I see… Welp, guess I’ll go back to what I was using before!

Is this good news or bad news?

Satanic Edition

• NixOS
• Void
• Artix
• siduction
• PureOS
• Ubuntu SE

I like SchildiChat the most, since it has a nice UI and supports both E2EE and calls.

Alpine, mainly. It’s not bad on desktop.

I use Syncthing

Pepperidge Farm remembers

Nothing. There are just a lot of people in my Mastodon circle who use things like OpenBSD.

It also seems to be a popular OS to try and use during this year’s Old Computer Challenge.

Well, I often just do a bank transfer or card payment. I’ve tried to use Monero, but I’ve had trouble getting ahold of any crypto without selling my soul to Guardarian.

I have a few machines, which run:

• Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
• openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
• Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
• FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
• Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
• crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.

Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.

Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.

The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.

It’s an old program that converts between .deb (Debian), .rpm (RedHat), .tgz (Slackware), .slp (Stampede), .pkg (Solaris), and LSB packages.

I don’t use it much, but it can be handy in a pinch for installing software that isn’t packaged for your distribution. Just don’t use it for anything low-level or that’s already packaged natively, or you’ll break stuff.

You could try running the .deb through alien(1p), although it can be hit-and-miss if the package has a lot of scripts or dependencies.

A user by the name of electro1 has just told me that apparently it now contains trackers. I had no idea. Sorry.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.onlyoffice.documents/latest

I’ll keep an eye out to see if anything else turns up that’s FOSS, but doesn’t spy.

Wait, WHAT‽

You could give ONLYOFFICE a try. It defaults to Office Open XML formats, but it can read and edit OpenDocument files just fine.

EDIT: electro1 has just told me that ONLYOFFICE has trackers. One look on Exodus and, sure enough, they’re right. Sorry!

I think I probably meant usable. Essentially, the last time I tried it, software like LibreOffice wouldn’t run and I had a few minor issues with web browsing.

It’s probably been fixed, come to think of it. Maybe I’ll give it another go.

I do quite like Haiku. It’s not quite stable usable enough for me yet, but I have no doubt that I’ll be using it as a daily driver in the near future.

I’ll wait and see how this turns out, but I’ll keep openbsd.org open in my browser. Just in case.