Yeah, I feel like it requires more cooking skill to tie it together, but it prevents you from playing it safe, by going for your usual recipes or by selecting relatively few ingredients that you know to work together.

Yeah, particularly opening posts in tabs is something I miss from most apps…

In lots of functional languages, you’d have some_function() return an Option type and then you’d use .map() or similar on it to only do something when the value is defined. I think, that can be done in Python’s syntax, but you need a library for the Option type…

Yeah, the style of syntax originated in LISP. The technical name is S-expressions.

But yes, the basic syntax rules are extremely simple. It’s rather when you actually want to do something with that syntax that it takes some thinking…

Seems to be this one: https://www.maerklin.de/en/products/details/article/32000

Hmm, Debian and other long-term support distros are kind of in a tricky position with problems like these. On the one hand, they don’t want to break things, so they’ll often make changes like these relatively late. But on the other hand, someone might still run a current version of the distro in 2038, so they actually want to solve it as early as possible, too.

On Linux:

• an application’s files can be updated while the application is running, and
• there’s an OS-wide updater (i.e. package manager) with which you can update most software, including Firefox. (You can also get Firefox with its built-in auto-updater, but most people prefer the OS-wide updater.)

Both of these are good things. But Firefox, with its relatively advanced multi-process architecture, had a problem here, because it could happen that its files got updated while it was running and then when it started a new process, this new process might be incompatible with the old processes, therefore unable to communicate correctly.

Their initial solution was to force you to quit Firefox and reopen it, when they detected that the files had changed and you did something in Firefox which might need a new process, so primarily when opening a new tab.

I’m guessing, they now implemented a way to launch the new process by still using the old files from before the update.

I find it so bizarre, too. I’ve been using quite a similar autosuggestion feature as part of Fish shell for a few years now. But when an LLM keeps spewing words at me, that’s a whole different shtick. It genuinely just inhibits my thinking, which is a feeling I never had with Fish.

I guess, one difference is that Fish uses real intelligence, a.k.a. my shell history. If it has a suggestion, the chance is high that it’s actually what I want to do or close to it. And it also shuts the hell up when there’s no good suggestion. I don’t have to be constantly vigilant that what it suggests might be complete garbage.

And the other difference is probably that it’s *my* intelligence, *my* shell history. I will have thunk the thoughts before which lead to the command it suggests, which brings the brain load much further down again.
Occasionally, it’ll suggest something where I have no recollection of having run that command before, but knowing that I have, is still really useful and this only happens for niche commands anyways. Most of the suggestions are just stuff which I’ve run a few minutes ago or last week or such, where I won’t have to think about it.

I guess, it probably also helps that commands have simple formatting, with only a single line and you can mostly read the flags in any order…

Sure. Here’s a high-level page which I’ll be kind of going off of: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/choosing-firefox-update-channel

But basically, Firefox ESR (“Extended Support Release”) means that you still get security fixes in a timely manner, but feature updates are delayed. Firefox normally gets feature updates every 4 weeks, whereas ESR averages one (larger) feature update per year. You might know such a model as LTS (“Long-Term Support”) release from other software.

Essentially, the current ‘normal’ Firefox version is 141.0, whereas the ESR version is 128.13.0.
Mozilla does maintain a separate changelog for ESR, but basically it’s as if from 129.0 onwards, you only included the “Fixed”, none of the “New” or “Changed” stuff.

The next ESR will be based off of Firefox 140, as can be seen in their release calendar, so this change that OP praises here will not make it into ESR for another year or so.

And then you gotta also pay the Debian toll, which is that they won’t upgrade to the newest ESR right away either. 😅
Mozilla actually still maintains the Firefox ESR based on version 115, which is about to be discontinued with the new ESR major release.
Debian will typically maintain the ESR even beyond that (Firefox is open-source, so they can retrofit patches themselves), because they have an even longer support lifecycle for their OS release. But I believe, if you always upgrade to the newest Debian release as they make them available, you should be covered by the Mozilla-supported ESR at all times.

If you do not want to pay the Debian toll (not just for Firefox, but any software where you care about new features), then Flatpaks are typically the solution of choice. It’s a different way of installing software, which allows you to get the newest version, independent from what Debian is doing.

But back to the normal Debian experience. How does it affect the user experience for Firefox? Well, we’ve already covered that others may be happy about new features when you’ve gotta take solace in your disgustingly stable software.
These feature updates also include the newest support for web standards, so it’s theoretically possible that a webpage doesn’t work right in ESR. In practice, I don’t think this happens very often, because webdevs can’t use the newest web standards right away anyways. There’s always gonna be users on old browsers or there’s whole browsers which don’t support the new stuff right away.

How does it affect security? Generally, ESR is secure. Occasionally, the feature updates might introduce security-relevant stuff, too, like when they switched to the multi-process architecture, that brought along much better isolation and you can’t just retrofit that into ESR. But yeah, this isn’t the norm. You shouldn’t be particularly worried about security. You do get the normal patches in a timely manner.

Well, and to infodump a little more, you could also take a look at Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s Linux Mint, but instead of Ubuntu underneath, it’s Debian underneath.
Ubuntu is actually itself based on Debian, so I’ve heard LMDE described as “What does basing it on Ubuntu even add? LMDE feels exactly the same as normal Linux Mint.”.
Of course, if you’re switching because you want to try something different, that would be counterproductive. 🫠

I believe, Firefox bugfix releases get rolled out pretty quickly on most non-rolling distros, too, so I don’t think it’s a terribly different experience, unless you’re on a distro with Firefox ESR, like e.g. Debian.

Well, apparently this is the list of parameters it strips: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-release/source/toolkit/components/antitracking/StripOnShareLists/LGPL/StripOnShareLGPL.json

Hmm, apparently this is the list of parameters it strips: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-release/source/toolkit/components/antitracking/StripOnShareLists/LGPL/StripOnShareLGPL.json

So, yeah, it’s only some of the UTM parameters (+ some non-UTM parameters).

It’s the bane of being built-in. You don’t have an extension page to explain to people that the link might not work anymore. You certainly also can’t assume that your users should know of such a possibility, because this can be clicked by any user.

I guess, there could be like a workflow where it opens the URL in a new tab and asks you, if it still works, but that’s also a good way to ensure your less techy users will not press that button again…

Yeah, and a few other such parameters where it’s pretty clear that they’re only used for tracking.

Sure, I guess, if you’ve got a distro installed on your PC and use the distro-provided packages to install the Rust compiler, then you can’t be subject to such certificate MitM attacks.

Your comment sounded like you were primarily concerned about the shell script piping rather it just being a program which can be downloaded without going through distro packages.

You’re using that to download a program. If they can MitM the shell script, they can just as well MitM the program that you’ll run right after the download…

Anecdotal, but I actually stopped liking fictional stories at some point, because I realized there’s such an abundance of cool and real stories I could be learning about, that it’s just like “Why are you telling me of a phoenix/dragon/Lavados when there’s black hawks setting fire to Australia?”.

I guess, it also ties in, though, that I don’t do escapism in general either, so I don’t either get lost in real stories, nor drugs.
I had a rough point in my life where escapism was crucial – I certainly don’t judge anyone wanting to step outside of this world for some time – but yeah, that changed my fundamental world view, so that I prefer to stay in the real world now.

Are these genuinely just screencaps from Star Trek or something?

I guess, it being an identity is somewhat recent-ish…?

You first needed lots of weirdos to make it their identity that they only fuck people from the Champagne region, before it could be an identity that you just fuck whomever’s hot.

Well, the writing-part isn’t the bad part about duplicated code. It’s the maintaining of it. In particular, if you duplicate logic, it happens all too quickly that you make modifications to one, but not the other, or you make differing modifications to both.

Eventually, you’ll end up with two wildly different versions, where you won’t know why certain changes were made and not applied to the other version. Similarly, if you do need to make a similar change to both, you might now need to implement it two times.

I guess, I do agree that it isn’t *always* worth it, but in my experience, it is far more often worth it than one might think.