Linguistic witch hunts are not merely distasteful and often misguided; they sometimes have unintended consequences ranging from corruption of historical records to character assassination.

I am embarrassed to see them taking place in my field.

Does the latter group exist?

And at this point, I guess folks who think Wayland is some kind of big tech conspiracy being forced on users without good reason might want to rethink that stance.

Unfortunately, Wayland still lacks some functionality that Xorg has, so switching would be a step backward for some people. Snarkily dismissing them as conspiracy theorists is wrong in several ways.

AFAICT, what matters is whether you have stardict installed and running, not whether you use Bookworm vs. Trixie. It looks like they both have the same version of the package in question, though I haven’t verified the behavior.

You have to be using X and Gnome.

I don’t think this is true. The stardict-gtk package gets installed on any system that installs the stardict package, regardless of what desktop environment is used, due to a hard dependency between those packages.

The phrasing in that quote is unclear. It could be read to mean Debian 13 installs the stardict-gtk package and enables the bad plugin if you install stardict yourself, rather than meaning that any of this is included as part of the default Debian installation.

I think this would indeed happen if you installed stardict yourself, because the stardict package depends on stardict-gtk, which recommends the stardict-plugin package, and the recommends relationship is treated as a dependency by default.

The questions on my mind are:

• Is stardict installed by default in a new Debian 13 installation, or does this only affect people who install it themselves?
• When will this malicious plugin be fixed or removed, not just in Debian, but in all distros that have it?
• When will the package maintainer who defended the plugin’s behavior be dealt with?

Which distro? Chances are you can install KDE on it and then select the Plasma session next time you log in.

On Debian-based systems, the package you would want to install is probably task-kde-desktop. More info here: https://wiki.debian.org/KDE

That’s a strange conclusion to reach, considering that KDE’s window manager / compositor draws uniform top (title) bars for all applications that allow it, while GNOME/Gtk has adopted client-side decorations where each app draws whatever it wants at the top of the window.

I think it’s more likely that GP is either using GNOME apps that have different ideas about what to stuff into their title bars, or using some other desktop environment with a mix of apps built with different widget toolkits (or different versions of them).

Last time I checked, PipeWire expected audio device permissions to be granted dynamically, and would have trouble in multi-user environments if the users were in the audio group. (I don’t know your distro, but it’s possible this is why your user wasn’t in the audio group by default.) So if you run PipeWire, you might want to take a closer look at the issue.

After seeing a lot of tmux hype, I gave it a try. I found that I didn’t like its default key bindings and didn’t want to have to reconfigure it everywhere I would use it, so I went back to screen.

Haven’t tried zellij yet.

I did it as soon as I got the device.

Power usage: I didn’t have a chance to compare, but I wouldn’t expect much difference.
Stability: Improved, because the Debian kernel was better at dealing with a quirky hard drive.
Features: Vastly improved, because I had a complete Linux system with admin rights, and could install any software I wanted. That “NAS” became a general purpose server.

Nice. Back when I had a QNAP NAS, it was a real pleasure to replace their applianceware with Debian.

It describes itself as a server-side application for playing music, but it can be used locally as well. For example, the Cantata music player uses mpd to handle music decoding and playback, but automates it in the background to keep the interface simple for the user. This separation of concerns allows Cantata to benefit from things like decoding improvements, security fixes, and new sound APIs (e.g. PipeWire) without having to reinvent the wheel.

It’s worth noting that KDE Connect works on more desktops than just KDE Plasma. It also supports Linux, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and probably other operating systems, and can do more than just transfer files.

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It’s possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it’s nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don’t mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

If you want help, you’re going to have to give some detail about what “not working” means.

The RX 9000 series is very new, so it’s likely that at least one of these components in the linux distros you’ve tried was not new enough to support that GPU:

• The amdgpu driver (part of the kernel).
• The GPU firmware (package names vary; probably linux-firmware package on Ubuntu).
• Mesa.

I suggest asking other RX 90xx users what linux distro/release they have found to support such new hardware out of the box, and trying one of those. Or if you know what you’re doing, grab a tarball of new firmware and install it manually.

the first thing was install FreeBSD. I have always been intrigued by it, a UNIX like OS that was by design meant to replace UNIX

FreeBSD descends from the Berkeley Software Distribution, a descendant of Bell Labs Unix. As it is very much a pedigreed Unix, you don’t have to say “UNIX like”. :)

Fun fact: The network sockets API that is (or was originally) used by every major OS for internet protocol support came from BSD.

Edit: You might enjoy these Unix family trees…

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_history-simple.svg

https://eylenburg.github.io/os_familytree.htm

All the more reason to call attention to an easily overlooked alternative, especially if it’s able to serve a blind person’s needs better.

Running ALSA as root had one huge benefit

Huh? ALSA is not a sound server, but a collection of kernel components and libraries. You don’t run it.

With PipeWire or PulseAudio, audio is bound to a user session.

PipeWire has a system-wide mode of operation. It wasn’t well-tested when I last asked about it, but it might be worth a try.

GTK3 broke accessibility for years.
GTK4 released with no accessibility support at all.

This whole article is focused on GNOME and other GTK-based desktops. The only mention of KDE Plasma at all is to say that a certain GNOME fork (MATE) isn’t like it. This seems like a rather large oversight given that Qt, upon which Plasma is built, has accessibility features built in.

So, nearly every criticism here is not about Linux after all, but about a specific desktop family. I hope the author eventually notices that others exist, tries them, and discovers things that work better in them. (And it would be nice if they were to post a more comprehensive follow-up article, or at least rephrase this one so that it doesn’t mislead people into thinking it represents the Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole.)

This is the first time I’ve read of fwupd having firmware that’s likely to be useful to individuals, rather than data centers. Nice!