A fun frontier/sailing adventure in a throwback sort of way, but nothing really special. Sort of a mashup of Moby Dickā¦IN SPAAAACE with everyone based out of a corrupt frontier town. The title refers to the planetās slow rotation, only four day/night cycles in a year, which makes the surface uninhabitable during the long, boiling days and freezing nights.
Characters include the scrappy teen reporter, the town drunk with suspiciously good reflexes, the corrupt union boss colluding with the corrupt corporate representative, rugged sea captains, and the school principal who figures if he can handle a bunch of kids, he can handle an unruly mob.
It appears to be set in the same universe as Little Fuzzy, but itās more interested in telling an adventure than asking big questions. Which is fine ā I probably would have liked it a lot more at, say, 10 or 12.
The concept is really interesting: Our world has no magic because itās the last stop in a series of realities, each of which has less magic than the next one up (and yes, itās a series of shadows, like Roger Zelaznyās Amber). The higher and farther away, the purer the stories and stronger the magic. And theyāve all been cursed. In most of them, adults have been taken out of the picture one way or another, leaving only teenagers and children to pick up the piecesā¦sometimes disastrously.
The main characters are interesting too: Aster is a refugee from the more magical realms, living in our world and trying to get back on a quest. She puts Errolās consciousness in a wooden body while heās in a coma, coming to grips with his suicide attempt. Veronica is the kind of ghost who sparks urban legends, brought back somewhere between life and death. They all grow over the course of the series, and they all read as teenagers (including the kinds of mistakes they make!)
Butā¦
The editing is bad, especially by the third book, which is extremely disjointed. The resolution comes completely out of nowhere, despite having three whole books to set it up. A current of misogyny runs through the first two books, with a constant threat of sexual violence by the villains hanging over everything, which is made worse by the fact that almost everyone is a teenager. That dissipates by the third book, but it makes parts of the others really unpleasant to read.
I picked them all up at once, knowing only that an author I used to keep up with had written a bunch of books that Iād missed. If Iād been reading them one at a time, as they came out, I donāt think I would have finished. And I rarely leave books unfinished. I really hope the other two books of his that I bought at the same time are better than these.
Iād absolutely recommend the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone quadrilogy, Age of Unreason, or The Waterborn and The Blackgod. But not this one.
Iāve found Falkon to be a good balance of features and light weight for low-end hardware like the PineTab2 and virtual machines running Linux. Itās more capable (and compatible!) than NetSurf or Dillo, and faster than Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi or Angelfish. It also runs well under LXQT, which I like to use on that low-spec (and virtual) hardware for the same reason.
It does all the basics you expect of a modern browser, and because itās built on Chromium (via QtWebEngine), itās less likely to run into actual incompatibilities than sites that think theyāre incompatible.
You can send a page from your phone to your desktop using KDE Connect (which despite its name can also run on Gnome and other desktops), and if Falkon is your default browser, itāll pick it up. I havenāt found a good way to send tabs from Falkon to a phone, though.
Problems and Workarounds
It doesnāt run Chromium extensions (or Firefox add-ons for that matter), and there are only a few dozen Falkon extensions at this time.
Thereās no way to connect directly to an external password manager like KeePassXC (or Bitwarden, as OSNewsā article points out). Iāve worked around this by using KeePassXCās auto-type feature. Itās more cumbersome than auto-detecting in the browser, but still faster than copying and pasting ā and much faster than typing manually.
Bookmarklets (JavaScript bookmarks) arenāt allowed to open new windows by default, which is actually a sensible decision. Thereās a preference to allow JavaScript to open pop-up windows, which makes things like my Postmarks bookmarklet actually, yāknow, work:
Preferences ā Privacy-General ā JavaScript Options ā Open popup windows
Thereās no bookmark sync capability, even using extensions. For now Iāve just put the main links for my Nextcloud Bookmarks and Postmarks instances in the toolbar and using them directly, but it would be nice to be able to use the built-in UI. Iāve been contemplating hacking together a script to download from Nextcloud and update the bookmarks file as a one-way sync, but havenāt gotten around to it.
It canāt install PWAs (portable web applications). Then again, neither can desktop versions of Firefox.
But I can log into Dropbox or Nextcloud (they complain, but let me use it anyway) or any webmail client and it does what I need it to in a reasonable amount of time!
Flatpak Issues
When installed through Flatpak, launchers get confused if Falkon is already running: It opens a new instance of the program, complete with all the windows and tabs you had open the last time you closed it, in addition to the one still running.
On XFCE specifically, I also have trouble setting Falkon as the default browser if itās been installed through Flatpak: It doesnāt show up in the list of applications for setting a default web browser, so you have to manually add the full flatpak run org.kde.falkon "%s" command as a custom browser. Adding that makes it work as the default browser for opening links, but the āWeb Browserā launcher wonāt run it.
Haiku
Falkon also runs on Haiku, an alternative operating system inspired by the late, lamented BeOS. The version in Haiku Depot is a bit out of date, and Iāve only experimented a little with the OS as a whole, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to handle more websites than WebPositive (Haikuās native web browser), but itās not quite as stable. Or as stable as Falkon itself on Linux. A few sites just donāt show text. But it mostly works, and I can imagine alternating between the two as needed if I spent more time in Haiku!
Availability on Linux
Fedora and Arch packages seem to be kept reasonably up to date (no surprise), and you donāt have to install too much of KDE if youāre running it on another desktop. Debian stable lags behind (also no surprise), but the current Flatpak runs just fine (thereās also a Snap) unless I try to open way too many tabs. All packages are available for both x86_64 and aarch64, which why itās even possible for me to run it on my ARM-based Pine tablet!
Iāve been using Vivaldi as my main web browser lately, after several years using Firefox as my primary and Vivaldi as an alternate when something didnāt work.
Vivaldi comes from the small-tech side of things (the company is employee-owned, with no outside investors) and was co-founded by Jon von Tetzchner, one of Operaās co-founders. Itās basically what Opera would have been today if theyād kept their focus on making a good browser that works for the person using it instead of working to squeeze out more profit for the conglomerate that owns the company.
What About the Software?
Itās a power-user ultra-customizable internet suite including web, mail and news, built on the same āBlinkā engine as Chrome and other Chromium browsers.
Downsides:
The engine still depends on the Google-defined monoculture.
Vivaldiās own code isnāt capital-F Free Software.
Upsides:
Youāre a lot less likely to run into a page that doesnāt work than you are with Firefox.
āTopicsā was actually the last straw for me, and I uninstalled Chrome everywhere I could. (Sadly, I still have one site that I have to use semi-regularly that wonāt work in Vivaldi or Firefox, only in Chrome.)
Vivaldi is available on every platform I use regularly between work and home, including macOS, Linux, Windows and Android (plus iOS), and runs natively on both x86_64 and ARM. Yes, on Windows and Linux too (Google still doesnāt offer aarch64 packages for Linux as of February 2025!). For Linux they provide DEB, RPM, Flatpak, and Snap packages for both architectures.
Recommended Extensions
KeePassXC-Browser autofills from KeePass when you have a vault open.
The Android app is noticeably faster than Firefox on my phone, and has most of the features of the desktop version. It also supports more capabilities for PWAs (installable web applications). The main thing I miss from Firefox is that Vivaldiās mobile app doesnāt support extensions.
The only real problem Iāve run into is that the browserās autofill sometimes crowds out the autofill from KeePass2Android (and possibly other password managers). I worked around it once by switching to KP2Aās keyboard, then deleted the one password I had saved in Vivaldi, but it does the same thing with saved addresses. Sometimes.
Sync
Every browser has a sync service these days. I only recently started using Vivaldi Link, and I turned off bookmark syncing because Iām using Floccus to sync bookmarks across Vivaldi and Firefox. The nice thing about Vivaldiās is that you set a second password on your local devices for encrypting your data before it even gets sent to their servers, so Vivaldi couldnāt sell your sync data or use it to train AI even if they wanted to!
It took me a while before I noticed that the mobile version does have a āSend to devicesā option, itās just in the smaller, text-based list above the icons in the Share action, and the list of devices you can send to is behind that button. (Firefox shows a set of icons, one for each device, so itās easier to spot.) You can also get a drop-down list of open tabs on other devices from the cloud icon in the tab bar.
Beyond Web Pages
Vivaldi has continued to maintain an actual internet suite, including mail, calendar, and newsfeeds (RSS/Atom). I havenāt used these as much as I have used the web browser, though.
Notes: Sync seamlessly between the sidebar on desktop and their own screen on mobile.
Feeds: Even if you donāt have the full suite enabled, itāll show a human-readable version of feeds you might click on. If you do, you get a familiar feed reader app similar to NetNewsWire or Liferea.
Mail: Works with any IMAP or POP server, including Gmail. Handles multiple accounts, lets you work with combined inboxesā¦and combined folders, which can get confusing sometimes. Iāve found I like Vivaldiās mail client for a pass through new messages, but I still prefer Thunderbird overall, especially for organizing my archives.
Calendars/Tasks: Syncs with Vivaldi, Google, Apple, and standard CalDAV servers so it works with Nextcloud.
Contacts: Only syncs with a Vivaldi account, so itās a non-starter as far as my Nextcloud setup goes.
Online Community / Services
Vivaldi.net started out as a new home for the Opera community (as in the people who used it) when the company shut down the Opera Community (as in the hosted blogs, forums, and other services) back in 2014. It wasnāt until later, shortly before Opera (the company) broke up, that Vivaldi launched their own browser. Because of this, they still have some services you might not expect a browser company to provide:
Forums for users to talk about Vivaldi and random stuff, and to interact with developers. This is where youād make a feature request or report a bug, or share tips with other Vivaldi users.
Blogs: Just general blog hosting, like Operaās used to be! Runs on multi-site WordPress (the software) with plugins including The SEO Framework, ActivityPub (Fediverse compatibility), Akismet (spam filtering), and the Classic Editor for those of us who [prefer it over blocks]/software/wordpress-block-editor/.
Webmail (yes, webmail!): To cut down on spam and abuse they wait until youāve been active on your account for a while before giving you access to webmail. It runs on Roundcube, the same software DreamHost uses. Itās got a good set of features and runs well, plus you can also connect to the account with any IMAP mail client (including Vivaldi, of course!)
Vivaldi.Social: A social network site running Mastodon, which interacts with the rest of the Fediverse. Easy to set up and access in the sidebar, making it a good way to check out Mastodon if youāre curious.
A very lightweight social networking server, with a very clean web interface for viewing public posts. Compatible with Mastodon apps and interacts well with Mastodon and other major ActivityPub platforms on the Fediverse.
You can run it as a semi-private server, so your group can interact locally without the posts leaking, and still share public posts with followers on Mastodon etc. And theyāve been building in safety features like local-only posts, controls on who can reply, and so on.
Itās server-only, though. You can manage settings and your profile on the website, and others can view public posts, but all the interaction has to be done through an app like Elk (what Iām currently using on desktops), Ivory (on iOS), or Tusky (my preferred app on Android).
Hosting
Itās not meant for handling zillions of users. GoToSocial is more for setting up a server for your group or family or friends (or even just yourself) on a spare Raspberry Pi or cheap VPS host. Itās not as small as Snac (which is incredibly tiny!), but Iāve got GTS running quite well on a 1GB Linode.
Admin is a lot simpler than Mastodon. It can be a single binary or a single container, and just uses SQLite instead of running a full DB in a separate container. Iām running it on a 1GB Linode and havenāt had to add storage or (the website)RAM.
Basically the only sysadmin stuff Iāve done aside from setup in two years has been installing updates, which has just been incrementing the version number in docker-compose.
Beta and Compatibility
Interoperability is a lot better now than it was when I started testing it, and these days it interacts well with varieties of Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Snac, WordPress, etc. Bridgy Fed works with it now, and Iām able to follow Bluesky accounts (and vice versa). Postmarks patched its compatibility with the broader Fediverse, and works with GTS now. Threads* still wonāt talk to GTS, and I still have trouble getting GTS and Lemmy to interact fully.
Post editing is finally available in version 0.18 (though 0.17 does pick up incoming edits). And thereās a utility to import your old posts from another site, something that even Mastodon still doesnāt have!
Right now itās still in beta. Some of the more noticeable features that havenāt been built yet:
link previews
search posts (except your own)
auto-delete (which I could probably hack together as a database script)
But it already handles most of what I need, and Iāve been using a personal server as my primary Fediverse presence since early 2024.