Ah, the hubris. I won't be the first nor the last person in the nerdville who thinks they have the golden formula on how to tweak operating systems for sane, normal, pure desktop usage. But here I am. I will attempt to do the same. I want to try to give you a formula on how to make your Windows 11 desktop behave like a desktop and not as a data-pumping machine for the cloud overlords.

Long story short, I don't like Windows 11, and don't want to use it. Recently, I did a lot of testing. This masochistic endeavor resulted in my fresh install and reset articles, which detail a great deal of cleanup and pruning. Then, there's CDP, right. Okay. So perhaps, I ought to consolidate everything into one piece, and give you a sort of definitive list of things you can "safely" disable in Windows 11, and still retain a normal system for intelligent use. I'm under the illusion that I can accomplish this. Let's see what gives.

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The Year of the Linux (desktop). Can it happen? Will it happen? For about two decades, the Linux desktop market share hovered around the magical underdog figure of about 1%. No matter what the Tux folks did, the needle wouldn't budge. More recently, there's been some growth in the desktop share. This is primarily thanks to Steam and their hard work on the Proton compatibility layer, which lets you play Windows games as if natively on Linux. As a result, with that one major obstacle removed, more and more people are slowly, gradually switching to Linux. My own journey shows some rather nice results. It would seem we have finally turned a page.

Alas, just as we've reached some small level of stability, some small level of progress, there's a good chance all of this effort will have been in vain. What do I mean by this? Well, the Linux world is fragmenting once more, on several levels. Rather than consolidate powers, or at least, not add more chaos into an already chaotic market, we shall now see a proliferation of new package formats, new distributions, new everything. This repeating of history comes at the most inopportune moment, and jeopardizes the Linux success story.

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If you use the iPhone, your browser choices are somewhat limited. Under the hood, it's all Safari, one way or another. But. Safari itself can use adblockers, like the lovely UBlock Origin Lite. Crucial for sane Internet usage. Firefox, on the other hand, does not have those. Shame, because Firefox is my preferred browser choice everywhere. Firefox Focus sort of does the job, but in a limited fashion.

This brings me to Brave, which I tested in Zorin OS, i.e., its Linux version. As far as Chromium-based browsers go, it was okay. Pretty decent. It did quite well, it has a built-in adblocker, and you can also add Manifest V2 extensions. In iOS, things are a bit different, but you still get a browser that promises to keep your Internet quiet and clean. Well, let's see what gives.

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Let me explain the fourth law of thermodynamics to you. Now, you could say, Dedo, there ain't one. Yes, there is. It goes as follows: if a description of an entity, intended to explain what an entity does, makes one's understanding of the intended functionality even more cryptic, then such an entity should be immediately discarded as pure garbage. Indeed, we don't want to mess with entropy. Case in point: Connected Devices Platform.

Rummaging about in Windows 10/11, I stumbled upon a service called the above. CDP, in short. What does it do? Ah. Ah! Well, I read the service explanation, I felt my eyelids flutter, and I said, okay, I don't want this. Apparently, this thing goes hand in hand with"user activities" so there's that, too. Confused? You should be. But let me explain, and show you what you can do.

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On paper, the world of smartphone is big and rich. There be hundreds of device models on offer. Alas, the reality is not quite so liberal and rosy. Throw in any sort of sensible requirement, and the list narrows down to maybe one or two devices, sometimes zero. Physical dual SIM? 3.5mm audio jack? Replaceable battery? Five or more years of support and upgrades? If you combine all these, you get exactly ZERO hits. Yup. This problem has plagued me for a while now, and whatever phone I choose, it's going to be a compromise of some sort.

Well, wifey said she needed a new phone, as her old one would occasionally turn itself off, plus the casing is a bit battered. Potential choices: Samsung of some sort, Google Pixel, iPhone, or Fairphone. There really isn't much else, believe it or not, if you wanna hit as many of the requirements I outlined above. But I own a Samsung A54, unfortunately, and I don't like it that much. Google Pixel could be a decent choice, but after Google pushed the SafetyCore prude filters onto one of my other devices, without my consent mind, I don't really feel like giving them money as a reward for that. Apple's devices are posh and extremely expensive, and while I've grown to like them quite a bit more in the recent years, such a choice is still a bit of a hurdle. That pretty much leaves the Fairphone as the only choice, even though it doesn't quite check all the boxes. On its own, that does not sound like a great selling point, but despair not. This smartphone has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. Indeed, I decided to bite the bullet, and get it. This review shall explain more. To wit.

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For many years, I strongly opposed the idea of using the iPhone, for two primary reasons. One, I couldn't find an easy way to sync my local, offline MP3 music to the device without using the iTunes. Two, there was no effective adblocking. And in my book, browsing the "modern" Internet without adblocking is like swimming through sewage with your eyes and mouth wide open.

In the recent years, I was able to resolve these issues. You can use VLC (and optionally KDE Connect) to copy your MP3 songs onto the iPhone. Sweet. Then, there's also the Adblock Plus extension for Safari, which lets you, well, block ads. Now, my preferred browser is Firefox, which doesn't support similar functionality on iOS (but it does so in Android, better than anything else, as it happens), but you could try Firefox Focus, or perhaps use Brave (I shall do that test soon). Yes, solutions. Happy me. Obstacles removed. Well, now, great news! UBlock Origin Lite, from the creator of the fantastic UBlock Origin (UBO), is now available on iOS, starting with version 18.6. Sweet. Let's explore.

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Wait, what. Yes, KDE is developing its own Linux distro called, well, KDE Linux. The project is still in extremely early phases, hence no big public announcement. But it is an interesting idea, and you might be tempted to test it. But, would you risk installing such an alpha-quality system on your physical hardware? That's what virtualization is for.

The only problem is, the KDE Linux installation instructions don't mention anything of this kind. The requirements call for a UEFI-based system, which means, it won't support old, legacy machines. Okay. Makes sense for a tool being developed in 2025. Another hardware restriction is that you won't be able to use Nvidia cards older than GTX 1650. This feels too limiting. It will also be Wayland only, most likely. Hm. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Early work. Indeed, we're here so I can show you how you can set up this distro in a virtual machine, safely. This will allow you to test the system without sacrificing precious hardware or risking major bugs. Let's commence.

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Over the years, I have owned (and/or own) a variety of Android smartphones. For the most part, they all exhibited reasonably long battery time in between charges, more so than what you normally hear reported in various articles. My Motorola One Zoom could do about a week, even with several hours of video calls, video playback, music, browsing and alike. More recently, a Samsung A54 in my possession can do four days.

This latest report triggered a bunch of emails, with people asking me what kind of magic I'm using to get such results. Well, I thought, ain't it obvious? After all, if you've followed my rather long Android privacy guide, you will have already taken a lot of steps toward improved battery life. But, for the sake of completeness, let me show you what I do, how I do it, and what you can do to extend the charge time.

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AKA alternative search engines. Here's one for you. In 2025, you know that your online habits are being profiled. All the time, by almost everyone, a million times over. Indeed, when you do any sort of search anywhere, your queries (your questions) tell a great deal about you to whomever you ask. Thus, if you tend to utilize Google or Bing for your search, you're "disclosing" tons of personal information. On its own, this ain't a big problem, because the actions are voluntary (if unavoidable in the modern world). But then, throw in the slew of Google and Microsoft services everywhere, and your search becomes a virtual mirror of your identity. If you're keen on privacy, you might want to consider not doing so, or to minimize your interaction with these search engines.

Well, question no.1: doable? The answer is: yes and no, mostly no. As it happens, there are very few search engine indexes out there. Whatever route you take, you're most likely going to end up with one or the other. Question no.2: why bother then? Well, privacy. And you're in luck! You can use search without giving too much away. Proxy search engines. So, no, you don't avoid Google or Bing, but yes, you use these proxies, and they make your search somewhat more private. Sounds cool. Let's explore, shall we?

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Over the years, the Linux desktop has become easier to use, more accessible. One "victim" of this progress is Linux Mint, in a way. Created as the ultimate pimped-up version of Ubuntu with everything available and working out of the box, for a long time, Mint offered Windows converts the most convenient Linux desktop experience out there. You wanted it, Mint had it. Then, Linux improved across the board, and Mint lost some of its advantage.

It's been quite a while since I tested any version of Mint. Overall, it's still a nice distro, and the flagship Cinnamon desktop does its work reasonably well. But it's not as shiny and awesome as it used to be. Well, you can read all about those impressions if you check the review of Uma, and then go back. Now, I wanna do a fresh test of the latest available version, Cinnamon edition. Let's see what gives.

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In a few short months, Windows 10 will reach the end of life (EOL) of mainstream consumer support. Without additional steps and remedies, by October 2025, roughly 50% of all Windows machines out there will no longer receives updates and patches. Yes, almost half of all boxen running Microsoft's operating system will become proverbial e-waste. If there's a better indicator to how much of a failure Windows 11 is, I can't name any. Never before has a "dying" version of Windows held such massive market share come its end of life. For that matter, the good ole Windows 7 was used by about 25% of all users when it was retired.

The reason I decided to write this tutorial is to help you with the conundrum. What do you do come October 2025? Should you upgrade to Windows 11? What if you cannot upgrade? Or don't want to upgrade? Are there any extended support options available? Should the end user be worried about the security implications of this change? Well, let's talk about all this, and then some.

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What do you do if you don't want or cannot use Microsoft Office? A legitimate question. There are many options, of course. You could try the free LibreOffice, for instance. You could try maybe Google Docs and alike. But what if you're really keen on document fidelity and accuracy, and you just must have good Microsoft Office format support, plus you actually want a proper desktop program?

Well, OnlyOffice sounds like a nice candidate. Having tested it before several times, I can indeed say it's a pretty decent program. It could be a bit speedier, the UI could be a bit more ergonomic, but it works well, and it renders Office documents quite alright. Not perfect, but good. Well, a major new version is out there, so we should test it! Now, I'm going to examine this program in Linux. One, why not. Two, as a cross-platform suite, OnlyOffice should work well on any of the supported systems, so Linux is as valid as any. Three, I do want to stop using Windows, so this is an important aspect of the test, for me. Sure, there might be Linux-specific niggles. Do take that into account while reading. Now, let's.

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Howdie. Many a Linux nerd is under a wrongful impression that I have some rancorous emotional investment toward different components of the operating system called Linux, Gnome in particular. Nope. My dislike of certain technologies is purely technological, ergo if a supposed solution doesn't do what it should, does it badly, or compromises heavily on important ergonomic aspects of DESKTOP usage, then, yes. In my case, it comes purely down to functionality, not ideological affiliations.

Ever since Gnome 3 became a thing, I was opposed to its visual minimalism, excess of mouse clicks to get things done, hiding of information, and lack of easy customization. That said, it's not a blanket verdict. Indeed, as I tested the latest version of Fedora Workstation, I discovered a few interesting pieces. Some good, some bad. I didn't elaborate too much in the review, so let's have a little piece focused on the aspects of desktop usability. Good things, bad things, lessons in Tux. Follow me.

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Windows 11, the curse that keeps on giving. First, my take, don't use. Now, if you must, read on. Should you happen to have been inflicted with the Home edition of this operating system, you're in for a treat. And by that, I mean you will need to spend way more time fixing things than a Pro edition would toll you. Whereby in the latter can just toggle a bunch of group policies to make things ever so slightly less stupid, Home edition users must suffer more.

Case in point, I tested the reset option in Windows 11 recently. A week after the procedure, Windows merrily reinstalled a bunch of crappy apps that I've explicitly removed from my system. Moreover, I've already toggled off pretty much all and any options available, as I've shown you in my usability guide. And still, still, Windows 11 ignored my choices and foisted a bunch of crayony apps that no one wants or needs onto me. Well, let me show you how you can stop the noise.

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My old but feisty Lenovo IdeaPad Y50 laptop has seen quite a bit of action lately. After I replaced the original HDD with a brand-new SSD not that long ago, I infused this 11-year-old chassis with a strong, minty breath of fresh fair. I tested Kubuntu 24.04 on it, with lukewarm initial results and a solid experience after several iterations and much bug fixing.

But then, I tested MX Linux MX-23.6, separately, and I liked it so much that I decided to try it on this machine, too. Basically, I reused the entire disk, displacing Kubuntu. This endeavor was good but not perfect. There were lots of small, annoying problems in the desktop, and the hybrid graphics supports seems a bit iffy. At the very least, there's no GUI way to configure PRIME for the Nvidia card, and this bothered me a lot. Well, I decided to restore Kubuntu onto the disk, a fresh install. And so I must report how this effort went.

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I've been using MX Linux for a long time now, mostly on elden hardware. My impression thereof changed from a lukewarm, average distro to a serious operating system, steadily improving, with a clear message and a rather recognizable feel. But in all my endeavors, I've mostly tested MX Linux on machines with Intel or AMD integrated graphics. Today, we shall change that.

My IdeaPad Y50 is an old machine - 11 years now. But with an SSD under the hood, and running Kubuntu, it works reasonably well. The early distro setup was somewhat rough, but things have become much better since. Excellent hybrid graphics support, decent performance. About as good as you can expect. But perhaps MX Linux can raise the bar even further? Well, with so many other distros pushing for Wayland/systemd as the future so to speak, MX Linux doggedly keeps using init and X11 (and yet, lets you systemd if you want), and that's a refreshing approach. So I wondered, if push comes to shove, would this work? Could I use MX Linux on Nvidia systems? Let's explore.

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For years, the smartphone users have enjoyed a simple "truth" - their rootless devices, combined with the use of sanctioned gilded cage stores, offered them superior security, especially compared to the Wild West of the desktop world. But then, things got more complicated. Today, the online stores are inundated with crapware, and attacks have become quite sophisticated. An improvement in the security posture is warranted, no?

Indeed. A few months back, I wrote my review of the iOS Lockdown Mode. I loved it. It was fantastic. In fact, I think it should be the DEFAULT security state. Not because it reduces attack risks, which it does, but because it reduces the noise and spam factors that are the milieu of the everyday smartphone life. Now, I want to take a look at Android's Advanced Protection mode, not to be confused with the similarly named Chrome browser or Google account mechanisms. And I'm going to take a look at the Samsung version thereof, because that's the device that I have. So follow me, if you will.

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Here's a wee situation you're facing. You want to change the run state of a Windows service. For example, you wish to change a specific service to be started manually rather than automatically when the system boots. Or you may want to disable it. You launch the Services tool (services.msc), you open the desired service, you change its state, and you click Apply/OK. You see an error: the parameter is incorrect.

I've encountered this issue when trying to disable the Windows Defender Web Threat service. This is a real-time component of Windows Defender, which I don't use, don't want to use, and refuse to use. On any Windows box that I have, it's disabled, any which way. If I can't do it through group policies, then I fully and complete delete the relevant program folders, as I mentioned multiple times. But even with Defender gone, the Web Threat service kept running, and I couldn't toggle it off using the Services utility. Let's rectify this, shall we.

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It is time to expand my testing some more. Now that I'm committed, it is time for fresh benchmarks. The story trail is somewhat long, so let me remind you. I tested Plasma 6.4, I got worried, I showed you various Wayland problems. To put my words where my mouth is or whatever, I decided to run a bunch of checks. First, I showed you Plasma idle desktop figures, two separate articles. Second, I did another experiment on an Nvidia hybrid graphics laptop, and added load tests - 4K video playback and some WebGL action.

Then, I went back to my AMD-powered, AMD-graphics laptop and redid the load tests in Plasma. All of my power, CPU, GPU, and FPS results show that X11 offers a superior, leaner performance, both in Plasma 5 and 6, both on AMD and Nvidia graphics. To make my testing complete, I am now going to redo everything in Fedora 42 Workstation Gnome. As Wayland as it gets. So let's see what gives. Beware, this is a very long, exhaustive article with tons of data. Do dedicate a nice chunk of time to read it.

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YOLO. When I did my Plasma 6.4 review, I didn't really have any idea how much time I was going to invest into actually testing and benchmarking Wayland and X11 performance. But post that review I did, received some feedback I did, and so I began doing more and more and more testing. First, I showed you idle system GPU numbers on an AMD graphics laptop. Then, CPU and power data on that same machine. Then, as I had some spare brain cycles, I went further, and I showed you idle and loaded system performance benchmarks on a different laptop with hybrid Intel-Nvidia graphics.

Now, I want to go back to my IdeaPad 3 machine, with its AMD integrated graphics and repeat the tests from my Nvidia adventure. Namely check the CPU, GPU and power utilization while playing a 4K 60FPS video clip and running a WebGL simulation in Firefox. I will do this for both Wayland power efficiency (PE) and color accuracy (CA) modes, and for X11 session with compositing on and off. I'll do this on a fully updated KDE neon desktop, but I want to let you know already, I shall endeavor to redo this test in Fedora 42 Gnome very soon. Now, let's commence.

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Yo, remember when I did my Wayland vs X11 benchmarks on an AMD-powered machine, and then, I said that I could expand my testing but might not do it due to a lack of free time? Surprise! I uncovered a fresh bucket of free time, and so I decided to run another round of benchmarks. But check this out, a laptop with hybrid graphics, Nvidia plus Intel. Should be interesting!

If you missed the drama, I did my Plasma 6.4 review recently, and discovered a bunch of alarming things, including subpar Wayland performance, even on an idle desktop. I confirmed this in my GPU tests and also power & CPU tests. Now, I will (try to) repeat my checks and benchmarks on a different machine, one with Nvidia hardware. And then, expand on those. Begin to commence to start, we shall. After me.

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Back in 2017, Canonical decided to stop the development of its homegrown Unity desktop. Instead, they chose Gnome 3 as the next platform, and even since, Ubuntu simply hasn't been as good as it was before. I often wonder what would have happened if Canonical had chosen, well, pretty much anything else.

Recent news in the Linux world around the forced deprecation of the X11 session in upcoming Gnome and, consequently, Ubuntu releases prompted me to write this article. I feel sad and alarmed, and I want to take a look at the Linux tech landscape, to see where we are, why we are where we are, and if perhaps the future holds anything good and bright and meaningful for the Linux folks. Let's chat.

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I love me a good mystery. Although I'm not happy and I'm rather worried about the direction the Linux home desktop is going, AKA forced deprecation of X11 before its would-be successor Wayland is truly ready, there's some small joy in telling a good story, replete with numbers. Indeed, after I published my Plasma 6.4 review, which showed Wayland being less optimized even for truly basic stuff, I decided to dig in and expand more on that early test and its troubling findings.

A few days back, I published some GPU benchmarks, very rudimentary, Wayland vs X11 in Plasma 6.4. I did it on the same test box, with its integrated AMD graphics, using the radeontop utility. The results explains why you may expect to see GPU spikes with Wayland, simply because it is less optimized, less efficient than the X11 session. Now, I want to back those numbers up with additional data, namely CPU and power figures.

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It hasn't been that long since I last reviewed MX Linux. Some nine months or so. In a way, at the risk of repeating myself, I wanted to try and test this lovely distro once again, and see what gives. The reasons are varied. But among them, the recent announcement about Wayland/X11 thingie in Gnome, Ubuntu and the birth of Xlibre, and my rather recent test of Plasma 6.4, all gave me added impetus to experiment with MX once more. After all, in the world of "modern", how does a simple, init-based, X11-running, not-big-company distro stack against the competition?

My journey with MX Linux has been interesting. I drew a lot of flak for my early, negative review of this system and its associated brethren distros. But I persevered, and so did the distro team. Fast forward a bunch of years, MX Linux has found its true calling. It's a simple system with no frills, friendly, accessible, and it puts the end user in focus, first and foremost. Like the fact you STILL get 32-bit builds for ancient hardware. In my book, that means a lot. Well, let's see what gives. Plasma version, mind!

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Last Thursday, I published my review of the latest version of the fantastic Plasma desktop environment. It wasn't without flaws or problems, including notable issues with Wayland, the new display protocol thingie that's supposed to drive the desktop. On its own, this wouldn't be anything cardinal, except both Gnome and KDE teams are pushing heavily for having Wayland as the default display protocol, even though it still kind of beta, and it severely lacks in numerous areas, including basic usability, as I noted in my article. So we're heading toward a no-choice Linux future that's deeply, deeply troubling.

What makes the whole story even more interesting is the predictable range of response to my writing. You get the usual gamut of ad hominem nonsense, the "it works for me so it's a-ok" school of thought, and some reasonable discussion to and fro. Well, I thought, I did report a few problems, perhaps I can shed some more light on the issues. As I always said, I have nothing against Wayland, and if we can make it better, great! The only problem, the ONLY problem is the forced deprecation of X11 BEFORE Wayland is ready. Now, let me show you some more info on the AMD GPU 100% spikes under Wayland.

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Hello there fellow people of the Internet world! I would like to invite you to the mega-nice Smashwords Summer Sale, taking place throughout the entire month of July. For 31 days and nights, you can buy and enjoy the entire catalog of me digital books available on Smashwords at a lovely 50% discount. A good opportunity to grab some fresh reading material, especially since all these e-books are DRM free. And, well, nicely written, I think.

You will get a chance to buy my yesteryear-published career-focused book aptly named How to Make Your Career Suck Less, a mythological fantasy novel about an ancient hero and a dragon, and the four volumes in The Lost Words series. Now, check this out, the first book, The Betrayed, is free, no strings attached. You can try that one before you commit to the full series. Well, that would be all for now. Take care, and happy shopping!

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My favorite desktop environment has just received an update. Arguably the best desktop out there, Plasma can do anything and everything. I did wait a couple of days for the KDE team to update their ISOs, and then downloaded and etched one KDE neon User Edition onto a USB stick. Henceforth, a test ensued. The previous version, Plasma 6.3 was fast and elegant, but it had lots of bugs and problems.

Furthermore, I decided to try using Wayland. As I said in my Xlibre article, I have no emotional investment in software. I don't care. I want things to work. Since the Plasma team spends a lot of work and energy in making their desktop pretty and shiny, including Wayland support, I decided to give it a go. And that's the very first thing I will cover in this review. Then, we shall expand more on the finer points of the sweet Plasma desktop. Let us begin, shall we.

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Since September 2023, I've had one Samsung A54 smartphone in my possession. Do I like the device? Well, not really. It's rather annoying, especially the software part. The worst element is the neverending tweaking, which is necessary if you want to stay ahead of the game and stop the operating system from profiling every little moment of your usage. As I explained throughout seven long-term reports no less, there's always something to do, always another little option, another little nugget of modern nonsense. The "smart" life.

You can imagine my apprehension when I saw an update prompt for One UI 7.0. This is Samsung's take on Android 15, and it's finally arrived on me device. Well, avoiding it for too long won't work. So I decided to go through with the ordeal. Who knows, I might actually be positively surprised. Well, if your touch device usage habits are similar to mine, then you will surely want to know what to expect. Or not expect. Because no one expects the Samsung inqi ... You get the idea. Begin, we must.

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A quick baseline & recap for ye of low Dedoimedo readership. I don't like Windows 11. I don't want to use it, like at all, nopety nope. But I do occasionally test the system, just so I can report my experience, as I've recently done in my June review. That experiment was so bad that I actually decided to fully reset the system, and see what happens once I wipe the slate clean. Ought to be interesting.

Beforehand, to reduce the "noise" in the system, caused by the accumulated usage cruft, rigorous tweaking and lots of problematic updates, I also conducted a separate, clean setup of the system to see what gives. Indeed, just a day ago, I also shared my results on a fresh Windows 11 install. That wasn't that bad, but I did choose the Pro version and not Home, the likes of which is installed on my test laptop. Let's commence, and see what gives, shall we?

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I have no intention of using Windows 11. It's a pointless operating system. But I test it occasionally, just to see what the state of the estate is, so to speak. I recently did a fairly extensive test on my dual-boot IdeaPad laptop, which included a version 24H2 upgrade, with all its associated problems. Long story short, it would seem my Administrator account on said box is borked beyond repair, and I will need to do a reset or a fresh install.

Before attempting that, I wanted to check how Windows 11 behaves if configured afresh, no old stuff. On the test laptop, I had gone from Windows 10 to 11, and done a great deal of tweaks and customization. So, for the sake of fairness, let's do a new, blank-slate experiment. Follow me.

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Imagine a software project that's been 15 years into making. A project that, after all this time, is still rather beta in quality. A project that can only do a portion of what its predecessor technology could and can do, and yet it is hailed as a "modern replacement". A project that no one really wants to use, as it's cumbersome, it breaks a lot of things, and doesn't do what it ought to. A project that is now being forced onto the users through arbitrary decisions, because it's the only way it could ever possibly be adopted. You would think this is something coming from a greedy big corpo like Apple or Google or Microsoft. Nope, it's the open-source "darling" Wayland.

Well, the FOSS community seems to have a reached a nice inflection point. Rather than embrace an inferior solution as the "way forward", there's a new contender in the display protocol space. It's called Xlibre, and it's a fork of the old and trusty Xorg (xserver). The goal of Xlibre is to modernize Xorg. I liked this news so much that I decided to write an article about it, even though there isn't a product for me to use, just yet. But sometimes, a story is all that is needed. Let's talk.

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Let me describe the concepts of paradox, irony and tragedy all wrapped into one package. After roughly 25 years of being a single-tab, no-formatting, plain-as-Great-Plains text editor that no one wanted to use, and having received no love or updates from Microsoft across three or four consecutive Windows releases, Notepad is all of a sudden a shiny champion of AI. Yup. The crummy text editor has tabs, and if you read around, it now supports nerdy stuff like Markdown, and yes, there's going to be ey-aye in it. Innit to winnit, or some such.

Recently, Microsoft has been on a roll. And by a roll, I mean freefall hill tumble. Windows 11 ain't selling as much as it should, boo hoo, poor market share figures. Microsoft killed Wordpad. It introduced a new Notepad as an "app", and it's Visual Studio Code for the masses. The timing is perfect, of course, the delay minor. It's not like every user with three grams of common sense installed Notepad++, set it as their default text editor, and moved on with their merry lives. Nope. Well, my point is, if you do NOT want to use the new Notepad with its shiny AI gimmicks, you can still use the old Notepad, in Windows 11. Let me show you how.

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Ah, it is time for me to do another review of my un-favorite operating system. Well, no. Based on the market share statistics, it's everyone's un-favorite operating system. With less than six months left on the clock for Windows 10, it is still the dominant version of Windows, the '11 still hasn't crested the 50% mark, and the adoption has slowed down, yet again. If that isn't an indicator of mega-fail, I don't know what is.

As it happens, I keep a test instance on me test laptop. The machine dual-boots Linux and this Windows 11, and every few months, I log in (log on in Windows parlance), do some updates, observe the changes and problems, and report back. So far, it's been one disappointment after another. But that's okay. We all occasionally need extra motivation to get past difficult hurdles. For me, this would be no longer using Windows as my primary operating system after some three decades or so. Windows 11 has all the motivation one needs to get there. Let's test, let's comment.

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Wait, what's wrong with you, Dedo, why would you use Bing? Ah, wait. Hear me out. Yes, Bing hardly registers on the search statistics graphs compared to Google. That said, it's not a bad search engine. In fact, it has some decent elements, most notably, the image search, as I commented in my history book article. I find this aspect of Bing's functionality much better. It also offers better, quicker clarity on image copyright and licenses.

Now, that said, like Google and friends, Bing now shows "AI summaries" when you do ordinary searches. This wouldn't be a problem, except: 1) the summaries are often incorrect 2) the passive-aggressive tone of text used by AI is intellectually aggravating 3) if I want AI, I'll use AI, I don't need it shoved down my throat regardless of its value. So, much like I've shown you how to use Google search without the AI overview nonsense, let's try to do the same thing with Bing.

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Yows. What I'm going to discuss today ain't a new problem. I've mentioned it at least 5-6 times, and it seems to affect multiple versions of Plasma, including various 5.X and 6.X branches. I've seen the problem in several distributions, albeit all Ubuntu-based. What happens is, you update your software, and suddenly, the icons no longer show up, either in the menu, or in the task manager, mostly the former.

In particular, Firefox seems most prone to exhibit this problem, and I've seen it lots of times. You run an update, and the icon is no longer there. You have an empty placeholder. The program works normally, and you can launch it, even by clicking on this supposedly generic non-icon icon. Well, let's troubleshoot and resolve the problem, shall we.

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Hear hear. Now, I'm not going to be neither the first nor the second person to write about this topic. Still, I wanted to share with you a tutorial on how to use Google's search engine without having to filter through annoying AI overviews and summaries and other dross. Simple results, simple data.

I've been toying with this functionality ever since I chose to write my nonfiction military book. As part of my research, I had to use various search engines quite a bit, and along the way, I discovered their pros and cons, and made adjustments in how I do things to be more efficient, and most importantly, try to get the most accurate information available. While weird, esoteric search terms won't trigger that many AI overviews, common searches most definitely will. Not only are they annoying, they are often plain wrong. So, let's avoid them altogether. After me.

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I've sort of stopped doing distro reviews in the past few years, but here and then, I do download an ISO or two, and commit to a couple of hours of rigorous testing. Now, I mostly do that with distributions that interest me on some level, even if I may not choose to personally use them day to day. Fedora is a good example. 'Tis a system I wouldn't run on me boxen, but then, I like and respect its stubbornness, its state-of-art approach, and the fact it innovates, for better or worse, except, of course, Wayland, PulseAudio and systemd, that is.

With Fedora 42 as the new version out there, it's time for a fresh article. And no, I'm not going to be doing any cliche Douglas Adams quotes. That would be too crude. What I am going to do is test the Gnome edition, yup. After all, if you wanna Gnome, you might as well do it with Fedora. My test system is the dual-boot IdeaPad 3, a somewhat older system (brand new in my mind), which currently houses the useless Windows 11 test instance and Zorin OS, from a recent endeavor. NVMe storage, though. Let's begin.

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Me likey obscure, complex challenges. As it happens, I have a physical Windows box with two network cards, one wired, one Wireless, both used at the same time, with different IP addresses and LAN segments and different routing priorities. By and large, the setup works fine, but there are issues, mostly because Windows assumes there ought to be perfect Wi-Fi signal strength, because these corner cases aren't that well tested, and because the operating systems believes it knows better than the user.

Namely, I noticed that the Wi-Fi connection occasionally drops. It never happens during the use, only while the system is idle. From what I've been able to gather, Windows decides to disconnect the Wi-Fi network when it deems it no longer necessary, or when it detects no Internet. This can happen, considering the fact the Wireless signal isn't that great. But what I'd expect to happen is - nothing. I want Windows to keep the Wi-Fi connected, even if there's no Internet. Just as it does with wired. Anyway, I had to troubleshoot this, so I'm sharing my findings.

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A few days ago, I encountered a rather bizarre yet highly interesting if frustrating problem. First, the circumstances. I connected an external hard disk containing an NTFS-formatted VeraCrypt container to my Slimbook Titan machine running Kubuntu 22.04. On this machine, I have both VeraCrypt and TrueCrypt installed, and the laptop's internal NVMe devices are both encrypted (LUKS). So far so good.

I then tried to mount the VeraCrypt container, and encountered all sorts of problems, including various mount errors, filesystem errors, and eventually, after I did succeed in mounting the container, a hard system lockup and kernel freeze during a simple copy operation. Fully repeatable with VeraCrypt, and as it turns out, with TrueCrypt, too. All right, let's debug, shall we.

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Two years ago, I bought a Slimbook Titan, a beefy machine running Linux. My intended purpose for this laptop was to prepare myself for the eventual EOL of Windows 10, and see whether I could move all of my work and fun into the Linux realm, exclusively. This has been the topic of many an article I wrote over the past several years, focusing on software compatibility, gaming, WINE programs, and then some.

So far, I reported back on how well the Titan works five times. The experience has been, well, somewhat mediocre. A rough start, followed by ups and downs in usability, mostly caused by regressions in the kernel space and some firmware problems. In my fifth report, I felt the things have finally stabilized. With optimism in hand, let's have another look at this system, how well it behaves, and assess how close I am to my goal. Begin, we must.

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Here's something neat and sweet. From May 15 till May 31, I'm offering my entire Draft2Digital book catalog at 50% discount, through all the available stores. That means Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Everand, Vivlio, Fable, and others. DRM-free books, too, no strings attached.

Should this pique your interest, the following titles are at your disposal: the four volumes in The Lost Words fantasy series, my mythological novel I Shall Slay the Dragon!, and the recently published How to Make Your Career Suck Less, your one-stop shop to reduced work-related suffering. Furthermore, The Betrayed, the first book in the Lost Words series, happens to be entirely free. Well, 50% of zero is still zero. Hopefully, you will take advantage of this wee offer, or at the very least, share among your friends and colleagues. Lastly, if you want to explore yet more of my books, please check the namesake section in the site's menu, or head over to my Amazon page. Enjoy and party on.

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This problem, if it can be called that, will probably appeal to a tiny, tiny pool of people who still may be using this old yet phenomenal WYSIWYG HTML editor to style simple, clean pages for their websites, whether in an interim or a final form. But yeah, if you're not into nonsensical modern-era software overload, and you just want to code simple websites with an element of UI, then you don't have that many options. Back in 2018, I wrote how KompoZer is still the best choice, and in 2025, this is still the case. Yup.

The real difficulty with this program is that it's hard to find Linux-native versions thereof - you could say try the snap version from the Snap Store, or perhaps run the Windows program (installable or portable) using the WINE framework. I showed you this in my namesake tutorial. Great stuff. Since, though, I noticed a slight degradation in the program's performance. Namely, the GUI renders slowly, with high CPU usage. Not quite usable as it ought to be. This seems to be the artifact of high DPI display resolution, as I've scaled my display in Kubuntu 22.04 on my Slimbook Titan laptop. Now, the worst part? 'Tis a new issue, and it wasn't there when I set up KompoZer, originally. Well, let's rectify and optimize, shall we.

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About two years ago, I wrote an article showing you how to install and use SketchUp Make 2017 in Linux. This awesome little tutorial is part of my migration away from Windows. The idea is to use one of the many available distributions as my baseline operating system, use native programs as much as possible, and if not, then also use Windows software through WINE. SketchUp Make is a good example. Furthermore, I expanded this topic some more with a second guide on how to fix blank menus in the likes of Maxwell Render plugin. Superb. Later on, I aggregated both these tutorials into a single large article, which covers all of these fine details. Noice.

For a few months, everything was peachy. Then, all of a sudden, SketchUp stopped working. It would no longer run. As always, when you hit an issue of this kind, you need to repeat the execution from the command line, to see exactly what kind of errors crop up. For me, the exception was: wine: Call from 00006FFFFFC84108 to unimplemented function iertutil.dll.653, aborting. Well, let's fix this.

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Every few weeks, I come across an article telling us how passwords are bad and how we need to go "passwordless". These pieces are written by mostly well-intended nerds who think technology can solve basic problems in human behavior. But when the likes of Microsoft and Google and Facebook start spamming you to "increase your security with passkeys", you instantly know this isn't what you want. And so, tragically, the nerds end up supporting data-hungry companies in trying to get an ever greater hold on our personal lives.

Moreover, there's a bigger, fundamental issue. It's not that passwords can be hacked - after all, company databases get hacked all the time, and this is vector no.1 for data loss, not brute force hax0ring of individual accounts. It's that the whole concept of preventing phishing with private-public keys is misplaced. It missed the point. The issue is quite simple: clickable links, plus greed. Let's elaborate.

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Until now, for no deliberate reason, I never quite got around to testing Brave. I have tried and reviewed various other Chromium-based browsers, but somehow, not it. Well, today, I would like to rectify the situation, and take Brave for a spin. What makes the endeavor easier is the fact it is the default browser in Zorin OS, a Linux distribution, which I tested recently.

Now, be aware the Zorin team has configured Brave its own way, with some of the features disabled by default. Thus, your experience with Brave could be different from what I'm about to show, but the essential bits and pieces should be the same. Also, be aware I'm gonna do this review from the perspective of a staunch Firefox user, so my focus is on whether Brave could be a solid secondary browser for me. All right, let's see what gives.

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If you use Ubuntu, then you enjoy one of its great benefits: long-term support. Five years for each LTS, ten or more if you activate the pro offering (which is free for home users). But if you use one of the community editions, like say Kubuntu, you will be told that you only get three years of updates.

Indeed, for the past year, Kubuntu 22.04 users would see a prompt, on every login, telling them how their version would stop receiving updates and security fixes in this or that many days. I reported about this back in my Slimbook Titan 4 article. The prompt nag couldn't really be easily disabled (from the UI). Worst of all, it simply isn't correct. Your Kubuntu will continue receiving updates, just like an ordinary Ubuntu. Let me show you what gives.

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In modern times, trying to minimize one's digital footprint is mostly an exercise in futility, with a dollop of placebo, for good measure. But the thing is, even if the efforts are somewhat sisyphean, one must persist, because that's what being a peasant is all about. Being anti is so hot right now, on mobile devices, in particular. On a more serious note, if you want to use your smartphone without being constantly profiled and surveilled, you must take steps to reduce these pointless garbage activities.

DuckDuckGo's browser offers some relief when it comes to online probing and busybodying by companies big and small alike. It comes with a built-in mechanism called App Tracking Protection (ATP), which, if turned on, will then funnel app traffic through its own filters, and try to stop and block various trackers embedded in these apps. This ought to minimize the amount of nonsense assailing your device. There's a bigger philosophical question of how you could perhaps eliminate the problem from the start, but that's a slightly separate topic. Now, let's take a look at this functionality, and see how it works.

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Around mid-February, I went to my local electronics store. My intention was to buy a Pixel 8/9 phone. The reasons were, I had heard mostly good things about the devices. When I (wrongly) chose to buy my smartphone in late 2023, one ultra-annoying Samsung A54, the two other devices on my consideration list were the Pixel and the Fairphone, and perhaps, to some extent, maybe the iPhone, primarily because of the promise of long-term support and patching. Then, recently, I began warming up to the idea of testing GrapheneOS, and that one is designed for Pixels.

I didn't buy the phone, because the store didn't have any in their warehouse, so it was a question of going onto their website and buying there, or going into the store at a later date. I sort of let it simmer for a few weeks, and then I encountered SafetyCore. This rude, unwelcome surprise suddenly made me question whether I ought to get the Pixel, at all. And in turn, this conundrum spurred the writing of this article.

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This article will blow your mind. But in a good way. Say you have any number of old computer games, many of which were created in the era of 4:3 monitors and low resolutions. And now, you want to play those titles on a modern computer, which most likely has a 16:9 or 16:10 display, with resolutions many times more than the old games. In a lot of cases, this can create problems.

I recently encountered this with Pharaoh. This turn-of-the-century game starts at 640x480 px by default, and can be stretched to a fantastic 1024x768 px. Start it on a computer with a resolution that does not conform to this narrow range, and it most likely won't run at all. But as I showed you in that same article, if you're running a Linux system, with X11 of course, then you can create a virtual screen setup that will accommodate pretty much anything and everything. Native Linux games, WINE games, you name it. Let's.

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For reasons many and varied, the commercial Linux desktop has never quite caught on. It's a shame, because it would be nice to run an operating system that does not treat you as an insect, and also support people who build and maintain such a system. Of course, today, nothing stops any one person from donating money to their favorite Linux distro. Here and there, you can actually go for an institutionalized payware option.

Zorin OS is one such beast. While it's based on Ubuntu, and it's largely Ubuntu, Zorin OS tries to set itself apart by offering a paid version (about EUR50), which comes with additional software, tweaks and support from the developers. Technically speaking, you can also pay for Ubuntu, if you like, or try the pro set of patches, which ought to last you a decade plus. KDE is also gearing up toward having its own commercial distro. Today, we shall focus on Zorin, and how it does its thing. Let's begin.

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I don't often test UNIX-like operating systems on Dedoimedo, but when I do, I usually like the hardcore nostalgia that these systems brings. Well, to an extent, that is. On one hand, you have the nerdy, spartan approach to system administration, how it should be mind, none of this systemd nonsense. On the other, there's an attempt to make the usage relatively simple and approachable, with this or that level of success. There's always the ultimate question, can they do better than Linux?

Five years ago, I took GhostBSD for a spin. 'Twas quite decent. Not as approachable as your common distro, but not that far off, either. Behind the scenes, GhostBSD is FreeBSD, which means tight, no-nonsense security. Usually, security and functionality tend to clash, and it's hard having an everyday system that's also locked down to the max. Well, let's have a fresh look, and see if this UNIX can perhaps serve your daily needs, or at least, some of them. It's both a question of could and should. Let's begin.

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Here I was, blithely using a Windows 10 system. Since day one, it's behaved nicely. No worries. Now, all of a sudden, a log on attempt kind of stuttered. The desktop loaded, but it was sluggish. The taskbar never got populated with its shortcuts. Weird. I rebooted, and things were normal again.

I launched the Event Viewer, and examined the system errors. Indeed, there were some. One that really caught my eye was: Autopilot.dll WIL error was reported. As it turns out, this thing is related to Windows logons when you use a Microsoft (online) account. But I don't use any, and so, the error infuriated me. I decided to troubleshoot some, and here we are. After me.

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You know me. Mega curmudgeon. Whenever I review Linux distros, I'm usually unhappy. Lots of people mistake my negativism as something inherently anti-Linux. Quite the opposite. I so want the Linux desktop to succeed that I'm always upset when it doesn't. After all, true friends don't just blindly nod at whatever you tell them, they actually tell you the truth. The problem is, my reviews may obscure the fact that I do use Linux quite extensively, and usually manage to accomplish a great deal in the operating system. Not everything, but a lot.

So I thought, let's have a little semi-random article that highlights some of the many cool things I've been doing in the past year or two, using Linux, primarily Kubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, on a couple of different machines. We're talking everyday stuff, gaming, writing, music, whatnot. Some clever solutions, too. Now, as a member of the nerd race, extra monkey clade, my everyday isn't exactly the mainstream nonsense. Even so, perhaps you will find this article relatable and enjoyable. Begin we must.

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If you qualify for the serious amateur but still amateur class of digital media users, with only an occasional need for some polish and paint for your photos and images, then you're in luck. There are lots of reasonable choices out there. One of the programs you may want to consider for your arsenal is GIMP, a free, open-source image editor. In many ways, it's unto Adobe Photoshop what LibreOffice is unto Microsoft Office.

'Tis an alternative that should give you good results, especially if you're willing to make a bit of extra effort. Can it outmaneuver the big guys, though? Maybe, I don't know, I'm not qualified enough to make that call. But as the aforementioned amateur, I can surely get happy and excited about GIMP's latest, long-awaited third major release. Excited enough to write a review. Let's do it, then.

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I last tested Lutris in 2019. That's quite a long time ago in software terms. An eternity. Over the years, many Linux unification gaming platforms have come and gone. Every one tried to bring all your titles from all your different channels under one roof. And none has truly succeeded so far. I tried PlayOnLinux, and that never quite delivered, and as my previous review of Lutris shows, neither did Lutris, although it came closer than any other solution so far.

In the past six years, a lot has changed. Steam has the Steam Deck, and there's Proton, a true game changer, so to speak. As part of my migration away from Windows, I tested many a Windows-only title this way, with superb success. For example, already in 2023, on my gaming-oriented Slimbook Titan, I was able to run almost every single important game I own (through Steam). This includes native Linux titles, of course, but also Windows ones, like ArmA 3, Age of Empires II, BeamNG, Wreckfest, Command & Conquer, and many more. In some ways, this makes all other efforts less critical, but Steam isn't the only marketplace. This is where Lutris comes in. It's supposed to make all your Linux gaming easy. Well, let's explore, again.

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Here's a wee issue you won't come across every day. Or even every week. Say you're using Linux. A Plasma desktop, to be more precise. Let's say Kubuntu. There, the default file manager is a program called Dolphin, and it's extremely capable. It can do many wondrous things. It can extract archives in various formats, like say tar, zip, and others. But most of the time, it must rely on what your system has. For instance, it won't do 7z natively, unless you add a package.

I encountered a problem with a rar file extraction recently. The funny thing is, the error message is quite weird, and does not indicate you have an issue with the file format. Instead, you will get a "bogus" message that your system does not have enough free space available. At this point, you might start sweating and fretting. No need, let's fix this.

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Hear me out. Of all the weird problems I've ever encountered playing computer games, this one is the weirdest of them all. A friend of mine and I decided to play Wreckfest. It's a very sweet, fun, soft physics racing title. Splendid. As always, my friend would start a server, and I would join. Only this time, his router was misbehaving for some odd reason, and when I tried to connect, Wreckfest crashed. Not only that, it popped a most bizarre dialog window of all. No title. It just said: Fatal error B - no extra punctuation. Even the OK button to acknowledge the prompt wasn't a proper OK. It only read O. Dismissing the error any which way would always result in the game crash. Nothing in the logs, whatsoever.

And so, seemingly, I was stuck. My friend and I decided to try to troubleshoot the problem, and it took a lot of tweaking, witchcraft, and some educated guesses to get around the issue. If you're one of the unfortunate souls to have encountered a similar phenomenon, perhaps this tutorial may help you. After me, drivers.

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Have you noticed how the digital landscape has become harsher lately? More and more companies are turning brazen, even outright hostile with the consumer, even with their own people (employees). Mass surveillance, arbitrary Return to Office (RTO) mandates, shameless data grabs in the name of "AI", forced telephone waits even if there are no queues, ruthless terms of use, bricked devices. The list is endless and bleak.

So what can the little person do? The common peasant, like you and me? What can we do in the face of this ugly, shameless onslaught on our senses, sensibility and dignity? Well, we common peasants, don't get much say in how the world runs. But we do have one winning card. We can choose when and if and how we spend what money we have. Perhaps the companies can push their pointless solutions onto people, but they cannot force people to spend money on pointless solutions.

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I've been writing books for over 30 years now. I began publishing them in 2011. So far, I unleashed 21 books unto the wild. By and large, fiction is super easy to write. You just use your own head. Even my technical works on kernel crash analysis, problem solving, ethics, or career help were relatively simple to jot down. Recently, though, I had completed my most ambitious project yet. A military history book.

Nonfiction is hard. You cannot wing it, use your experience or imagination. You must work with references, tons and tons of them, read other books, you must use citations, and so forth. Well, for the past three months, I have engrossed myself into this ultra-complex endeavor. Now, it's done. The book weighs 90K words, it has some 35 figures and tables, each, plus almost 700 citations. It also includes a piece of simulation code, for a specific combat scenario, written in Matlab-like octave. And I did all of this work using Linux and Linux tools. Well, 90% of the work. Let me tell you more. Linux from the perspective of a seasoner author with fifteen million words under their belt.

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Here's something I never quite expected to write. But recently, I've been playing and playing with some old games, most notably the wonderful Caesar III and Pharaoh, and I decided to expand my adventure. And I thought, well, Max Payne, a lovely title of yore. After all, I enjoyed this game immensely back in the early 2000s, and I must have finished it four or five times at least. So I wondered, can it run in Linux?

To see what gives, I went rummaging in my old game archive. As it happens, Max Payne is one of those majestic games that simplify things for the user - it's largely self-contained. So you simply grab the directory with all its contents, and copy that to a different host. Boom. Now, how does a 2001 game handle a 4K screen on an old yet powerful laptop with Kubuntu 24.04, plus Nvidia PRIME? Well, let's find out.

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As you well know, and if you don't, let's establish this once more: I love the Plasma desktop environment, I use it extensively, and it's simply the best desktop out there. But I am not blind to its flaws and problems, and there were quite a few the first three times I tested the brand new Plasma 6. While KDE should be commended on being able to retain the look and feel and functionality without ruining the user experience, and just building on it with a new tech stack, there are still a lot of hurdles and obstacles in making Plasma 6 rock.

Well, there's a new version out there, Plasma 6.3. In October yesteryear, Plasma 6.2 turned out to be fine. Now, I must test the latest release, and see if and how the KDE team has improved on the proven formula. I was thinking about being adventurous, and doing a test on a system with Nvidia drivers, but I decided to be consistent, and continue with my IdeaPad 3 machine and its AMD processor and graphics. So we begin.

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Remember my old Lenovo G50 laptop? Well, it's still around, still working reasonably well. As you may recall, it's got a fabulous eight-boot setup, and I've used it for dozens if not hundreds of distro tests. Currently, the machine runs Windows 10 (which I've not used on this box in three-four years), CentOS 7 and 8, Rocky Linux 8, Manjaro, MX Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu 20.04. I mostly run the latest, and it's been an okay experience overall. Surprisingly fast and smooth. But an SSD refresh can't go wrong.

Much as I did with my 2014 Lenovo Y50 machine, I'm going to revitalize this 2015 G50 box. It's not sluggish by any means, but the boot times are ridiculous. We're talking two minutes just to log into the Ubuntu session. That's silly. But once logged in, things work well. I can do 1080p playback without any stuttering, the browsing speed and page loading is good. There's really nothing missing from the "modern" experience. So things ought to be even better with a new disk. Let's begin.

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Here I was, a decadent European minding my own European business, pondering art and chocolate and the price of diesel, when, just a day ago, I accidentally came across an article that mentioned something called Android System SafetyCore being installed on people's phones without consent. I read more about this app, and it turns out, among other things, it's a crappy, intrusive prude filter for idiots. It enables a "safety" framework for the "classification" (shh, don't call it scanning) of potentially "sensitive" content. And of course, this would be nudity, a forbidden word across the pond.

I checked my phones, and yup, on one of these, this little turd had indeed been installed without my consent. So, we might have a privacy violation on our hands, which I'm going to examine in detail and, if needed, report to the relevant regulatory bodies. Second, I can't even begin to express my disdain about this feature and its intended purpose of tech-imposed moralism. But I'll try. Let's have an article.

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Without exaggeration, this is one of the sweetest tutorials I've ever written on Dedoimedo. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I used to play Sierra's fabulous Caesar III and Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) RTS titles for many an hour. The experience was phenomenal. With time, it became harder and harder to enjoy these games on modern machines, due to various compatibility issues. And yet, I persisted.

Just a few days ago, I showed you how to set up Caesar III, bought from GOG, in Linux. While technically the game isn't supported on Linux, it works great. Not only that, you can also use the amazing, amazing Julius program to run Caesar III in HD. You get to enjoy one of the finest games ever made on modern hardware, you get to do it with style. But Pharaoh does not have its Julius equivalent. So what then? Well, let me show you.

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Even though I own Caesar III physical media and a Steam copy, I decided to purchase the Good Old Games (GOG) version of the game, too. Why not. It's not expensive, I end up supporting a nice DRM-free marketplace, and I get to have a digital copy of one of my most beloved and cherished games, plus a top-notch RTS title, to boot. Among the first articles I ever published on Dedoimedo some 19 years back.

Over the years, I've shown you many different ways on how to play this fine game on modern systems. First, by using a virtual machine in Windows XP, then the compatibility mode in Windows 7, then by using the Steam version through Proton in Linux, all part of my long-going migration away from Microsoft's tools and onto Linux, for all and everything, gaming included. But that's not all. When I did that, I also used the Julius program, which is a superb, superb open-source re-implementation of Caesar III, allowing you to run the title in HD on brand-new machines and operating systems. You still need game files (like once upon a time with OpenTTD) and Julius is specifically designed to work with the more recent, digital editions of the game. So let's see how the GOG experiment went.

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Like many a nerd, yesterday and today, I read a whole bunch of news on how Google intends to remove SMS as an option for 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) for Gmail accounts. On its own, this wouldn't be a biggie. Perhaps even a good thing. But the hailed replacement, in the form of QR codes, is an alarming development. Utter nonsense, if you ask me.

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Normally, I try to avoid Internet drama, so to speak, but something rather interesting caught my eye this week. The OBS Studio maintainers raised an issue with Fedora regarding their use of an unofficial OBS Studio Flatpak package. Naturally, the "incident" created quite a bit of furor in the Linux community. Specific IP issues aside, most people seem to think that Fedora folks are in the wrong for maintaining their own Flatpak repositories, rather than using the community-maintained FlatHub. Well.

I find this event to be so important that I decided to write an entire article dedicated to it. As it happens, I recently tested Fedora Kinoite, which uses Flatpaks for apps, and I wrote about the many, many problems with multi-source package management in my openSUSE Tumbleweed review. Now, with those in mind, once again, I would like to address the issue of official and unofficial software, chain of trust, and the way things are done in the Linux world.

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Let's talk about Tux babe, let's talk about you and me. Let's ponder all the good thing and the bad things in me Slimbook Executive laptop and its operating system, chosen to be Kubuntu 22.04 by its owner, ergo me. Now, I may upgrade soon, but that's a separate story. We're here to talk about the latest round of my escapades with this machine. I got the device so it can do productive stuff, and productive stuff it does. Most of the time.

By and large, the Executive is awesome. It's an extremely lovely piece of hardware. The only downside is that the operating system keeps misbehaving, every now and then. You run an update, and boom, you get a silly regression. Nope. Don't want. I want a stable, robust system. I wanna have fun. Plural. Funs! Well, in the seventh report, I expressed my disappointment. Perhaps today, the muses of source and compilation will be more favorably inclined toward me and my laptop. Commence, we must.

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Have you run out of good Internet? Worry not. I got a fresh supply. First, on the Kultur front. Do you walk the walk? Do you talk the talk? Well, unless you've had an occasional visit to Urban Dictionary, I've got some bad news for you. Dear Internetian, you might not be as well versed in everyday street lingo as you think. And by street, I mean the Web. Worry not, there's still time to redeem yourself. Hop over to Urban Dictionary, and educate yourself.

Now, on the gaming front. DOS? DOS! Who in the name of the command line still uses DOS? Well, it turns out, quite a lot of people. Whether you're a diehard romantic and you pine for the good ole days, whether you like ancient games and feel like playing them now and then, whether you're a DOSBox user, or just curious about old stuff, Vogons is there to help you. But with more flair and less bureaucracy than you'd expect.

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It is time for me to do another long-term review of a laptop in me possession. This time, we shall focus on the Slimbook Titan, a machine with handsome specs; a beefy, Linux-only machine I purchased with the explicit goal and mission of moving away from Windows for good. So far, I've given you four reports about this system. The journey started badly, got much much better, and then it went south again, as a result of bad updates. The same type of problem that affected my Slimbook Executive, as well. A confidence rollercoaster.

Before you blame my choice of operating system, please take a look at my recent hardware piece, and read through my software management section for the openSUSE Tumbleweed review. Those shall explain a few things, including: a) Kubuntu is probably the least bad big-name choice out there b) the hardware is fine, as I had tons of problems with pretty much any distro on pretty much any machine. Now, with that in mind, let's commence to start another Titan piece. I will address all sorts of different aspects of everyday usage, including gaming, which is one of the major blockers for leaving Windows and its silliness behind. Let's start.

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Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go "back" and retest it, and so there's no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call "modern" software today are justified.

If you're wondering how I feel, I've said it before. Windows 10 is about the same as Windows 7. There aren't any big differences, except more annoyances and more "online" nonsense that adds zero value to the actual user experience. For me, the leap from XP to 7 was a good one, mostly because the latter came with improved 64-bit support. But ever since? I left XP with three years remaining on its support clock. I left 7 with maybe a month left. With 10, I have absolute zero intentions of moving to the low-IQ Windows 11. Linux, it is, but if push comes to shove, Mac might also be an option. But I digress. Let's check the last real desktop Windows.

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I said this many times before, and I'll say it again. Plasma is by far the best, most elegant and ergonomic desktop out there. It's visually pleasing, it's designed with clever thought and passion, and it comes with a bewildering array of options and settings so you can set it up just the way you like it. One such feature is the task manager, the thing where all your icons and notifications and system tray stuff goeth. Y'know, something that isn't really a given in the desktop world, believe it or not.

Well, Plasma lets you have it any which way you want - windows, icons, everything. But seemingly, Microsoft Windows seems to have one advantage: it can combine tasks when full. But wait just a moment. Plasma can do one better. It can combine them selectively, only for specific programs you want. Sounds like a major productivity win, and it is. Let's elaborate then.

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My first encounter with Kubuntu 24.04 was not very successful. Retro, but not in a good way. Since then, I've persevered with the distro, testing it every few months, usually after a nice, big round of updates. Overall, there's a solid, positive trend. It's getting better. Sure, one could argue that an LTS should be top-notch quality from the start, and that it needs to distinguish itself from the lesser short-support versions by being simply better, not worse, but hey. We can't go back in time.

Forward, we can. And so I'd like to give this distro its third round of testing. Well, fourth, to be fair, but who's counting. My scapegoat machine is a 2014 vintage IdeaPad Y50-70. 'Twas a fairly beefy and capable machine back in the day, still is, and with some modern technology under the hood (hint: SSD), it purrs nicely. The only question is, can its operating system match the hardware enthusiasm? Begin, we must.

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I consider myself an amateur photographer and video creator. That means, most of the time, I'll get by fine just by using ffmpeg, VLC, GIMP, and KDEnlive for my artistic endeavors. But now and then, I wonder whether I can up my game, and try my luck and skill using a top-notch tool like DaVinci Resolve. This near-3GB program offers a lot of goodies, and it's heavily used in the film industry. Well, perchance.

And so, I tried. I encountered many a snag. To that end, I decided to write this tutorial, which outlines all the little bugs and problems and issues you may encounter trying to configure DaVinci Resolve in Linux. In particular, I tried it in Kubuntu 24.04 (well, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base), and it wasn't trivial. So, let's proceed then, and handle all manner of wee problems. In the end, you will have the program running, all dandy like.

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It is time for me to talk about my smartphone again. Again. This will be the seventh time I review this device. Ever since I got it, I've been caught in a neverending loop of tweaking, customization and various annoyances, all of which comprise the everyday usage experience with the A54. And the loop must continue.

For a while, I thought there would be peace, and that the device will have settled. But no. There's always something new, something fresh that demands my attention. The phone works, but the experience is not consistent. There be problems, and I'm not very happy. I mean the hardware is good, the camera is good, the long-term support and reasonable purchase price elements are there. Then, as I told you in my iPhone 11 review five years down the road, if you need proper dual SIM functionality, Samsung is among the few vendors still offering this without any eSIM nonsense. Well, it's time for another piece of drama. Let's see what's new.

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"Why did you get a Slimbook? If you had bought a more upmarket brand, it wouldn't have happened." I'm paraphrasing roughly a dozen emails I received after I published my seventh Slimbook Executive report, in which I complained a lot about buggy firmware and botched system updates that temporarily rendered my beautiful and elegant laptop into a nerdy sandbox.

As a result, I wanted to write an article that summarizes roughly 15 years of laptop usage, with this or that Linux distro, with this or that result. In this manner, I will try to answer the question written above. Sadly, the conclusion is, it doth not matter which hardware you choose, or which distro you choose, until there's a professional "wedding" of components, software and silicon, there will always be issues. After all, even Windows systems often have driver-related problems, despite the full, heavy OEM support in making the bits and pieces behave. Therefore, don't blame Slimbook. To wit, let's get into details.

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Dedoimedo here, reporting for my periodic dose of masochism. Every few months, I power on my test laptop, which has Windows 11 installed on it (in a dual-boot setup), and I check whether anything has cardinally changed in this system. My latest escapade, back in September, was rife with problems.

But it's not all gloomy. I recently read an article on The Register, which shows that not only has Windows 11 user share not grown, it has shrunk! Ah. Beautiful. Music to my ears. After all, I love reading the AI-flavored marketing self-hype by various big-shot executives, side by side with a nice bundle of hard reality check. But it makes sense. Windows 11 is useless, the file manager is slow, Settings is not as good as Control Panel, and hardware requirements prevent people from "upgrading". Well, well, well. Karma and all that. Shall we?

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Here's an interesting little problem. A friend of mine gave me an older iPhone 11, so I could play with it, test its long-term abilities, do all sorts of everyday checks, and whatnot. I've already written some on this endeavor, including, for instance, how to use KDE Connect for music transfer. Next, I snapped a few photos with the camera, and I didn't notice that these were taken in the rather funny HEIC format.

I tried to view these files on my Slimbook Executive, which runs Kubuntu 22.04, and I had no success. So I did some reading, installed a few packages, and eventually got around the issue, relatively easily, to be fair. However, since the resolution has several layers, let me tell you all the different aspects of this adventure. Follow me.

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To the best of my memory, and I'm purposefully not checking me own article history, I've never reviewed openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's an interesting beast, because it's supposed to be a rolling release of the namesake distro. In other words, instead of you being "locked" to specific kernel, driver and app versions, you always get everything new and fresh, with implied potential instability that something like that could bring into your distro. Sort of like Manjaro, or perhaps CentOS Stream. Things, of course, get more complicated when you factor in Flatpaks or snaps, as they technically make any distro rolling. But I digress.

A second reason for why I'm writing this piece is because, after I wrote my Slimbook Executive report 7, which wasn't very happy, lots of people emailed me, telling me to ditch Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu), and try something else. Now, I am convinced that Ubuntu (or rather Kubuntu) is the least bad option there. Could the desktop be more amazing, more fun? Sure. But overall, its combo of stability, long-term support and overall ease of use are probably the best compromise you'll get in the Linux world. In other words, whatever you choose, there will always, always be Linux issues, the pro-am underdog nonsense that won't go away. All right, with that in mind, let us begin.

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Your humble peasant has finally laid his grubby hands on an iPhone. I am now no longer a plebe, for I am able to use a posh phone! Rawr! However, before you get overly excited, I must inform you that the device in my possession is a hand-me-down from a friend, an iPhone 11, dating back to 2019. My friend got himself a brand new device, and instead of throwing out the old piece, he gave it to me. Now, I can do all sorts of cool things and experiments. Chiefly, answer a question, how well does a five-year-old phone handle the "modern" reality?

This question is quite important, because I'm always wondering what the long-term value of mobile devices really is. For example, I still have a bunch of old Androids around, but some of these no longer receive any updates, some of these are a bit slow, some of these are a bit broken. Therefore, should one pay more money and get themselves an expensive iPhone, which ought to be supported for many years, or pay "less" money and get an Android? Because this question is a bit silly, let me elaborate.

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