Privatising the Postal Service is an ok idea, anyone can do that job (eg. FedEX, UPS, etc). Privatising Amtrak is a different kettle of fish, it is a natural monopoly on critical infrastructure. In that situation prices will go up if private investors buy it. Increased freight costs will inevitably be passed onto consumers. Anything privatised like this (eg. electricity transmission lines) has been shown to be a net loss for consumers.
I think unfortunately while a lot of people claim they would do so, in actuallity they still have a limit on how much they would fund such an endeavor, and there's not enough such people that care to properly fund the amount of work it is to maintain such a large amount of code as exists to support modern smart phones.
I have no relationship with Nitrokey but they seem to be a legit open-source company in Germany, with a github account. I do run GrapheneOS and I recommend it. GrapheneOS is fully open source (from the kernel up) and free of google services in the default install. No "spam" IMO, but it does notify you when a security update is installed (which requires a reboot).
I wish I could say yes. Sadly, they still don't sell to the USA. They tried doing some sort of partnership a bit ago with the last Fairphone and an USA vendor but it seemed to not go very far. Can't even get the latest phone from them, and they have some sort of custom OS on it.
Sure, but paying Fairphone 5 prices for a less-powerful Fairphone 4, and then needing to flash an aftermarket ROM on it and live forevermore in a grey area support-wise? The value proposition just isn't there for me.
> I'm just addressing this comment, which is not strictly true. And you CAN still get the phone, the partnership does not appear to be over.
Well, if we're going to get pedantic, then I still say my original statement is true. They (being Fairphone) still don't sell to the USA. They make it very clear on their website that Fairphone is not supporting any phone bought through Murena. You have warranty issues, etc? You need to go through Murena. (And who knows how long they will last. Let's face it- such companies don't have long shelf-lives, sadly.)
So yeah, they don't sell to the USA.
Can I still get one? Yes. Through Murena, people on ebay, or other vendors that work as a go-between. That's not what I want, and there are other, potentially even better, ways of reducing e-waste. Such as buying refurbished phones.
Fairphone misleads people into believing they are a privacy pro phone. They don't provide regular updates, firmware updates aren't up to date and many more such things.
They mislead people who want to leave big tech and are privacy conscious.
I want to be able to use HTML/JS to design my desktop and call APIs. Can I do that with gjs or is it this GTK namespace and GTK-CSS like language only?
It would be really cool to design the background from the Ubuntu crown to a bunch of widgets of information I use daily.
I'm a firefox user on Ubuntu. They need to improve the cold start time badly. It currently takes me 4-5 minutes from launch to page load. Once loaded I have no issues with the performance but Chrome is vastly superior in this area.
EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.
If you can install a Flatpak or .deb package of Firefox, you should regain that performance. Found a post recommending a "Mozilla Team" PPA at https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/install-firefox..., but I last used Ubuntu 15 years ago, so I can't speak to the specific recommendations therein.
You can't possibly think that all Firefox and Ubuntu users sit around for 4 minutes waiting for their browser to open. It's clearly something specific to your setup.
If you want to report this issue I suggest first trying a fresh install of another OS on the same device just to ensure it's not hw. And of course the standard troubleshooting is to start Firefox in troubleshooting mode, that runs it without any plugins enabled.
That's a local issue for sure. Not sure how, might be Firefox's fault in some way. But it's not just a combination of Firefox and Ubuntu. (I use Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 and it's a couple seconds, maybe.)
That's the default install method for Firefox on Ubuntu, last I checked. I think they only recently had an apt repo too. I don't think it's specifically an issue with Snap either, nor do I think Snap is a terrible tool besides it being a centralized package store that you can't create 3rd party repositories for, though I understand people also complain about the block devices Snap packages add to your system.
Anyway, the intent of my original comment was just to say that they should do some more investigating on their issue because it's not as simple as Firefox in a Snap package on any Ubuntu installation.
Using Firefox on Fedora 39. It takes 1-2 seconds to start with lots of tabs reopening. I have had issues with videos not playing from time to time but other than that, I am really liking it (coming from MacOS and Chrome).
Not them, but tree tabs + auto tab discard is a great way to browse documentation when working on a project. That can easily use up dozens of tabs.
3000 seems excessive, but tabs are better than bookmarks since they save page state like scroll position, so many people use tabs instead of bookmarks. That's more a lack of useful functionality in existing bookmarks than an inherent advantage of tabs IMO.
Have you tried deleting your profile and starting fresh? Something is clearly messed up. Launching takes a fraction of a second for me on NixOS with a years-old profile.
Is the Firefox snap perhaps on a spinning rust drive?
(I boot from SSD but have spinning rust for /home - so I can hear when Firefox is hammering the drive. It seems that any time it updates or fails to quit cleanly it thrashes the HD for maybe 10 to 20 seconds the first time I visit something like facebook or youtube.)
> EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.
As do I, and it doesn't take as long on my machine. Perhaps your hardware is unusually slow or you're using extensions that do something on every tab after startup, even the lazy-loaded ones.
Firefox restarts in seconds for me.
I had a similar issue on Arch Linux some time ago.
I debugged it by running it with strace, seeing what it was waiting for and googling it. Uninstalling some package solved it.
I've had this problem on an Arch machine after no use and no update for a long time. Thunderbird was affected as well, and both unfreezed at the exact same moment a few minutes after launching the first one.
I never had time to investigate this but this was obviously a system problem, Firefox and Thunderbird are fast on all the other machines I use.
I'm on the Ubuntu Firefox snap, and it definitely doesn't take 5 minutes to load. Create a new profile and see if that helps, but it shouldn't take that long.
4-5 minutes is clearly insane, but Firefox in Ubuntu taking 10s of seconds for a fairly simple profile to start is why I went back to Debian after a few months of Ubuntu.
So did Google some with DeepMind.
All the big innovations were at DeepMind, and then they got bought, stifled and absorbed.
Big companies have a hard time innovating, so buy it.
