Most things should work just fine. There’s not all that much that requires x86.
So the real question is, what does your mom need/want? NextCloud? Jellyfin media server? Ente photos?
Maybe just a media center? Basically an Apple TV on crack?
Well crud. Thanks for the heads-up. First I’ve heard.
Sounds like Quad9 doesn’t actually do ad blocking, so that’s not much of a replacement.
It’s free for a limited number of queries per month. Generally enough for one device (depending on personal usage, obviously). Edit: It’ll still function as DNS after that limit, you just won’t get ad blocking and whatnot.
Mullvad has a free ad-blocking DNS you can use, too. I recommend the “base” version: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
I have lots of places I can use regex to match strings, but otherwise have no easy way to say “match any in list”.
Is it stupid? Sure. But I can’t fix the umpteen web consoles I manage; I have to work with them as they are.
The cheapest options I’ve found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.
Over the years I’ve picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of them.
I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it’s not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.
On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)
I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.
I love Debian. I’ve bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Debian.
The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it’s just outdated.
Like, “Debian is hard” and “Ubuntu is great for beginners”. That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.
My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn’t have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 “Trixie” does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12’s life cycle. If I’d waited another 6 months (or if I didn’t need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would’ve stuck with Debian.
I’m fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it’ll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won’t worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I’ll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I’m not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.
vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.
I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.
I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.
The line between user and advertiser is getting blurrier. They’re rolling out a feature where users can pay to “boost” their posts.
Meta’s boosts are a type of paid advertising that shows a Facebook or Instagram account’s posts to a wider audience. Meta frames boosts as a tool that many “small businesses” use, but it’s also being used by celebrities, brands, and individuals looking for more eyes on their content.
Paid boosts are a quick way to pay-to-play for engagement on Instagram and Facebook. They’re different from full ad campaigns, which can be purchased through Meta’s Ads Manager feature.
Buying anything on Amazon hardly seems viable anymore. There’s so much counterfeit crap there, and a million low-effort rebrandings of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress for cheaper.
Shop local when you can, and at least shop not-Amazon for the rest.
android can do this
How so? You mean running a full Linux VM or something? Android doesn’t run any desktop apps natively.
if you mean the tablet UI mode, yeah, that’s an easy thing for Apple to implement. I think they already have, more or less. iPadOS already has mouse support.
Apple’s been moving toward unifying their OSes for over a decade now. They’re playing the long game. They probably still have another decade (or two) to go.
Apple’s stance now is clear: developers need to make universal apps if they want them to run on both platforms, using tools and frameworks that are common to both. It’s much easier to make an iPad app run well on a Mac than vice-versa. I use some Mac apps that were ported from iPad, and the experience ranges from “okay” to “perfect”, depending on how much care the devs put into it. This is obviously the future of Mac software development, but it would require rewriting many apps almost from scratch. Apple’s not going to pull that rug out from under us anytime soon.
The next natural step would be to allow iPads to use the “desktop” UI of universal apps when connected to a keyboard and mouse. But I don’t think we’ll ever see iPads running arbitrary Mac apps. When I think of the Mac-only apps I use, I just don’t see how they’d run on iPad. How am I gonna run BBEdit on an iPad when there are hundreds of menu items, and a ton of UI elements that are like 8 pixels square? Never mind the lack of a real file system.
Microsoft tried this with Windows 8. It went poorly. The experience of using desktop apps with a touch screen sucks, and trying to make desktop UIs touchscreen-friendly across the board just handicapped desktop users. Apple has a better strategy here. They’re slowly molding the software ecosystem to make this Not Suck.
Same.
If you never do anything advanced, it’s as easy as any stock UI.
If you do want to do advanced things, it’s probably your only option because most stock firmware is ass on consumer-grade devices.