FOSS Is Fun
As far as I know, companies don’t have to comply yet with the Digital Markets Act. That’s most likely the reason why the WebKit restriction is still in place.
It misses one important choice: “I want to get notified of new releases of the operating system and want to have a graphical upgrade path.”
Otherwise people just run their no longer supported OS until something stops working (I’ve seen this countless times …), as very few people follow blog posts or social media feeds of their operating system.
This rules out lots of supposedly “beginner friendly” distributions, such as elementary OS or Linux Mint, as they don’t notify users about the availability of a new distribution release. Elementary OS doesn’t even offer in-place upgrades and requires a reinstallation.
I was in a similar situation not too long ago.
My criteria for another scripting language included that it should be preinstalled on all target systems (i. e. Debian and Fedora), it should be an interpreted language and it needs to have type safety.
Afterall I settled with Python due to its popularity, its syntax and features (type safety since v3.6, etc.) and the fact that it is preinstalled on many Linux distributions. System components often use Python as well, which means that libraries to interact with the system tend to be included by default.
For text-based notes I use Obsidian.
It isn’t open source, but it writes standard markdown files to disk, so I can switch programs whenever I like and I am not locked into the Obsidian ecosystem with my notes. That was the main reason why I decided against using Joplin, especially after my experience with converting recipes from Nextcloud Cookbook to markdown …
In general I am always trying to find a simple file-based solution for whatever I need to do. I want to be able to sync it with Syncthing instead of something fancier that requires a centralised web server or even relies on a cloud service.
ThinkPad under Lenovo has also gotten much worse to the point that I don’t really consider them anymore …
Last time I looked you couldn’t even buy a 2-in-1 with upgradeable memory (or RAM > 16 GB) anymore and for replacing the keyboard you now have to disassemble the entire ThinkPad. Unlike my L390 Yoga and X201 Tablet, where the RAM is slotted and where the keyboard can easily be changed by removing three screws (which is important to me, as I prefer US International over my local layout and I also value a clean keyboard when buying used). In my experience ThinkPad batteries also tend to loose capacity rather quickly? In addition we already have the second X1 Yoga with a broken hinge within three years of normal usage in my family (luckily this device has a five year warranty, so we’ll see if the warranty covers it) …
Maybe this has changed since the first L13 Yoga (haven’t read about any new hardware from Lenovo since then), but these were the main reasons why I decided to buy one of the last new L390 Yogas instead of its successor and why I no longer consider ThinkPads to be more desirable than any other laptop.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Rnote yet.
It is my favourite newly-created program for Linux. It is a relatively new app which supports annotating files and taking handwritten notes. You can import PDFs, set the page size to infinite or a fixed size (something OneNote can’t do), adjust the background to display grids or lines or dots or nothing with any spacing you like, input text with your keyboard, … It is available on Flathub for easy installation.
The only major downside is the following: Disclaimer: The file format is still unstable. It might change and break compatibility between versions.
You can select a local folder in Obsidian for Android and sync the folder with Syncthing. You can even revoke network permissions for Obsidian and it all works completely offline (Flatpak override: --unshare=network / GrapheneOS: don’t allow the network permission).
This is my current setup, even though Obsidian is not FOSS. I like that it stores standard Markdown files in a traditional filesystem hierarchy, instead of what Joplin does with using Markdown files as a database. This means that with Obsidian I can use any text editor or any other Markdown app to access and edit my notes, whereas with Joplin I would have to export them first to standard Markdown and then potentially rename and reorganise all the files and their attachments.
Oh no, I thought that was a feature. I came to rely on it to transcribe long tab titles into my text editor. Is there any way to restore the old behaviour in Firefox? Otherwise I’ll have to stick with Firefox 118 or switch web browsers, since Firefox 119 seems to break my longstanding workflow. :(
Any ideas?