Proprietary snap store backend that is controlled by Canonical: that’s it.

I used Ubuntu for years: installed it for family and friends. I moved away around a year ago.

Moving packages like Firefox to snap was what first started annoying me.

If the backend was open source, and the community could have hosted their own (like how flatpak repositories can be), I might have been slightly more forgiving.

Did a quick Google to find if someone had elaborated, here’s a good one:

deleted by creator

super productivity is pretty good.

You can also sync between your phone, desktop, etc using different sync options including Dropbox, webdav, local file, etc

It is certainly useful for some use cases such as network print servers (I have a dedicated lxc container on the network to do this) and custom conversions of pages (during my digging, I learned about companies using a CUPS network printer to watermark every document being printed).

I’m not an expert by any means: it is definitely a useful tool in certain cases, but oh man… the documentation was a bit hard to figure out for me!

Mission Accomplished! My printer driver now has a MirrorPrint Option, and selecting it enables Mirror Printing. For convenience (since I don’t see a client side option to flip mirror printing), I have a doppleganger of my regular printer, and I named it MirrorTest - screenshot below. When I need a mirror print, I just send it to the mirror printer.

Actual Changes

Here’s the relevant excerpt (added) in /etc/cups/ppd/MirrorTest.ppd (I added this UI option right below the Toner option). Excerpt adds a MirrorPrint Toggle (boolean) to the printer defaults setup. When enabled - the printer will print in mirror mode.

*%=== Mirror Printing ================================
*OpenGroup: General
*OpenUI *MirrorPrint/Mirror Print: Boolean
*OrderDependency: 110 AnySetup *MirrorPrint
*DefaultMirrorPrint: True
*MirrorPrint True/MirrorPrint: "<>setpagedevice"
*MirrorPrint False/Normal: ""
*CloseUI: *MirrorPrint

For further convenience (making sure that a new printer installation didn’t mess up my custom changes, I also updated the relevant ppd file in /usr/share/cups/model/. Whenever you add a new printer - CUPS will use the corresponding model ppd as a base, and it will apply any settings changes from configuring default to the copied ppd file in /etc/cups/ppd/your_printer.ppd.

Hope this helps if someone else is also looking to do something similar!

Try running it from the command line with code --disable-gpu.

If that works, you can update the desktop shortcut files (exec section) with the same added parameter.

I recently ran into something similar (opensuse slowroll//kde)

Ref: stackoverflow/Google for the --disable-gpu argument, the desktop file editing - I did for convenience.

Here’s how you can find . desktop files

Desktop file reference.- easy format

Thanks for that link, it gave a bit more context into what OP was talking about.

The article does link to this archive.org link, which seems to back the title.

On the other hand, I also see articles like: KDE Foundation hires Dwarf Paladin as new Executive Director, which make me agree that this seems to be a bit on the malicious side.

It does make me want to dig around a bit now though.

Wow, that’s so messed up: I didn’t know HP did that… I think it might just be a matter of time before others follow suit.

Sounds very Wireshark worthy!

I’m generally not a fan of endless os (very locked down), but this might be a good low-maintenance option for libraries.

Endless comes out of the box with offline educational materials and learning apps.

Flatpak based distribution.

That would be cool.

Here’s my new setup that might not work for everyone, but I’d recommend thinking about if you’re able to.

1. Network printers are blocked from Internet by my router. They have static IP addresses allocated (permanent DHCP leases) for convenience.

2. I have some Canon laser printers. I don’t want to install Canon software across my devices, so I setup a cups print server (lxc container) where I installed the software.

3. I setup and shared the printers (local network only), made them discoverable.

4. I use the CUPS web GUI over ssh tunnel if I need to check on job queues and do maintenance/admin tasks (don’t usually have to).

Clients immediately find the printers on the server, no driver required.

As a bonus, I made the margins 0 on the CUPS ppd on the server so that I get to print without margins when so desired (Canon has fixed minimum margins otherwise).

The one caveat is that the Canon drivers don’t work on raspberry pi (arm), so while I have a to-do to get around that by using a virtualization layer, you need a separate Intel/AMD machine for the print server if your printer doesn’t support ARM.

If you want persistent messages, use a messaging app like another poster posted. KDE connect should work, but it doesn’t work for my setup for some reason.

If you just need transient messages, which is more of my usecase, and lightweight sending, use pairdrop.

snapdrop and pairdrop app from fdroid for Android, pairdrop website in desktop.

You can just use the website instead of app on phone too.

Sending over LAN is local - it doesn’t go outside your own network.

If devices are on same WiFi, no pairing required.

You can also send across networks by pairing.

Project GitHub repository

You’re fine.

Most distributions/derivative distributions are fine for very long periods.

It’s just that when the base distribution itself (Debian, Fedora in your case, Opensuse, etc) are themselves nicely customized out of the box to address user concerns, that’s a very attractive prospect to long time users like myself.

Debian has a lot of history and stability, so if I can use it for myself, family, friends without an additional layer or more of other parties, that’s very appealing.

I have Nixos on a laptop, and have a love//hate relationship with it.

I love the customizability and declarative setup.

I hate the number of times I’ve sunk down rabbitholes trying to set specific things up on it.

The updates being done via switch are a bit inconvenient, but cool enough.

The fact that I can’t customize everything, particularly on kde, is slightly sad.

All in all, I really like it, but wouldn’t recommend it for my less technical friends, who I’d normally install Ubuntu for. This has gone up my list, close to Opensuse slowroll and Linux mint Debian edition now.

Yes, an opinionated customized installer that seems to be aligned with my own thoughts of great out of the box usage.

I see, you’re right from that perspective.

For this ‘distro’, I like the emphasis the maintainer put on out of the box usability, including proprietary codecs, extra repositories that are not enabled/added by default, but widely used, flatpak setup out of the box, printer permissions relaxing etc.

That’s not right. Debian/suse are no less out of the box user friendly than Arch - not counting endeavouros/Manjaro, they’re more friendly.

Arch still needs extra setup and configuration after install. Endeavouros makes it a bit simpler, but there’s still configuration (and ricing) invoice. Auto-discovery of printers (cups, avahi), graphical configuration tools out of the box, user permissions/group membership setup out of the box in a way that new users (or even power users) can just set things up graphically… all of that needs extra work.

That’s the extra configuration that this is providing.

I’m pretty much a superficial user regarding office programs, particularly draw. However, I did want to have borders around my text recently, and found you can insert a single celled table with the border you want.

Would a worse hack with a single celled table in a single celled table (different border colors) do the trick for you?

Splunk is already very expensive to be honest, with their policy of charging based on indexed logs (hit by searches) as opposed to used logs, and the necessity for a lot of logs to be indexed for 'in case something breaks '. Bit of hearsay there - while I don’t work for the team that manages indexing, I have had quite a few conversations with our internal team.

I was surprised we were moving from splunk to a lesser known proprietary competitor (we tried and gave up on elasticsearch years ago). Splunk is much more powerful for power users , but the cost of the alternative was 7-10 times less, and most users didn’t unfortunately use splunk power user functionality to justify using it over the competitor.

Being a power user with lots of dashboards, my team still uses splunk for now, and I have background conversations to make sure we don’t lose it, I think Cisco would lose out if they jacked up prices, I think they’d add value to their infrastructure offerings using splunk as an additional value add perhaps?

Here’s a slightly more detailed description of my debugging experience over the years (also includes that of many coworkers implicitly… many of whom I’ve walked through the stages).

As someone who has done a lot of debugging in the past, and has also written many log analysis tools in the past, it’s not an ether/or, they complement each other.

I’ve seen a lot of times logs are dismissed in these threads recently, and while I love the debugger (I’d boast that I know very few people who can play with gdb like I can), logs are an art, and just as essential.

The beginner printf thing is an inefficient learning stage that people will get past in their early careers after learning the debugger, but then they’ll need to eventually relearn the art of proper logging too, and understand how to use both tools (logging and debugging).

There’s a stage when you love prints.

Then you discover debuggers, you realize they are much more powerful. (For those of you who haven’t used gdb enough, you can script it to iterate stl (or any other) containers, and test your fixes without writing any code yet.

And then, as your (and everyone else’s) code has been in production a while, and some random client reports a bug that just happened for a few hard to trace events, guess what?

Logs are your best friend. You use them to get the scope of the problem, and region of problem (if you have indexing tools like splunk - much easier, though grep/awk/sort/uniq also work). You also get the input parameters, output results, and often notice the root cause without needing to spin up a debugger. Saves a lot of time for everyone.

If you can’t, you replicate, often takes a bit of time, but at least your logs give you better chances at using the right parameters. Then you spin up the debugger (the heavy guns) when all else fails.

It takes more time, and you often have a lot of issues that are working at designed in production systems, and a lot of upstream/downstream issues that logs will help you with much faster.