zafiro17

This is tangential to the subject at hand, but I feel obliged to complain about how much Substacks now requires you install its app to read the content. Very similar to Reddit, in fact. I've watched the progression in pushiness over the year. On my phone, I did not install the app and there was apparently no other way to read the article.

I block Reddit at the router for similar dark patterns.

I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. I've used TDE for years (on the Q4OS Linux distro). It excels at being a low-resource requirement virtual desktop for teams needing a modern distro/kernel/browser but want it to run as lightly and cheaply as possible. My company uses it on virtual server infra accessed over Nomachine. It runs perfectly well with <1GB RAM and even in 500MB RAM it does well. The DE it's updated worked great on a Pentium III with 128MB back in the day.

The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.

I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.

This is one of the apps that not only keeps me on a desktop/laptop computer (vs a phone/tablet) but also keeps me on Linux. I've got all my photos stored on a NAS device in my house, and manage backups myself (to external harddrives and to rsync). Digikam is my photo manager. I couldn't be happier and I'm sure I don't use even half of the advanced features. What a great app - easy to discover, straightforward, and very polished in my opinion. Many thanks, open source Digikam team.

I wish both the K9 and Thunderbird teams all the best. K9 needs some love, and so does Thunderbird, honestly.

I use Aquamail on Android and love it. Great feature set, works great with multiple accounts, lots of configuration options. It's not open source or free and I honestly do not care.

Back in the day it was something like USD 4. Now it's something like USD 25. Still worth it, and I don't mind paying for software if it keeps the developers in business.

Comp.misc for computer stuff Misc.news.internet.discuss for oddball Sci.misc for science

These are three decent groups for content similar to HN.

If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or individual.net (paid but excellent)

For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as BSD/Linux.

I'm using Mageia with great success. KDE, frequent security and package updates, big repository, non-Ubuntu. Former Mandriva and Mandrake for those who remember Linux in the early 2000s.

I just tried out delomore and am very impressed. Bookmarking now!

I applaud the work that went into this, but unless I'm missing something, they've recreated a terminal server, where nomachine has delivered desktops for ages and works over a connection as poor as dial-up.

This article feels like it written specifically for me. I have a strong nostalgia and affection for shortwave radio while sadly also forcing myself to come to grips with the fact that it's a dead medium.

I was a volunteer in rural Central America from 1998-2000 and shortwave radio was an important news source for me (but already a VERY niche medium, even then). Nights I dialed in VOA and then found a lot of other interesting things too, from Cuba to broadcasts from Spain, Germany, and Indonesia. It was all fun and exciting.

Ten years later I began a decade of work overseas in rural West Africa. I dutifully brought my shortwave with me, only this time I found close to nothing on the airwaves. Some crazy religious broadcasts here and there, but nothing. I looked around and can confirm that in ten years of living in Africa (with a lot of West African friends and colleagues) not a single one of them had or used shortwave, or even really had any awareness that it existed. The number one media source even then was FM radio tuned in over cheap Chinese FM radios or over FM radio apps on cell phones.

I've still got a shortwave and occasionally scan the frequencies from my hammock here in North Carolina. But there is really not much there (religious stuff still being one exception). I ask myself, if rural West Africans aren't listening to shortwave anymore, really who is?

This article answers it: a few pockets remain, like Nigeria and Myanmar. But the shortwave era ended: everyone who left shortwave never came back, even when newer methods failed. Guess it was fun while it lasted :)

Looks like the first paragraph was a recent edit. I'm not sure how gopherpedia works but perhaps it only syncs periodically.

If text-based access to popular websites is your cup of tea, there are two very good gopher interfaces I use regularly: gopher://gopherpedia.com for Wikipedia and gopher://gopherddit.com for Reddit.

The latter is not very helpful on image-based threads but is excellent for text-rich threads (like askreddit). The gopher interface to wikipedia is surprisingly full-featured; I love it.

Every time a vivaldi post shows up on HN it attracts a lot of negative comments (and some positive ones). Will just add my voice to the mix - Vivaldi is my primary browser and I love it. On my 5 year old laptop I experience no slowness, and I generally enjoy it's very user-focused features. I also enjoyed Opera prior to version 12. I recognize it's not the browser for everyone, but on my Linux boxes it's the second app I install (mutt is the first one). Your experience may vary.