I don’t like flatpaks or snaps or anything like it either, but I think they help a lot in situations like the Steam Deck or PinePhone where you want the base to be able to move slowly and be stable, while letting the apps on top move quickly.

The problems with flatpaks and similar is that it allows and even encourages developers to stick with horrendously outdated libraries, and your system is only as safe as the container’s isolation defenses.

They also make it more difficult to go in and directly modify or tweak the program as the user.

And many developers are no longer offering bare-metal options.

Well, in the case of the liberux and the 9 pro, you get a lot more storage space built in (very fast storage), way more RAM, etc.

Its up to you whether that’s all worth it. To me it is, I max out sub-$400 phones very quickly. The pinephone feels very choppy to use too by comparison.

Wow, that’s quite the difference. What’s more shocking to me though is the fact that the rockchip somehow is built to handle a higher resolution than the tensor despite being weaker (8k@60fps vs 4k@60fps), and has AV1 support where the tensor doesn’t.

That’s a good callout. I’m not super familiar with it, do you know how it might bench against the Tensor G4?

Liberux NEXX is supposed to be a thing but they sorely need backers. It costs about the same as an equivalent Android phone (pixel 9 pro 1tb costs $1,500, liberux nexx 1tb costs $1,300).

8 core/32gb RAM/1TB storage phone in a very sleek body, Linux phones could have their flagship soon (and unlike pinephone it sounds like Liberux is gonna do the actual work on developing the software).

After the Apple ruling basically forcing them to allow side loading, I doubt google would even be able to.

If you have access to the actual files themselves you can even edit them with a text, binary, or hex editor depending on the format.

LACT is, unfortunately, built on the GTK framework instead of Qt or similar, so its a no go for me (too many input issues with modern GNOME apps on non-GNOME DEs and the general issues most people have with the GNOME team as a whole).

Run it on ancient hardware. If it chokes on computers from the '90s, it’s slow.

You can have mixed emotions.

“DUDE it would be so rad if we supported Linux! Gotta get a bunch of things cleared first and get permission to take on the extra overhead for testing and… But LINUX SUPPORT!”

DX and XC (formerly used android2keepass)

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 10 April 2025 at 05:46 AM EDT. 12 Comments RADEON Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” is now exposing its emulated ray-tracing support by default for older AMD Radeon GPUs even without any form of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in order to run the new Indiana Jones game. It turns out even the emulated RT mode is fast enough to allow various older AMD Radeon graphics cards to be playable with this title.

Natalie Vock has landed the change to expose the emulated Vulkan ray-tracing extensions by default when running Indiana Jones and The Great Circle “TGC”. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was released for Windows back in December and powered by the Motor Engine. It requires ray-tracing support but it turns out RADV’s emulated support is good enough for allowing older GPUs to enjoy this action-adventure game.

Indiana Jones The Great Circle logo

Vock explained in the merge request:

"Various people have been playing Indiana Jones: The Great Circle with RADV_PERFTEST=emulate_rt on GFX9/GFX10. RT support is required to launch the game, and performance is okay even with emulation, so enable it by default to make the game playable for everyone running older (GFX8-10) GPUs."

AMD GFX8 is for the Polaris GPUs along with Volcanic Islands and Arctic Islands. Amazing to see AMD Radeon RX 480/580 Polaris GPUs still working for newer games on Linux.

This change is now in Mesa 25.1-devel while those on current Mesa releases with older Radeon GPUs can always set the RADV_PERFTEST=emulate_rt environment variable to achieve the same behavior.

I was waiting for someone to say that.

I like that Mate is a thing, but like I said, I’m looking for something thats based on it but as if its had the same 20 years of enhancements everything else got.

The closest thing to that I’ve found is quite literally KDE. So I use KDE.

I miss old Gnome. I wish they’d stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.

For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of “simplicity.” There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.

The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they’re very much “we know what’s best for you better than you do.”

Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that’s primarily it. KDE’s accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.

That’s just my take, take it as you will.

Kmail is simple and to the point, and at least in my experience is easier to set up. Bonus, if youre on KDE, it integrates very nicely.

It’s also more performant than Thunderbird.

• AMD drivers: use the built-in MESA drivers that include the official AMD support.

• Gmail: ProtonMail for the service, Kmail for the desktop client.

• Chrome: Firefox, or Librewolf if you care about privacy.

• Office365: LibreOffice for full FOSS or OnlyOfficr for less freedom but more comfort.

• iTunes: depends entirely on what you use it for, but I buy my music mostly off of BandCamp these days.

• MuseScore: MuseScore

• Norton: Why were you using Norton in the first place? It’s practically a virus itself. If you need an antivirus on Linux, you might want ClamAV/ClamTK for something that runs locally only, or Microsoft Defender for Linux.

• Py-Charm: Py-Charm, VSCode, Vim, Kate/KWrite

• Remote Desktop to iOS: I got nothin’

• Star Citizen: Star Citizen

• Steam: Steam

• VPN: Wireguard

• Windows Games: install locally using Wine and then add to Steam as a non-Steam game to use Proton for better support.

Windows 10: run it in a VM if you still need it, or keep it on a separate SSD and dual boot into that.

Gnomelets BTFO by chad KDE screenshots

I like it

After completing the challenge and making sure your system is usable and can survive a reboot:

If you’ve kept the old package manager, search for installed packages and make sure that the package manager itself is the only thing left. Then delete it.