Sudden culture shock from a Norwegian:

Still open is the transition of heat and cars to electricity…

Almost all electricity used by Norwegian homes goes towards heating (including cooking and hot water), and charging cars. So counting heating separate from electricity suddenly makes the electric transition sound less impressive. (And the transition away from nuclear more baffling). It’s still impressive to see Germany really follow through on renewables though. 60% renewable electricity is still a lot

Is there a plan to transition away from burning fossil fuels for heating?

No they’re not, in fact Cosmic is almost ready for Alpha release (Sorry, couldn’t help myself)

You make a valid point.

One counterpoint does come to mind: Cost. The hardware to run it on ain’t cheap

(Im not up to date on the used market and the cut off point where old macs become unsupported and stop receiving software updates)

Had great success on Kubuntu. Set up the desktop to have two giant icons only: Firefox, and shutdown.

On Windows the constant popups for updating various components were causing much confusion Java, flash (back in the day), printer “drivers”, and of course windows itself would throw popups about updates requiring clicking buttons every time they used the computer, which was very infrequently, and cause them much confusion (“what does update mean” ?")

Meanwhile on Kubuntu all updates go “shhhh” in the background, and no more confusing “To shutdown, press Start”

This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.

In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.

Instead of one super chunky battery, how about a laptop with replaceable batteries, in combination with a UPS?

UPS is so you can actually replace the laptop battery with a spare one , even during a power outage. Just run the laptop on AC from the UPS while changing batteries. Or see if you can find a UPS with a long lasting battery. Entry level ones only have like 15-30 minutes of battery life though, since they’re more intended for safe shutdowns or brownouts.

Probably more what MangoKangoroo and B0rax talked about, that enterprises can opt out of this telemetry, due to compliance or Intellectual Property protection.

So only the commoners get mandatory full-scale surveillance, Ehm I mean “ai enhancement”

Why did they have their own builds of these projects in the first place? Did they have custom patches they maintained?

I know your pain! (Cries in Nvidia laptop) when i bought mine i literally couldn’t find a laptop with AMD graphics in my region.

There is some hope these days. In addition to the previously mentioned Frameworks laptop, there’s also this TUXEDO Sirius 16 - Gen1. (Tuxedo is a German company specializing in Linux-compatible computers). It might not be exactly what your looking for, but AMD graphics laptops are so few and far between I thought I should put it out there.

+2 for KDE Connect, the integration is amazing. I’ve used it on KDE and Gnome (gsconnect), all works very well

How much of this is Spotify’s fault and how much is the major record labels sitting between Spotify and the individual artists?

And is there a better place for us consumers to go and vote with our wallet? Ideally somewhere that isn’t one of the 5 major tech giants that control everything

I did this too :D I used to have 20 pairs of non-identical black socks, which made matching hard and it felt wrong to wear socks of slightly different type or size. Much easier now

I keep getting socks for Christmas though, which I never wear cause they’d mess up the simplicity

2nd for Kobo! It’s a good device, supports more standards, and doesn’t fund any of the Too Big Tech Giants

That’s very strange, which distro and GPU was this? So I don’t recommend that to anyone?

I’m assuming the GPU in question was Nvidia, since AMD and Intel make their driver opensource and baked in to the kernel. Sadly nVidias latest kernel (535) has been troublesome, so I’m still on the previous 525. nVidia is about to release 545, which looks to be very promising.

Luckily on Ubuntu changing driver is as easy as opening the Additional Drivers application, selecting the driver version, hit apply and reboot. PopOS, Bazzite, and a few others comes with Nvidia drivers preinstalled.

Best of luck if you try again in the future

Application Z requires another 3GB because it needs Gnome runtime version X+1, not version X. Although I do believe Flatpak does some kind of reduplication so actual used space is somewhat less.

It’s also less of a problem if you flatpak all the apps vs having just a handful. The more apps the better chance they’re actually sharing runtimes.

Flatpak updates are handled very smoothly by KDE Discover, I always assumed Gnome Software did the same, so no additional package manager required.

Despite the few downsides Flatpak is still wonderful. As a Kubuntu user it’s nice to say Farewell random PPAs whenever there’s a need for an actual newish version of an application

What’s the deal with the timezone?

Like maxmal said, FreeCAD has an Architecture (and BIM) workbench, which is heavily developed by one of the main FreeCAD Devs. Try it out and see if it works for you

Calling the architecture workbench a plugin is technically correct, but a bit misleading, as all core features are technically plugins(workbenches). The Architecture workbench is a built-in default feature

Kate on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows.

Also, Kate on Windows (it’s really good)

Sadly Obsidian is not open source or free as in free speech. For individuals it is free as in free beer though

True, and so all honour to the creators for remaining FOSS, especially smaller projects spearheaded by a single dev

Altough usually when a shift like that happens in bigger projects there’s a community fork, and the original project withers. Like Owncloud -> Nextcloud , OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, MySQL -> MariaDB

You could argue there’s some degree enshitification through the Ubuntu snapification driven by Canonical. Although that’s not so much about making Ubuntu deliberately worse, it’s more moving Ubuntu forward in a way that aligns with Canonical’s strategic goals. So its “paying the strategy tax” rather than direct enshitification.

For collaborative projects like Linux I believe every contributor would need to agree to any license change, which is practically impossible