Iâve mostly used Arch Linux on my PineTab 2, and occasionally in virtual machines for tinkering. What Iâve found is that once itâs installed itâs generally fine! The biggest issue I have with it is remembering the options for pacman instead of apk or apt or dnf, and thatâs only because I use a lot of different Linux distributions on a regular basis! But I donât like the throwback to the old days of setting up a system by hand. Even Alpine has a better installation process.
Since itâs a rolling distribution, included software tends to get updated faster than Fedora or Debian. It has a smaller selection, but between Flatpak and AUR thatâs less of an issue than it could have been. I havenât seen updates break the system, so thereâs clearly some process to keep things stable-ish upstream. The AUR pseudo-packages are sort of like RPM spec files. You do need enough technical know-how to install the dev tools and run the package builder from the command line.
The main Arch project is only built for x86_64, with no official ARM version, but Iâve been quite happy with with the Danctnix distribution for Pine64 devices. Not only is it quick to update its aarch64 branch from the upstream project, itâs also quick to include things like driver updates for Pine64 hardware (which has been kind of important since the device shipped before all the drivers were finished).
All that said, I wouldnât recommend it for a novice, unless the novice wanted to use it as a learning experience. I would recommend the Arch wiki, which has helped me many times!
There have been times when itâs been the best web browser on Windows or Linux, and itâs still good on both (and macOS). Iâve used it as my primary web browser off and on for years. Itâs stable! It runs almost everywhere! Itâs built into most Linux distributions! Itâs got a great extension ecosystem, and unlike Chrome, Mozilla is continuing to support older extensions.
Unfortunately weâre in another period of near-monopoly in web browser engines. A lot of developers only test with Chromium browsers, like they only tested with Internet Explorer way back when â so there are websites that donât work right, or donât work at all. This is not Firefoxâs fault, but it is a problem.
I used Firefox for Android as the main web browser on my phone for several years (up through 2024).
Pros:
Works just fine! (most of the time)
Can run Portable Web Apps (PWAs)
Can run extensions!
Share button targets include other Firefox devices youâre synced with
Doesnât phone home to Google
Cons:
Noticeably slower than Chrome or Vivaldi
May phone home to Mozilla
PWAs are clunky, and donât support as many features as they do when installed through a Chromium browser.
I used to run PWAs in Chrome or Vivaldi even when I was using Firefox as my primary browser, just for the speed boost.
Sync
Syncing bookmarks, settings and history across multiple Firefox browsers is easy to set up. I turned off the bookmarks part in favor of using Floccus to sync with Vivaldi and other browsers. But when I was using Firefox on my phone, it was super-easy to send the page I was looking at over to my desktop or tablet. Your other Firefox devices just show up when you hit the share button.
In theory you can run your own sync server, which IâŠmight get around to trying out sometime? Maybe?
Pocket has been useful for read-it-later and read-it-offline scenarios, and sometimes for discovering interesting articles. Iâve actually been using it since before Mozilla bought it, all the way back to when it was called Read It Later. I used to find articles while at work, save them to Pocket, then take my tablet with me to read them at lunch even if there was no wi-fi connection where I went.
Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is a fantastic reference for web development, and I highly recommend using it instead of, say, W3Schools.
Fakespot is an interesting idea (detect bogus reviews and misleading store listings), but didnât impress me when I tried it out a while back.
I havenât used Relay (disposable email addresses) or their VPN, or their data breach monitor service, so I canât really speak to how well they work.
And of course maintaining their own rendering engine (Gecko) is an important bulwark against one company having too much influence over web technology. Firefoxâs success in the mid-2000s arguably helped convince Microsoft to start improving Internet Explorer again after years of stagnation. Since Opera and Microsoft switched to Chromium in the 2010s, Gecko is the only major engine that isnât controlled by Google (Chromium/Blink) or Apple (WebKit), making that role even more important.
Mozillaâs main source of income is a deal to use Google Search as the default in Firefox. This is precarious, to say the least. Itâs also been cited as monopolist behavior on the part of Google, and the US Department of Justice recommended blocking itâŠwhich ironically would cement Googleâs dominance in browsers.
As with Chrome, trust is easy to lose and hard to rebuild. Up to this point Mozillaâs flailing hasnât made Firefox appreciably worse yet, but itâs likely slowed down making it better. Iâd rather have feed detection back than an AI chatbot built into my browser.
I want Mozilla to succeed again. I want Firefox to keep getting better. But Iâm concerned about the direction itâs going.
There was a time when Chrome was the fastest web browser available, especially cross-platform, and I used it as my main browser on Linux, Windows and macOS for most of the 2010s. But it gradually got more complicated, cluttered and slower. And since 2020 or so, itâs felt less like a user agent and more like a Google agent.
I switched back to Firefox a few years ago when Mozilla made some massive strides in performance, but kept Chrome as my alternate browser for websites that just wonât work right (or refuse to run) in Firefox.
The final straws:
Planning to replace third-party cookie tracking by having the browser track you itself, which is both a breach of trust and will give Googleâs own ad network an advantage.
Google, an advertising company, making changes to its extension scheme that conveniently make it a lot more difficult to run ad blockers and privacy extensions.*
Itâs clear that the people trying to make a good web browser are no longer the ones calling the shots: the advertising execs are. (Youâve probably noticed this happening with search too.)
Trust is easy to lose, and hard to rebuild. I uninstalled Chrome from everything except test environments and replaced it with Vivaldi, which has worked out great.
Yes, even my Android devices. Unfortunately thereâs one website that I have to use that wonât work right in Vivaldi or Firefox, and I have to keep Chrome available on one device for that. Otherwise Iâd flat-out disable it.
The Opera web browser, as it exists today, just doesnât appeal to me. Itâs one of many Chromium-based browsers, and there isnât a whole lot to distinguish it from the crowd. The things that set it apart most are things that I donât want or need:
I donât need my browser to be tied into cryptocurrencies.
I donât need it to be tied into messenger apps that I donât use.
I donât need a VPN built into my browser as an afterthought when most websites use HTTPS these days and Iâd rather use something where privacy is their whole deal (and besides, if I really need privacy, Iâd be better off with something like Tor anyway).
I donât need a special browser âfor gamersâ instead of having, you know, settings.
About the only feature theyâve added since 2013 that I want that isnât available in Vivaldi or Firefox is built-in IPFS support, and even thatâs tied into the whole cryptocurrency thing. (And I can use an add-on with those browsers when I want to mess around with IPFS.)
The company is also just one part of an international conglomerate, which can go one of two ways: either the parent company sees youâre making money and leaves you alone until they donât, or they want to squeeze out every last drop of money they can without regard to what makes your particular business niche work (or not). In my opinion Opera had already reached that point by the time they were bought in 2016 â and long before they got involved in things like predatory loan apps in Africa) that will spam all your contacts (including your boss and your in-laws) to embarrass you if you donât pay back on time. And that wasnât even the parent company: it was subsidiaries of Opera.
Opera wasnât always like that.
It Used To Be Good
These would be my ratings for Opera at different times since I first used it:
Before 2000:
â â â â â
Super-fast!
2000-2005:
â â â ââ
Slow and clunky.
2005-2013:
â â â â â
Fast again, lots of cool features and innovations!
2013-present:
â â âââ
Nothing stands out, and I don't trust the company anymore.
The original Norwegian company has been around since the early days of the web. I bought (yes, bought) my first copy for $18 with a student discount â it fit on a floppy disk, back when that mattered â after a classmate showed me how fast it was compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer. It got really cluttered and slow in the early 2000s, but by 2005 it was streamlined and fast again.
Innovation
Opera was the scrappy underdog in the âbrowser wars,â pioneering innovations that caught on â like Speed Dial (2007), or bookmark syncing (not sure when), or using JavaScript to patch high-profile websites that donât quite work (2005) â and others that didnât, but were fascinating experiments.
My favorite of those was Opera Unite (2009), which built peer-to-peer features so you could set up a simple website or photo gallery, share files with your friends, have your own chat room or collaborate real-time, etc. without having to get into the technical details or hosting, and without relying on a central server.
Thatâs right: Opera tried to decentralize the web before it was cool!
Unfortunately, because it wasnât cool yet, Opera Unite was removed just a couple of major versions later in 2012.
Mobility
They also got into the mobile web early on, with both a version for what passed for smartphones at the time, and a Java version, Opera Mini, that could run on higher-end âregularâ cell phones. Seriously, I used it on a flip phone with actual buttons.
sigh Yes, it was a Motorola RAZR, thank you for asking.
At a time when sites were making alternate, stripped down mobile versions of their websites that might have a chance of actually loading over an edge cellular network (2G if you were lucky) at speeds so slow youâd otherwise throw your hands up in frustration trying to access todayâs typical websites, then realize youâd accidentally thrown your phone away and decide to leave it and go live in a cabin in the woods instead, Opera was promoting the idea that there should only be one web, and sites should adapt to the device and browser you use.
Opera Mobile and Opera Mini used a proxy to compress the sites you visited. Downside: your browsing passed through the proxy. Upside: you could actually get the page to download onto your phone. They later (2009) adapted this proxy into an optional Turbo mode that did the same for the desktop.
Bucking Trends
Opera kept the email and news (and later calendar) components in the application long past the point when other âbrowser suitesâ had separated them out, which was nice, but not a huge deal for me.
They kept a paid (with free trial) business model for years â the one where youâre the customer, not the ad network or whoever â until it became clear that you just couldnât get people to buy a web browser anymore.
Before going totally free/gratis, they tried free-with-ads / paid-without-ads for a while, which was annoying, but not as annoying as the ones on the websites themselves.
Blocking Monoculture
Going into techie/nerd mode for this section. I was really into promoting web standards and interoperability for a while, and I still see the software landscape through that lens.
Because Opera also developed their own web rendering engine, it served as a critical check against a monoculture in which one primary rendering engine, controlled by one company, could have outsized influence on the future of web technology. And outsized influence on the bugs in web technology.
To pick a recent example: an Ars Technica article on a 2023 security vulnerability in libwebp, a software library widely used to display WebP images, noted that âThe number of affected software packages is too large to check all of them.â (emphasis added)
Back then we were worried about Microsoft and Internet Explorer. IE had stagnated as soon as it won the âBrowser Warsâ and only started catching up again when enough people were using Firefox to make them worry. For a while there we had Microsoft/IE (Trident, later Edge), Mozilla/Firefox (Gecko), Apple/Safari (WebKit) Google/Chrome (also WebKit) and Opera (Presto) all with a seat at the table.
Remember the bad old days when people just wrote for Internet Explorer, and there was basically no innovation in web browser capabilities? It took Firefoxâs success to turn the tide, but Opera was there, needling the industry with things like the âBork editionâ which turned the tables on browser-sniffing websites. Opera was a constant reminder that no, the web isnât just Internet Explorer and Firefox, or just Internet Explorer and Webkit, or just two flavors of WebKit. That it was worth building technologies to leverage cross-browser web standards instead of picking the current 800-pound gorilla and feeding it even more.
By 2018, Microsoft threw in the towel too, and now almost everything runs on WebKit (iOS & macOS) or Chromium (everywhere else). Firefox is still around, but its user share is drastically low, and Mozilla seems to be flailing around trying to find any way to make money except improving the browser. Google can dominate the direction of web tech, and itâs clearly not the browser team at Google thatâs in charge.
Finally: Vivaldi
Vivaldi.net was created by one of Operaâs co-founders (who had already left the company) as a new online home for the people who had come to rely on the My Opera community forums, blogs, and other services. Around the time Opera broke up, Vivaldi launched a browser focusing on power users and customizability. Both browsers are still around, but I trust Vivaldi more, which is why I picked it to replace ChromeâŠand currently use it as my main browser.
âYouâve played for 985 hours. Would you recommend this game to other players?â
Um, yeah, I guess so?
Seriously, Though
I picked up No Manâs Sky in spring 2021, long after the disastrous launch, and with several years of improvements to the game. By the time I got around to it, it was really good! (It also overheated my CPU the first time I played. I eventually discovered the heat sink was completely clogged with dust.)
The graphics are amazing. Gameplay switches smoothly between spaceflight, walking and ground vehicles, and between solo and multi-player scenarios. The story isâŠkinda loose. Itâs not so much âstoryâ as it is a collection of lore, which you uncover through the main missions and random exploration.
I soon realized that what I like about No Manâs Sky is that it combines aspects of Minecraft (which I played a lot of during the late 2010s and into 2020) and Wing Commander: Privateer (which I played a LOT of back in the 1990s). Both open-ended, self-directed sandboxes. Like Minecraft, you seek out resources and build equipment and bases. Like Privateer, you fly through space and do different types of missions depending on what you feel like that day.
And the many references to classic works of science-fiction certainly donât hurt!
Updates and Expeditions
Theyâve continued adding to the game, and several times a year theyâll release a major update and run a time-limited expedition focusing on the new/updated elements. Expeditions often force different styles of gameplay, and then convert to a normal game when you finish it (or when the event ends).
In one, you couldnât travel between systems using your ship, but had to rely on portals instead.
In another, you couldnât set up planet-side bases until the end of the expedition, but you could buy a freighter.
For a horror-themed one this past Halloween, you had to actively maintain your characterâs sanity, while occasionally letting yourself slip out of reality enough to interact with the cosmic horrors, but not enough for them to kill you. It was really interesting, but hard to keep up with.
So Iâve got my original game save thatâs been continually updated (with the occasional glitch and one really painful bug), that Iâve been playing on and off for almost 4 years, and other saves that started out with various expeditions.
Cosmic Similarity
The universe of No Manâs Sky is practically infinite, with planets, space stations, system economies, plants, animals and minerals, and of course Sentinels â lots and lots of Sentinels â generated procedurally as players visit them. But each planet is a single biome (like Star Wars), space stations all have the same floorplan per type, same for crashed freighters, and so forth.
After a while you stop noticing the differences between two cold planets, or two radioactive planets. So the maps are different and the plants and animals look different â theyâre both cold, and the both have frost crystals. A high-toxin world and a high-temperature world donât really differ except in which resource you use to recharge your shielding and which resources you find. Itâs no longer as fun to fully explore star systems you pass through.
A lot of the gameplay is the same thing youâve done before, just dressed up differently and with better equipment or more inventory slots.
And yet here I am almost four years later, still firing up the game several times a month, salvaging derelicts, upgrading my ships and freighter, fighting pirates, smuggling, trading, building bases, mining, farmingâŠand yes, exploring.
