@Gareth Halfacree the Unite Shell extension gives you the option to hide the title bars when windows are tiled. Tiling Shell extension isn't triggering it however. Once I've figured that out though... WORLD DOMINATION! EDIT: It's a bug in Unite it seems. https://github.com/hardpixel/unite-shell/issues/385
I'm about to have my own rant . . . I recently switched to Firefox after Chrome turned off Ublock and said it was no longer supported. I knew I could just turn it back on, but the writing was on the wall and I was already wanting to move away from Chrome because of the Google monopoly and general privacy concerns. The biggest reason I didn't was because of all of the custom scripts and rules and other things I've done to make the internet usable. I'm extremely ad averse. I'd say the biggest reason I don't enjoy sports (or cable/broadcast tv in general) is because I really can't stand how asinine all advertising is. It's not worth it being able to watch whatever it is I want to watch when I'm seeing ads for at least 1/3 of the run time. No thanks. I block email signup popups. I block sponsored listings in eBay. I block the entire mountain of crap on Amazon that isn't the product information itself. It's also more than 50% of any amazon page at this point. I block all re-circulation items on news websites, especially the mid-article links which I find super distracting, but also usually 90% or more of the side bar. I don't listen to the radio. I've mostly stopped listening to podcasts because it's too annoying to get my phone out to skip the ads. So, anyway, having to move all of that stuff over to Firefox was one of those hurdles I didn't want to jump, but I did. I've tried Arc Browser for a minute just based on the look and function of it. It looks pretty good. But it's Chromium based and I haven't looked into what their monetization strategy is. I might look into it again now that they have a Windows version, but I'd need to do a little research on it to see if it's sketch/how sketchy it is. The issues that I've seen in both the tech industry and generally in capitalism is that so many new businesses are just some form of rent seeking without actually adding any value. Add to that little to no regulation and extremely saturated markets, and it's led to everything being very very bad for consumers. We're living in the definition of late stage capitalism. It's the enshitification of everything. A few things might happen. One, people may actually require their governments to do something about it. We might see some real, strong consumer protection regulation pass. This would essentially be the result of companies trying to squeeze more and more from their customers (since they can't grow anymore), consumers realizing they have nowhere else to go, small startups that could represent real competition being forced out or bought up or unable to even get started due to anti-competitive legislation pushed by entrenched giants, and then those consumers demanding better from their elected representatives because they really have nowhere else to go and are sick of it. I think this is a real, but unlikely option due to how much money is tied up in politics. Every tech CEO kissing Trump's ass is a perfect example. It's always there, but not usually that obvious. I had the thought the other day that Valve might actually have a few good moves to slowly, then all of a sudden, take over the PC space. SteamOS isn't perfect, but it's pretty great. And Windows 11 sucks so much that I barely use my nice gaming laptop because I don't want to use it until I've reinstalled Windows (without all of the built-in spying and cloud services I don't want to be forced to use), but I just haven't had the time or energy to research all of the stuff I'd need to do to do that. I also just want my tech to work without having to fiddle with it. I have a life. I don't want to spend a good chunk of a day dealing with this stuff when, in a better world, I wouldn't be forced to. Combine SteamOS with the fact that a lot of what people use is now cloud/web based anyway (google docs, etc), and various compatibility layers that make a lot of Windows software compatible with Linux, and I'm much less concerned with being able to be productive and use the software I need to use on Linux than I was ten years ago. So, Windows 11 sucks and people are really getting to the end of their tolerance of this crap, and then Valve releases SteamOS, but not as a standalone OS they're pushing (like they did with the Steam Machines), but via the SteamDeck, their own hardware device. They're sneaking Linux into the hands of many many people who would otherwise never have used it. And I'm pretty confident Valve has a few other things in development. They're developing a new VR HMD, and they definitely have another console competitor in the works, a Steam Machine 2 if you will. If they were to release a console competitor, you could easily see a lot of people moving from Xbox or PS to SteamOS via a very capable, but relatively affordable Steam Machine (at least comparable to the current console lineup). When people realize this is actually a full blown PC, they might not bother getting another Windows PC, or they may opt into just getting another Steam Machine. I'm already doing this at my own house. I have a HTPC. I've loved it, but it's getting older and MS is bugging the **** out of me with every "update" they install that is nothing more than them trying to push their spyware crap downward into Windows 10 or telling me I need to "finish setting up your PC" when it's been fully functional and running great for the better part of a decade, thank you very much. I had a spare SteamDeck and my daughter wanted a computer in her room. I grabbed one of my monitors, a SteamDeck dock, keyboard, and mouse, and now she's got a pretty great little computer set up in her room. And it was cheap compared to all of the PC crap going on right now. If enough other people do this, then I think we could see some slow adoption for a long period of time, and then, all of a sudden, Valve is on top (at least in the consumer space) and Microsoft finally loses a huge chunk of market share. I wouldn't think this except that Microsoft is insisting on making their OS and bad as possible for people. If people realize they have a viable alternative, I think most normal people will jump ship. Almost nobody is actually loyal to Windows. They just use what works. I've considered myself an enthusiast on and off for most of my life. If Valve released a SteamOS that works with most/all PC hardware of the last ~10-15 years, I think there are a lot of enthusiasts who would switch to SteamOS. I know Bazzite exists, but I really do think Valve could lend the weight necessary for people to be confident they'll have support from somewhere. One more rant that I think also contributes to this, at least in the enthusiast space. Nvidia is driving me nuts. Their pricing sucks. The actual performance uplift generation over generation hasn't actually been that great, especially when compared to their pricing. They keep nerfing products after launch but not telling anyone, leaving consumers to follow hardware news to know what's going on. The fake frame feature is being blocked behind a software layer unnecessarily in most cases. "30xx series can't run our new fake frame software. Better buy a new GPU!," but it all arbitrary. But it doesn't matter because, at least to me, the fake frames stick out as bad as screen tearing does. I'll play a game and think, "why does this look so weird?" It's always because some form of frame gen is on. It's all just left me extremely unexcited about PCs and tech in general, and I know I'm not alone. So, again, I think this leaves an opening for Valve to make a SteamOS family of devices that may not be super competitive in terms of raw max performance, but if it just works and people are as sick of what's going on in the hardware space as I am, then I think a lot of people might jump to a Valve life raft until Nvidia changes course, which they aren't going to do because they don't actually care about GPUs anymore. And why I think it could be slow and then all at once is that it'll take time for adoption to happen, for people to realize they have a desktop alternative, and for people to stop buying/using the stuff they currently have. But it's not just PCs. It's the PC market. It's handhelds. It's consoles. It's VR. They're going to build an ecosystem capable of toppling a giant like Microsoft by eroding market share in multiple places at once.
So, I've used Chrome almost exclusively on all my PC's all the way back to Win7 beta, if not earlier. I like the integration with my Google apps, I like a lot of features but I'm not completely sold on it. Similarly, I have nothing against Firefox, I just preferred Chrome because of the ease of access right from the jump. However, after watching LTT's De-Google Your Life vids, I've been trying to find something that will work across Mac and W11Pro. I tried Brave, but didn't have a great time with it and am not happy rolling it out across my machines. My Macs run Safari as it's a perfectly competent browser, when I don't get stupid random proxy errors despite not actually using a proxy server. I guess I'm looking for some recommendations for other browsers to use. Any suggestions of Opera or Edge will likely be roundly ignored. Nothing personal, but I *have* to use Edge with work and hate it with every fibre of my being, and Opera keeps getting installed with antivirus and freeware apps and I have the Devil's own time actually removing it from a system properly.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-On-GitHub Considering all the security issues GitHub keeps having, what could possibly go wrong?
