data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.

    Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.












  • That is kind of awesome.

    I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.






  • Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.

    Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.

    As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.

    If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.

    If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.



  • May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).

    Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.

    • Blink is resource intensive and has so many non-standard APIs for the sake of Google’s version of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
    • WebKit takes 50 years to support the newest standards.
    • Gecko (Firefox) is non-modular and is limited to being used in Firefox, Thunderbird, and forks and Firefox as a result. Its performance is also somewhat worse than Chrome’s, but not noticeable for daily use.

    Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.