Debian 11 on a Mid-2011 Apple iMac 27-inch

An Apple Mid-2011 iMac 27-inch “Core i5” 2.7 fell into my lap some time around 2017, and even though it had a few years of MacOS support ahead, it was slow — never mind the 20 GB of RAM I added when supporting it for an Adobe Creative Cloud workflow.

Booting took forever. Updates took forever. Saving an inDesign document took … you guessed it. A lot of spinning beach balls. (You know when I get spinning beach balls in Linux? NEVER.)

Once the iMac was replaced with a newer model, the old one came to me. I spent a bit of time trying to re-create my Linux-based workflow in MacOS.

I added things like gVim and Homebrew. I’m sure Homebrew is great, but if you’ve ever used a real Linux package manager, it’s a no.

I am not a Mac person. The Finder? You have got to be kidding me. Maybe it’s OK. But it’s not for me.

The OS is now unsupported by Apple — which happened for this iMac after a reasonable (in my opinion) nine years. Still, this computer is pretty much mint. Why junk it?

Even before Apple ended OS support, I suspected this Intel-based Mac might be better as a Linux workstation.

And it is.

I went for my go-to distribution — Debian Stable, which at the time was Buster (aka Debian 10) and is now, via upgrade, Bullseye (Debian 11).

Things might have been easier with Ubuntu — and I do recommend Linux distros that make it easier to get the Radeon graphics card working out of the box. I didn’t want something as dynamic as the upgrade-every-six-months Fedora, which I am running on my newer laptop.

When I want serious, boring stability, I go for Debian. I’ve probably done more Debian installs than any other Linux or BSD, and I’ve spent a whole lot of time using Debian. It’s like comfortable old slippers.

But if you like Ubuntu, it’s definitely a great way to go, or to get started with Linux on the 2011 iMac.

Still, due to the hardware’s age — 11 years at this writing — it pays to go with a distro that doesn’t demand the use of heavy Snap packages. I’d still try it with the latest Ubuntu LTS and see how I feel about Snaps. But since I’m a Debian user, I haven’t gone that route. I stuck with Debian.

That being said, I always recommend trying all of your favorites on a new computer. This iMac has a DVD drive, but it also boots off USB, and that’s how I did my live testing. I’ve run Ubuntu, Fedora and AlmaLinux from live images.

When I did the original install, which I’m still running, I did a dual-boot using rEFIit with the original MacOS. But once my laziness wears off (and I sure hope it does), I plan to devote the entire 1 TB drive to Linux.

It’s just not worth dual-booting, especially with an unsupported MacOS, which I almost never used, even when it was still getting security patches. Why would I? ANY Linux beats MacOS for speed.

And then there’s software availability, the package management, the desktop environments I already know.

Truthfully, I am pretty sour on dual-booting with Windows, MacOS, or even other Linux distros. It’s a complicated and brittle process. I like to run one OS at a time and give it the whole drive.

Sure, this iMac is old, but it runs GNOME 3 very well. There’s no need to use Xfce or other “lighter” desktop environments unless you prefer them. I’m a big GNOME 3 fan, and the fact that the DE seems to run great on even my oldest hardware keeps me using it.

I do recommend getting a Debian Live image and booting it up along with Ubuntu, Fedora and whatever else you like that has a live environment.

But when I do a Debian install, I generally use the non-free firmware amd64 netinstall image, though as I remember it I still had to add some firmware after the installation. If I do a reinstall and it turns out I don’t need to sneak firmware onto the box, this tutorial will get a lot shorter.

Debian doesn’t make it easy to find the right image. Here’s what I would use for 11.3.

So let’s get to it. First of all, remember:

• To run Debian 11 on a mid-2011 iMac 27-inch, you do need some firmware and to make a tweak in the GRUB settings.
• I don’t recommend dual-booting with rEFIit, and while you can hook up the original Mac wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard, It’s better to have a “real” keyboard, USB or wireless. I use the Logitech keyboard-mouse combo to save a port.

I already had the 20 GB of RAM from the iMac’s MacOS days, but it still had — and has — its original 1 TB drive.

It would be great to replace that spinning hard drive with an SSD, but the procedure for replacing the disk drive is a bit too difficult for me. It involves suction cups for lifting out the screen, reattaching some kind of thermal sensor, and other things I’d rather not deal with. WHO WANTS TO DEAL WITH SUCTION CUPS?

The iMac is a little slower with a traditional hard drive but still very usable. Mostly it just boots slower. Once you’re up and running in Debian, I barely notice the drive slowing me down.

And another bonus of not doing a dual-boot is that you can encrypt the entire drive and add a good measure of security. If the system powers down, nobody can get to your data without the passphrase.

One caveat: The 2011 iMac runs “hot.” Literally. I mean the top back side of the computer throws off a lot of heat. It is the same whether you run MacOS or Linux. It’s designed this way. The 2017 iMac that replaced this runs super cool, has way more screen resolution and also cost $3,000+. Again, it’s hard to beat $0 for a sweet Linux workstation with a giant screen and decent (2560×1440) resolution.

When I got the 2011 iMac, the original mouse was long dead. The Bluetooth Mac keyboard was worn but 100% working. It was a bit of a nightmare to pair it in Linux, but I managed to do it. However, I soon replaced it with a $25 Logitech wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo that shares a single USB receiver. In Linux you need a USB keyboard (wired or wireless) around anyway because it takes the Bluetooth keyboard longer to be recognized by Linux during the boot process than in MacOS.

Also, the original Mac keyboard has a backspace key but no delete. What the hell? I spent $20 to end the frustration. I still have the original keyboard, but I pulled the batteries and put it in a box.

The tutorial I used to pair the original Mac Bluetooth keyboard in Linux has disappeared, but this post looks pretty much the same. Still, for Linux use I wouldn’t bother.

I almost forgot to mention that suspend and resume work perfectly, and the screen brightness adjusts automatically depending on room light.

Before you install, here are some things you should know and prepare for. Either print out this post, or look at it on another device.

My iMac has the following firmware packages installed:

firmware-amd-graphics/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed]
firmware-linux-free/stable,now 20200122-1 all [installed,automatic]
firmware-linux-nonfree/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed]
firmware-misc-nonfree/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed,automatic]

The Debian installer should take care of firmware-linux-free.

I recommend downloading firmware-amd-graphics, firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-misc-nonfree as .deb packages and putting them on a FAT-formatted USB drive that can be mounted from the command line so you can install them from there if you don’t have the network working.

Yep you need some command-line experience to make this happen — unless the non-free firmware Debian ISO manages to work the way it’s supposed to. More on that after my next install.

It’s likely the system will boot without a working GUI, and installing this firmware should make the it work.

Once you’ve done your Debian install and gotten the GUI to work by installing the three nonfree firmware packages from your USB drive, use your superuser (sudo or su) powers and add this line to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet radeon.dpm=0 acpi_backlight=vendor"

Here is an example portion of /etc/default/grub, so you see what I’m talking about. Just add the line above like so:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet radeon.dpm=0 acpi_backlight=vendor"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Then reboot, and it should work like butter.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. I’ve had the iMac running Debian long enough to have done one in-place upgrade, which went perfectly. I use a few Flatpaks here and there for things like Spotify and Zoom, but it’s mostly standard .deb packages.

I don’t do a lot of development on the Debian iMac — yet. I certainly could. I love the big screen. It’s not as nice as the screen on a 2022 iMac, but you can’t beat the price ($0) and the ease at which Linux goes on one of these older Macs.

What I do use the Debian iMac for are tasks that include Web production on the newspaper sites I work on (writing, editing, heavy WordPress posting, photo editing), playing audio — the speakers are awesome — and recording it via Audacity. I am using the real-time kernel, and I rely on Carla Schroder’s The Book of Audacity for my recording know-how.

For reference, here is the output of lspci on my mid-2011 iMac 27-inch:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 Display controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Universal Host Controller #5 (rev 05)
00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b5)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b5)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Universal Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Z68 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port Desktop SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Whistler [Radeon HD 6730M/6770M/7690M XT]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Turks HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6500/6600 / 6700M Series]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)
03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR93xx Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
04:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): LSI Corporation FW643 [TrueFire] PCIe 1394b Controller (rev 08)
05:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
06:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
06:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
06:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
06:05.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
06:06.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]
07:00.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010]

CentOS Stream and the end of the CentOS clone: perils, pitfalls, risks and opportunities for Red Hat

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.

What is CentOS Stream? It is a reimagining of CentOS as a continuously delivered yet version-constrained development distribution that tracks ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 yet stays within the RHEL 8 world from an ABI¹-compatibility standpoint.

So instead of RHEL leading to an eventual CentOS build, CentOS Stream leads to an eventual RHEL build.

Stream is also an upstream.

Plus, as many Red Hatters have said, Stream welcomes contributors large (like Facebook) and small (like you and me) in a way that “old” CentOS and RHEL never could.

In the rhetoric around the ending of traditional CentOS, RH employees have been saying the existing CentOS community is made up almost entirely of passive users and no contributors — mostly because it’s impossible to really contribute to CentOS or RHEL outside of filing bug reports. The only avenue, until now, for meaningful contribution to RHEL has been the very upstream and very welcoming Fedora.

Here’s how the “flow” of code used to go:

Fedora >>> RHEL >>> CentOS

and here’s how it will go:

Fedora >>> CentOS Stream >>> RHEL

For those unfamiliar with what the Fedora distribution is all about, it’s free to all users and encourages contributions and involvement. It is where the community — including employees of Red Hat — tests and develops new technologies that may eventually be included in RHEL.

Fedora is friendly and welcoming in a way few free software projects are. It’s a great community and a surprisingly great distro that gives users a years-ahead look at what mainstream Linux systems will eventually be doing.

Fedora releases every six months, and every release receives updates for the duration of the next release plus about a month. That generally works out to 13 months, give or take, but it’s possible to upgrade every six months. And the distro doesn’t stand still. It gets new kernels all the time, and many other components are also updated on a continuous basis.

A new version of RHEL is “cut” from a Fedora release every three years. It promises a certain level of stability and compatibility, has full support for five years, maintenance support for another five years and “extended life cycle support” for another two years after that. Everybody talks about the 10 years — and they do so as if the 10 years were equivalent to the first five years, which is something to think about.

One of the biggest differences between CentOS Stream and RHEL/old CentOS is the support period. RHEL is the only distro that patches for 10 years. By extension, so does CentOS and any other clone that can keep it going.

But CentOS Stream comes with a promise of “only” 5 years of support. That puts it in line with Ubuntu and maybe Debian. It’s not a positive for many. It “takes away” one of the features that made CentOS stand out. Unless things change, after 5 years, you’ll have to upgrade from Stream 8 to Stream 9. I can think of worse things.

I can’t see running any system for more than 5 years, but many can and want to do just that.

Red Hatters have been saying the reason the company created Stream is to encourage users large and small to participate in the development of RHEL by submitting bug fixes — and ostensibly also actual code.

CentOS Stream sounds good to me. For desktop use anyway. There’s no reason a desktop needs to track months behind RHEL. There is little downside — and potentially some upside — to being slightly ahead of it.

For server use, it may be a different story. If you read the thousands of comments out there, the end of CentOS as we know it — with only Stream surviving — is open-source armageddon, a line in the sand, a crossed Rubicon, a breach of trust. You name the cliche, and I promise it has been invoked.

Red Hat is saying that it either can’t or doesn’t want to split its effort between traditional CentOS and CentOS Stream. And as long as old-school CentOS remains on the table, nobody will want to switch to Stream in the first place.

Forcing people to do something they don’t want to do? Sometimes it works out, other times it just makes everyone angry.

The move to kill CentOS as it currently exists has been very unpopular. Very. Unpopular. Users are piling into threads to complain about how Red Hat has used its own Microsoftian form of “embrace, extend, extinguish” to first purchase the formerly independent CentOS Project and hire all its devs, wait while an “official” RHEL clone squeezed out competition like Scientific Linux, and then kill CentOS while keeping the name for what is now CentOS Stream.

Is there any reason why they didn’t call it RHEL Stream? That would be a more appropriate name.

The decision of Red Hat to purchase the clone project CentOS in the first place was curious. Why make a “free” version of your own product when you could just make that product free in the first place?

We all say that free RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux help promote the RHEL ecosystem and funnel business to Red Hat. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. If anybody really knows, it would be Red Hat.

Why the uproar when there are Debian, SUSE and Ubuntu?

There is something about the technical excellence in RHEL that makes it the overwhelming choice in the enterprise market. Plus everyone uses CentOS. Because it’s just like RHEL. That’s it in a nutshell. People want to use it because everybody else is already using it.

I followed the CentOS project before it was acquired by Red Hat. Things could be dicey. Releases were generally VERY far behind RHEL. So were updates. But the ability to “play” with something just like RHEL is very powerful. It’s not just the price of $0. Being able to use a distro for free and without “registering” or otherwise being marketed to are table stakes in the Linux distribution world.

Even Microsoft — which is very much not a Linux company — recognizes the value of “free” in particular situations. If users had to fork out even $10 for Windows 10, and the “price” wasn’t bundled into their hardware purchase, the system’s market share among home, business and enterprise users would plummet. Those who really, really needed Windows would pay, but the system — and Microsoft’s desktop OS business — would bleed users, mindshare and relevance.

(While I’m on this Microsoft tangent, I will point out that the company does offer a Windows Server product and doesn’t appear to give it away for free. Maybe Red Hat is taking notes.)

When Red Hat made its “ending CentOS as we know it” announcement, it said there would be new opportunities to run RHEL for low and no cost. But those plans would be revealed later. It’s not a good idea to pull the rug out from under users — even if they’re paying nothing — and promise them something in the indeterminate future. It doesn’t add to the trust.

Here’s the deal. As I say above, for desktop users, CentOS Stream won’t just be fine, it’ll be better than the “old” CentOS. Stream will unfold comfortably within the confines of a RHEL/CentOS release. It won’t be “slow” Fedora. It will be much slower.

We don’t know how Stream will work on servers. There are so many different server workloads and use cases. For some of them, Stream will be great, for others it will be not so great.

What Red Hat isn’t talking about, but what’s happening as we speak, is the formation of new projects that aim to provide the “old” CentOS/Scientific Linux experience, taking the RHEL source and producing a downstream “clone” of the distribution.

Unless Red Hat goes to extremes to prevent it — and there are no indications that it will, the source code for RHEL will be in good enough shape for the clone projects to do their work.

And CentOS Stream will have competitors in the form of new RHEL clones.

Red Hat won’t control those clones. It won’t have to pay for them, either. We all have to assume that Red Hat is OK with that. I’m 100% sure they didn’t think ending CentOS meant an end to all RHEL downstream clones.

Even if they’re not based on RHEL, there are other Linux distributions capable of securely handling whatever server workload you throw at them. The scientific community, the high performance computing community, academic departments, corporations and companies — everybody could switch to Debian or Ubuntu. Life and computing will go on.

At this point, Red Hat’s move carries a lot of risk with an uncertain reward. Making people unhappy almost never helps your cause.

Linux users, academics and enterprises will survive. They’ll figure this out.

For Red Hat, it’s a gutsy move, and I have no idea how it’s going to go.

¹ABI stands for Application Binary Interface I had to look that one up.

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How this Debian Stable user ended up with Google Chrome from Google’s repository

It’s been a long time since I ran the “real” Google Chrome in Linux.

(Update: A new Chromium browser moved into Debian Stable on Jan. 1, 2021. The original post follows.)

I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled — was very out of date in the Debian Stable repository.

But I didn’t know how bad it was until I started digging. Digging is easy in Debian.

While the rest of the web-browsing world was on version 87, Debian users are stuck with version 83. And that version 83 hasn’t been patched or otherwise updated since July 12. That’s more than six months at this point.

Whenever something’s not right with a Debian package, the place to turn is the bug reports.

There have been problems. Chromium is notoriously hard to package. There are unresolved issues with dependencies. Plus packaging of Chromium for Debian appears to be the responsibility of a one-man army. I’m not even sure if this guy Michael is the maintainer of the package. It doesn’t look like he is. Others are trying to help, but Debian Stable is old, and Chromium needs some other, newer packages in order to run.

It has gotten so bad that Chromium was removed from the Testing repository that is slated to become the next Debian release sometime next year. That could be bad news if the situation isn’t resolved before the “freeze” of Testing in anticipation of Debian 11/Bullseye.

Debian has always done a great job with Firefox. It ships with Debian desktop ISOs, and it is a priority for Debian Developers. Chromium, with its Googly origins, is not.

But many of us need Chromium/Chrome. It’s the IE of the 2020s, and sometimes Firefox doesn’t quite cut it. Like it or not, Google services run better on Chrome. And I use a lot of Google services in my day job. For my non-work browsing, I use Firefox, but when I’m snatching chocolates off the belt and putting them in boxes, it’s all Chromium.

I have Flatpak enabled on my Debian Stable/Buster system, and I thought that might solve my problem. There is a Chromium Flatpak. There is also Ungoogled Chromium, which I just learned exists.

Neither of these Flatpaks would install. The error message said my version of the flatpak package is too old. Debian’s Buster Backports repository has a newer version of flatpak, and I’m already set up for Backports, so I got the new flatpak package.

Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium still wouldn’t install from Flathub.

There were error messages, but I really don’t care about them, so I didn’t write down what they said.

I just need to get this system working with a Chromium web browser that HAS ACTUALLY RECEIVED A SECURITY PATCH IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS.

This is a huge problem.

In many ways, the idea of a never-changing Stable operating system and a constantly changing web browser doesn’t make sense. That’s why Debian ships Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) instead of “regular” Firefox.

So what did I do about Chromium?

I used the nuclear option. Or in this case the tactical nuclear option. The nuclear option is wiping Debian Stable and installing a Linux distribution that includes an up-to-date Chromium and is committed to keeping it that way.

The tactical nuclear option — for me anyway — is downloading the .deb of Chrome from Google and using dpkg to install it, knowing that the package adds the Google Chrome repository to my sources.list, and now Google is in charge of updating the browser for me.

I’m already logging into Google to sync my bookmarks and other settings, in addition to being logged into Google Apps, so insisting I have Chromium instead of Chrome is nowhere near a hill I need to die on.

I just need a working, secure Chrome/Chromium browser. And now I have one.

I considered moving to Fedora — or even the dreaded CentOS Stream (another topic for another day) — so I could get the up-to-date Chromium that the Fedora Project packages for its own distro as well as the RHEL/CentOS EPEL repo.

(There was a time in the mid-level distant past when Chromium was a problem for Fedora as well. But the distro seems to have it under control now.)

I could also move to Ubuntu, where that distro’s decision to only offer Chromium as a Snap package has been controversial. The decision on Ubuntu’s part was a labor issue. It’s so hard to package Chromium that they can do it once for the Snap and use that on all their Snap-enabled releases.

I could even try Snap in Debian Stable, but how much do I have to do to get a secure version of what for many people is their most important, most used app?

Sometimes things are broken in Debian. Literally it could be a package that doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s philosophical: Is it The Debian Way? That often combines with developer attention or interest — and the lack thereof — to leave a gaping hole in the distro.

For instance, it’s hard to get a working IDE in Debian. That’s why I turned to Flatpak in the first place. It’s the easiest (to me) way to get NetBeans, IntelliJ and Eclipse. Yep, even Eclipse fell out of the Debian repo.

Another think I’ve learned over the past year or so is that while alternative packaging systems like Flathub, Snap and AppImage have their place in the Linux ecosystem, it’s hard to beat traditional Linux packaging (.deb and .rpm).

I have spent a few long periods of time running Debian Stable, just as I have Fedora. Those are the two distros I’ve run the most. They couldn’t be on more opposite ends of the spectrum. Debian stays the same throughout the release, and Fedora changes all the time. You always run into problems in both cases. Not too many problems. I always say there’s about one mid-level problem per year in both distros.

For my time running Debian 10, Chromium is my problem. At least I’ve been able to solve it. You may not agree with using Google’s Chrome repo, but it gets the job done. If I didn’t use any Google services, that would be one thing, but since I use many, this makes the most sense for me right now.

When I finally get around to buying a bigger NVMe SSD drive and reinstalling my operating system, this situation will factor into my choice of Linux distribution. No question about that.

Update: As of Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020, a new Chromium (version 87) is now in Debian Sid/Unstable.

Update: That new Chromium version moved into Stable on Jan. 1, 2021.

Update: The same thing, sort of, happened to me in Debian 11 in late 2022. Now that the Chromium developers (OK, really just Google) have removed the ability to sync bookmarks from the open-source version of the browser, I moved in 2022 to Vivaldi, which is an “enhanced” browser built on Chromium that has a lot of user-focused features added — and which allows bookmark sync.

Anyhow, sometimes Vivaldi doesn’t perform too well. It freezes. Menus won’t open. But usually it’s OK.

I finally installed Chrome from the Flathub Flatpak, and that’s what I’m using now about half the time in Debian 11 (Stable) in early 2023. Today I do have Vivaldi running, but I tend to go back and forth.

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TLDR is what Linux man pages always should have been

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/24/tldr-linux-man-pages-always/

TLDR pages – man pages for humans

I can’t say enough how much I like this. http://tldr.sh Check out the PDF: http://tldr.sh/assets/tldr-book.pdf

I already saw more than a few commands that I’ve never used but could definitely benefit from. The whole thing is pulling me closer to returning to Linux/BSD.

He tries Linux, doesn’t like it

https://medium.com/@ahawkins/my-failed-attempt-switching-to-linux-daf6c52a5147

exa – A modern replacement for ls

https://the.exa.website/?imm_mid=0f54a8&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20170805#installation

Why Evolution should be the default Linux email client – TechRepublic

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-evolution-should-be-the-default-linux-email-client/

Fedora 26 is coming: Here’s what you need to know

http://www.zdnet.com/article/fedora-26-is-coming-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Latest on the Windows Subsystem for Linux from InfoWorld

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3204592/linux/get-started-with-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux.html