I didn’t know it can do word suggestions until I read this comment. A web search suggests this functionality is provided by the ibus-typing-booster package; you could uninstall it or look for settings related to it.

Thunar should be able to access MTP devices when the gvfs-backends package is installed.

This is Arch, and I think its Gnome install is pretty vanilla. The OSK is definitely Gnome’s default.

I’m content without a lot of customization for this application when it gets things right. The tablet is a a tertiary device that doesn’t really get used for productivity.

The OSK doesn’t get things right. I shouldn’t have to press layer switch keys six times to type ~/note2b. This is Linux. Linux users type things like that all the time.

When installing distributions generally regarded as user-friendly on hardware that’s well-supported, I usually do have pretty low-fuss experiences. It’s usually no more trouble than installing Windows, though the average Windows user has never actually done that.

When installing Arch Linux ARM on an old Chromebook and trying to make tablet mode and rotation play well with various lightweight window managers, I did not, in fact have a flawless experience. Once I tried Gnome on it, the experience became much smoother, but that’s a little heavyweight on a 4gb machine.

Safely is always a bit iffy when you’re resizing partitions with data on them. Parted and various GUI tools built on top of it can resize partitions without losing data in most cases, but there is always a risk. I wouldn’t like doing this without fresh backups.

You can unmount the home partition for resizing when you’re not using it, e.g. if you log in as root, which typically has its home directory in /root. This would allow resizing it while running from your installed OS rather than a flash drive.

Not Lemmy, unless the post tags a community.

My Rockchip 3399 powered former Chromebook (now running proper Linux) from 2017 runs Gnome smoothly with Wayland, not with Xorg.

That’s reasonable to directly compare with phones from 2017; it’s slower than a Pixel 2. Mine actually benchmarks a little slower than the reference board linked here.

It isn’t working as it should be if it doesn’t run smoothly on more powerful hardware, but it’s not necessarily a matter of the end user “doing something wrong”. Sometimes it takes effort to get a particular combination of hardware and software to run smoothly even though it should work.

I’ve used Linux as my primary OS for many years, but I keep a copy of Windows on my current laptop for gaming. I know the gaming story on Linux is pretty good now, but having to hibernate and reboot is enough of a barrier to launching a game that it helps me stay more productive.

At home, my laptop sits on a stand with great airflow, but when trying to play The Witcher 3 on a desk while traveling, it overheated and throttled to the point it wasn’t playable. On Linux, the thinkpad_acpi driver allows setting the fan level to “disengaged”, which sounds like “off” but actually means unregulated and results in a considerably higher speed and cooling performance than the usual maximum. Some research led to the conclusion that while manual fan control is possible with certain apps on Windows, there is no way to exceed the maximum automatic speed.

It only took a couple minutes to set up Lutris and Proton to run the game, and as expected the mild abuse of my laptop’s fan does make it playable. What I didn’t expect is considerably faster load times, but I got those too.

When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

It is.

How the fuck did this become acceptable?

That’s a little less surprising to me. Organizations are likely to pick competing communication software if Teams is not available to everyone. Web browsers are generally interoperable after Microsoft lost the war to popularize one that wasn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the mere existence of software I’m not interested in using.

Microsoft Edge was a recent surprise. It’s surprising both that Microsoft would create it and that any Linux users would run it. Since its Chromium based, there should be no need for developers to test Edge separately.

That seems likely to work.

# ls -l /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 system camera 81,   0 1974-07-26 10:09 /dev/video0

Android doesn’t handle users and groups like standard Linux, but the user account assigned to Termux is not a member of the camera group.

I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.

This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.

It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.

I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while and mostly using it to share bird photography, but also to provide comments on a static site. Since Mastodon and Lemmy both speak ActivityPub, those get crossposted to /c/flashlight so Lemmy comments are also included on my site. Federation is cool.

I don’t follow many accounts that post Fediverse meta stuff on Mastodon. While I have some interest in the best examples of that content, the only way to attract a broader community is to promote accounts and content appealing to the interests of that broader audience.