Who said anything about a low res backlit screen? And if you read monitors and screens all day, it may be an issue, but with dark mode reading it is fine. The devices I am talking about have about twice the PPI as a 22/24 inch 1080p monitor. There are cheap e-readers that have atrocious resolutions but the tablets I am talking about are fine, but not as good as EInk.

If you can get an Onyx Boox tablet used by a first adopter that it wasn’t right for, it has the best of all worlds. Open, Android, EInk, large screen, and can be used to bang out content and read email. Other than that I would just get a downmarket but new Android Tablet and use it as a dedicated eBook and audio book/podcast device. The screen isn’t ideal but you can get a stock android tablet for $150 bucks us and use Caliber on it along with all the typical android stuff. Hell you might even be able to get a Linux tablet that would fit your needs but cost a little more. But if you go tablet the devices tend to be a bit more open to sideloading.

Well that is because Brave has been doing it longer, and Vivaldi only has about 30 devs across all the platforms, which is a fraction of Brave, although Brave has its issues as well, just not in the adblock department. I have found that if you use the uBlock block lists it is most of the way there, but it is not ready yet and I think that Vivaldi will have to consider picking up some dedicated devs. Also it is a ‘Vivaldi Thing’ to launch things piece mail and get those pieces working fully before adding on the rest of it. Then over time it gets good. But Vivaldi has come a LONG way when it comes to aggressive adblock detection.

That being said right now YouTube is detecting it and it is dumping the most manpower and money into this. When it does work you can pretty much use it across the web and the few cases that it doesn’t work usually OK just to pause it for a while and you won’t get too many ads.

However if Mv3 comes out and they haven’t gotten their act together I am going to Firefox or Brave, as much as I don’t like how they do business. Then there will be the Google Search thing running through the courts and we will see how Fx and Br come out and change their model.

Vivaldi is including its own adblock outside of the manifest system that uses many of the same blocklists that uBlock does (although at this point you have to add them manually) and hopes to get near the same functionality by the time it is pulled and Mv3 is implemented. They originally had plans to offer a Mv2 compliant area but after seeing how Mv3 was going to be implemented, they changed there plans to many users dismay.

It turns out it went multi-engine, probably to prevent getting cut off of Google’s Results. It probably mixes results from multiple engines like the old multi engine search engines in the old days of the internet.

When they were purchased it was with the understanding that they would get no user data and that Startpage does not collect it, and it has the same CEO who started the company so I believe him.

Yeah, I should have said “by default” because that is how most people will use it, but the power users will use other engines.

AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.

Uses Bing results.

On Vivaldi and yeah it was paywalled so I went straight to my collection of workarounds and no built in solutions. Overall faster that way.

For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

You think that there aren’t people who might need a Smartphone for work or medical emergencies? That is a non-zero number, so no. However should we have everyone’s base needs met before others get past a certain point before luxury goods? Yes. Should we be able to do that now AND have luxury goods? Also Yes. Is it alright for people to have a Billion Dollars before that? Definitely No.

Food is food. Do what you want to do to your food because you are eating it. Other people aren’t eating it so they don’t get a say. If most people saw what the original pizzas were they wouldn’t recognize them and some wouldn’t like them, including modern Italians.

Tabasco, in my opinion, is just like eating a pizza with peppers or a bunch of pepper flakes on it, or as I sometimes do, ground cayenne pepper.

If you don’t want to use Steam you can use the Heroic Launcher that does Epic and other games, especially itch.io games.

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.

While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can’t say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur’s Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.