I'm a huge fan of the Laundry Files books. Just finished Season of Skulls, the 3rd book in The New Management trilogy. It's a little less bleak than the first two books of the trilogy and very funny.

I'm now reading War Bodies by Neal Asher.

an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.

GNOME does have a launcher, which works just like the launcher on Mac and Android. You can even select whether to see all your apps or only the most-used ones. I do agree that a taskbar/dock with intelligent auto-hide is a must, though (at least for my usability). That's also not to say that some folks would rather have a Windows style launcher, and there are several DEs that provide that.

Thanks for the reminder about VLC. I don't use it much any more, but back in the wild west days of audio/video codecs (some of which were paid), VLC would play everything.

I don't have an answer for you, but maybe you and your friends could get together and start your own? The beauty of the fediverse and all that.

The web pages for Lemmy and kbin have the ability to filter by subscribed communities, as well. I think what most of us are thinking of is a way to view the "All" feed that gives more weight to the smaller communities, which would help us discover new communities to subscribe to.

Limiting myself to free as in freedom (no ads, not free to use because you are the product): KeePass/KeePassXC, GnuCash, Firefox, LibreOffice, digiKam, GIMP.

In my opinion, microblogging isn't really a conversational platform. It's a creator and audience platform. That format has its place, as well, but Twitter/Threads/Mastodon/etc. isn't a replacement for forums.

A qualified yes. I love the overview, which is, IMO, the most elegant way to launch applications and manage workspaces of any OS or DE. I also love the general look and fluidity of the environment and how it gets out out of your way when you don't need it. But I preferred the pre-GNOME 40 vertical workflow to the new horizontal workflow.

There are also three must-have extensions that make GNOME usable for me:

• AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support. GNOME can wish away tray icons if they want to, but the tray hasn't gone away and is still necessary for some applications.
• DashToDock. Makes app switching more accessible and adds right-click to close.
• Gnome 4x UI Improvements. Increases the size of the workspace thumbnails so you can actually see what's in them (like it was before GNOME 40).

Vector Pinball

Login issue reportedly fixed with 0.18.2 update: Lemmy.world updated to 0.18.2

I still favor native packages, but I don't have a problem with Flatpaks. I'll use them when a program isn't available in the repo or there's a compelling reason to have a never version of an application. I'm on Debian Stable, so I'm obviously not obsessed with having the newest, shiniest version of everything.

116 °F (47 °C) during the 2021 Western North America heat wave
7 °F (-14 °C) in Mammoth Lakes, CA

What about running the Flatpak version of Brave? Flatpaks are containerized and should contain compatible libraries.

To add to what @lordnikon said, the program is called Software & Updates and I'm pretty sure it's installed by default in GNOME (don't know about other DEs).

I'm a boomer and I'm here. Although I'm probably the exception since I've never had a Facebook account and you couldn't pay me enough to touch anything Meta. Probably because I fit the rest of OP's criteria: way over 30, tech worker, Linux user.

Paper mills smell like hydrogen sulfide - rotten eggs. It's a byproduct of the pulping process. It's bad, but some of the smells described here sound much worse. Source: the town I live in used to have an operating paper mill.

I'm on Fark more than I used to be on Reddit. It's still my go-to for political discussions and kept me sane during the Trump years. Honestly, the community is pretty good there and there's a nice balance between insightful comments and snark. But Reddit was better for hobbyists, niche interests and tech discussions and I'm hoping those communities will develop here on Lemmy.

As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It's the way federation works, it's not something that can be forced on people.

Same here. I've worn contacts for 50 years (my user name isn't a lie). A few minutes of inconvenience at the beginning and end of the day, and I don't have to think about my vision aids the rest of the time. And I can walk in the rain and still see!

GNOME. Been using Linux since before GNOME Shell was a thing and when it became a thing it just clicked for me. In my opinion, it's by far the most polished DE and provides the most elegant and intuitive launcher and workspace switcher of any DE or OS I've used. At least they did, until they fucked it up by moving from vertical to horizontal workspaces and made the workspace previews so small you can no longer see what's in them.

Which is the downside of GNOME. Sometimes their developers are their own worst enemies. Fortunately, there are usually extensions to fix the most egregious "enhancements".