Yes TheLounge is fantastic but I switched to Convos these days because it's lighter weight and I somehow manage to overrun my disk much less often :)
feoh
Nice to see that KDE is so well supported! I'd been running Manjaro KDE the last time I had Linux installed on my desktop but I may give Debian a try this time around.
I'm not gonna speak for Canonical but snaps enable commercial vendors to more readily ship their apps on the Ubuntu platform.
Humans are inherently evil. There is but a thin veneer we call "civilization" that stops of from beating each other to death with whatever object can be brought to hand.
And what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? :)
I get it.
I don't love Snaps either.
However, a thing I try to remember and wish others would as well is simply this: Canonical is a company. Their goal is to make money. They are not out to create the ultimate free as in freedom Linux distribution.
This does (to my mind) not make them evil, and ESPECIALLY doesn't make the folks who work there evil. It makes them participants in the great horrible game that is Capitalism, and expecting anything else from them is going to lead to heartache, as you've seen.
If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and won't try to jam snaps down your throat, you might consider giving Debian a whirl as many others have.
Continuing to ride the Ubuntu train and raging against the dying of the light when it continues chugging in the direction it's been headed for YEARS seems ... futile :)
Gamer culture in one :)
Fun meme, but honestly I think the only folks it's gonna be a bad year for are AAA game devs, who I already sympathize with.
I think indies are gonna keep rocking some outstanding content. Content made with and for love will always beat content made for money IMO :)
Holy cow I'd love that too.
I want to buy a game, not an ongoing financial leeching.
I think everybody's different. I mean, there do exist 23 year olds who are incredibly mature and fully formed as human beings, capable of making that kind of a Big Decision, but from what I've seen they're pretty darn rare :)
I met my wife at 37 and married at 39. Best decision I ever didn't intentionally make :)
But looking back, I had a TON of growing up to do before I was ready to seriously commit to marriage the way I personally view it. Pair bonding for life. Sure, people, things and desired change, but I've watched far too many god awful divorces to ever want to go through that, so I wanted to be really sure and I totally was. It's been an awesome 16 years.
Yeah, "brand new" hardware is rough in the Linux-verse :) I think Linux advocates need to be more up front with that as well. Quite a number of them are rocking 15 year old Thinkpads because that's what they read will maximize compatibility.
Convos - self hosted web based client written in Perl of all things, because it's small, simple, does exactly what I want and no more, and avoids my having to faff with client + bouncer which was getting old 10 years ago and feels positively withering now.
https://convos.chat/