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> I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads

People don't browse, they app.


Even then, most apps are just thinly veiled webapps for which the site (with Firefox and uBlock) provides the same or superior experience, ad-free.


Except when said web site detects your mobile web browser, and serves a page telling you to download their app instead.


That's half of the point of having uBlock Origin. Use the zapper to disappear an element for the session, use the picker to poof them forever. They really work on making their webapps as unbearable as possible, but you can get rid of it to make them webapps great again. Can even add sites/pages as home app icons.

Which makes Firefox the obviously better mobile browser, Chrome seems like a pretty strong case of defaults' power. Tho gotta add the "Google Search Fixer" select addon because they sure doesn't want you to get summary cards, financial charts and other goodies if you use a competitor browser.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and co without the ads circus. Duolingo without daily activity limit for some reason.


I've only run into one site (Instagram) that forces the use of the app, and I just close the site instead.


Another great example lately is Reddit. Reddit's mobile experience had become awful. Every time someone sends me a reddit link and I click on it, I'm taken to Reddit's mobile site, which should function just fine and dandy, but the minute it detects you are there on a mobile browser, it spams you with "Reddit works best in the app!" messages, and won't let you view some subs at all without signing in. Reddit is a great example of mobile done wrong. Don't be like Reddit.


Thankfully there are third party clients for Reddit. Check out Infinity @ F-Droid.


thanks for the recommendation! Love f-droid, will download the infinity app in a bit and give it a spin.


AdBlocker + desktop mode or User Agent Switcher blocks that


Er no, most iOS apps are not thinly veiled webapps. Have you ever used iOS?


Most apps are moving to React Native especially if they're targeting Android and iOS, but that's still a far cry from being a wrapper around a webapp.


I think this is only true for small biz.

All the big names quietly or publicly abandoned their efforts to fully migrate to React Native, focusing only on the most simple use-cases/views if they do keep it around. Even with the smartest people working on it, it's tough to keep React Native performant.


Sorry I didn't express that clearly FWIW, didn't mean that literally.

It's just that most apps people use are pretty much the same as their respective websites. All of FAAMG's websites work as perfectly fine replacement to the apps, even better, IMHO, when you get rid of the ads apparatus.


And they'll still see a ton of YouTube ads.


Not unless they pay for YouTube Premium (or share it with someone else paying for it). It's well worth it, IMHO.


I finally got fed up with ads on youtube and decided to put my money where my mouth is vis-a-vis supporting business models that I want to succeed (paying for content instead of with my eyeballs).

I have a little-used gmail account that I registered a few years ago, as my original gmail became completely overrun with spam and I switched to Fastmail.

I added a credit card to the account and tried to pay for Youtube Premium and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity. To reactivate my account, Google wants me to verify my identity with photos of goverment ID and a full KYC-style form.

No thanks. I signed up for https://nebula.app/ instead - they were able to process my payment on the first attempt.


Chances are they saw the login as fraud given it went unused via years and the first thing that login did was sign up for YT Premium via a credit card.

A potential problem they're trying to prevent might be where money launderers use google accounts to funnel YT Premium money to specific channels via watch time (since Premium pays out a lot more, and pay per minute watched[0]).

0: https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=100


I'm sure they have the best intentions but there's literally no way to appeal it. Why can't they verify the credit card the way every other merchant seems to be able to?


Sounds like there is a way to appeal it. You just have to provide a copy of a photo id.


Fair enough I should have said there is no reasonable way to appeal it.


There are a couple of ways to block YT ads, but DNS-based adblockers won't do it.

On Android you can simply install an alternate YT client, boom, job's done. Works on Android TV also.

On iOS, the content blocker lists in Safari can block YT ads, but there's no way to block them in Google's YouTube app unless you jailbreak and install a modified app. So just watch YT in Safari.


You can side load YouTube tweaked apps. You’ll have to refresh the app every 7 days without a workaround or dev account but altserver makes it painless after the first time.


yewtu.be / Invidious for the win!


Doesn't sound like a great security strategy. What happens the day some neighbor makes their Wi-Fi public?


> not everyone has the software installed to unpack them

People downloading 2 TB of compressed books in plain text format are not exactly the definition of "everyone".

> Yes, there's a lot better compression available these days

Tell me more!


zstd: https://github.com/facebook/zstd

Or any of the ones they benchmark against in their .README (lz4, snappy, zlib, etc.)


> Yet, I can never get the old test site I set up running again without massive annoyances.

Use Zola or Hugo. They have zero dependencies.


Blosxom is not a "platform". It's a Perl script.


Mikhaila? That is not a name that I would drop in the context of dietary advice.


Unless you think her story is entirely fabricated, it's a strong anecdote to support a meat-only diet can alleviate inflammation. I mean, she claims to have had hip and ankle replacement at age 17 because of arthritis. All of these conditions subsided on a meat-only diet and promptly returned when she attempted "cheats" (one she mentions is soy sauce).


This is the right answer and I was under the impression that this was in the the Google fu crash course these days.


> They say their next model will have better Linux support

How come a machine like this doesn't have flawless Linux support? Such a lost opportunity...


It's likely limitations of the drivers for the underlying hardware they were able to source in quantity and at the right price. Some of the highest-volume manufacturers have traditionally also been bad about Linux drivers (looking at you, Broadcom).


Brand new hardware rarely has perfect Linux support (or the other way around).

My experience is that it takes about two years to get 90% or better hardware support on a new one.


They say they made significant improvements to Linux support with this 12th gen model. Here's hoping!


He's live on YouTube now if you want to ask a question :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3IasVVL_k0


This guy's story is really impressive. Sounds like he managed to quit his job to work on livestream developing this full time as part of a drug addiction recovery strategy. [1] That's pretty impressive, I hope the best for him going forward with that. It looks like a pretty interesting introduction to operating system development, a huge topic with tons of stuff to cover.

[1] https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...


Sameish numbers here. I thought KDE doing just as good (and even slightly better) than XFCE (in the RAM department) was kind of a well established fact at this point.


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