neilsimp1on Elementary OS 6 Odin

But very good for the user, no?

neilsimp1on AltStore – An alternative app store for non-jailbroken iOS devices

This is a nice looking and elegant solution to an artificially created problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. Why not use an OS that doesn't treat it's users like crap?

neilsimp1on Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance

`mitigations=off` in your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to disable Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, in case anyone is wondering. This page has a pretty decent write-up on it: https://leochavez.org/index.php/2020/11/16/disabling-intel-a....

neilsimp1on Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

Well, we all know the every-other-version-of-Windows-rule:

Windows 2000 - Good

Windows ME - Bad

Windows XP - Good

Windows Vista - Bad

Windows 7 - Good

Windows 8 - Bad

Windows 10 - Good

Windows 11 - ????

neilsimp1on Ask HN: Linux Laptop for Workstation

I haven't used it, but the Librem 14 is getting a good reception from what I've been seeing.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

neilsimp1on Tell HN: There is no reason not to use Brave

If Brave would have just used a different engine under the hood than Chromium, I would be all over it.

I am not anti-Chromium, just pro-browser diversity.

neilsimp1on Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

Will Yahoo answers be coming back under the new ownership? (semi-serious question)

neilsimp1on Calibre – E-Book Management

I was surprised by this on my first use too. I just decided to give up and store my ebooks in the format that it wants, rather than just the media/books folder I already had.

neilsimp1on Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Sphere

As far as I know, it's the only Linux distro that requires Windows and VS in order to build it.

neilsimp1on If you care about privacy, it’s time to try a new web browser

Which one is less polished, and are you implying Chrome is more so? Maybe it's "polished" but it's incredibly slow and FF/Brave both have better features from what I can see.

neilsimp1on Show HN: Interactive Version of “Programmer's Competency Matrix”

There is a typo in the headerbar: "Programmes's Competency Matrix", should be Programmer's.

neilsimp1on Notepad++ 7.9.1 – pour Samuel Paty

https://notepadqq.com/s/ on Linux is an excellent alternative, but it lacks the plugin system and some of the tools from N++, which is a bummer. I still keep N++ installed via Wine, but use NotepadQQ most of the time since it starts up faster.

Notepad++ is a superb program.

neilsimp1on PinePhone – KDE Community edition

No "Edition" but Plasma Mobile is supported on PureOS/Librem 5 and it's possible to switch to use that in place of Phosh should you want: https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Bo...

I am not sure how up to date Plasma Mobile is in these repos though. It's been a while since I tried it out.

neilsimp1on KDE Plasma 5.20

People using KDE Plasma and not using some sort of rolling release distro are missing out, I think. 5.18 LTS was a very very solid release, but 5.19 and 5.20 have so much new that it's a bummer for people whose distros won't be seeing them any time soon.

neilsimp1on Microsoft 365 Outage

https://status.azure.com/en-us/status

Looking at it now, Azure AD is the only service that isn't green.

neilsimp1on What happened to Firefox Send?

Hahahaha. I have always thought this looked like a great product but never really had a need for it.

I had a file slightly too large to email last night and thought I'd try FF Send for the first time ever, only to be greeted with `Service Unavailable`.

It's a real bummer this is going away, and I hope this isn't a sign of more to come.

neilsimp1on Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

You can remove everything from the New Tab page to make it completely blank now, although I do agree I'd prefer if it was blank by default with no ads or anything.

neilsimp1on Microsoft Joins the Blender Development Fund

Extinguish, I have no examples. But Embrace and Extend, here is a possible one. Not saying I think this is a case of the first two E's necessarily but I know other people have pointed it out.

1. Build WSL2 and incorporate Linux kernel into Windows with great integration. 2. Add DirectX and GPU acceleration support for Linux that works in WSL2 only and not in regular Linux: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-GU....

These two steps could certainly be looked at as Embrace and Extend, although I admittedly fail to see how they could take an Extinguish step from here.

neilsimp1on Ask HN: Is your company Linux friendly or not?

I work for my state government, so the Enterprise-y Microsoft environment rules over everything else. I would guess most of the developers in my area (50+) aren't even very familiar with Linux. Heck, we even run most things on Windows servers as for whatever reason they are cheaper for us to provision than Linux servers.