Tio

@uninvitedguest Unfortunately…

@eddie_of_ny MagicEarth is superior from my tests. Better in all regards in terms of navigation: from the UI to the maps, voices, detection of radar, heads up when you speed up too much. Overall I managed to switch to it after so many years of being unable to find a Google Maps alternative. But truth is if you want to find an exact place to go, and then maybe parking and what not, google maps is still far superior. Has a lot of info about a lot of places. But in terms of navigation MagicEarth is superior in my view.

@smallaubergine @squid

https://searx.neocities.org/ most search engines get recognized in Firefox. Simply visit the link then right click the url and you should see a menu entry like: Add Searx as your search engine.

@sic_semper_tyrannis Oh nice! I’ll have a deeper look. Thx

@TheDarkBanana87 As far as I know they have been bought by an ad-company en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpag… - but SearX supports Startpage too. Just without the BS. I cannot trust any company honestly. They are incentivized to kinda lie and exaggerate. And search engines ran by companies…are terrible. If their business model is to sell you ads, they will track you one way or another, and if not today, they will do it next year.

@squid

Searx does not share users’ IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results.

- read more here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx and see the source code here github.com/searxng/searxng

@squid I use it daily. We ran an instance too. It is simply great. As good as Google, DDG, and the like are, since it is using them.

@squid True…Harder now to add a custom search engine unless you visit it and then click the url on top to get a dropdown to add it…but manually adding it is hard.

Speaking of search engines I highly recommend searx.neocities.org/ - it randomly uses the best Searx instances. No ads, no tracking…

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@dustyData I have hundreds of thousands of files that need to be backed up locally and in the cloud. I use either Vorta or Pika. Both are interfaces for Borg. Easy to use and their deduplication feature manages to save a lot of diskspace. I tried so many backup solutions and none worked as reliably.

@shapis I agree. I used Gnome for several years before switching to XFCE. Gnome feels like a great DE for people who do not do a lot of things on their computers. I normally have 5 or so workspaces and on each a dozen of apps open. Some apps are workspace-specific, some are available on all workspaces. You are right, multitasking when you do so much is a pain in Gnome. And I really really tried to like it.

Not to mention that you need a lot of extensions to make it useful.

Gnome does great in terms of animations and overall look, but not very practical and feels very non-customizable.

XFCE looks awful out of the box and the lack of animations is quite annoying. But you can make it look good - see our custom distro based on XFCE - TROMjaro. And if you give XFCE a try you will realize how sane it is. You can customize it a ton without being overwhelmed by thousands of options. You right click on panels and apps and you get sane options to move or tweak them.

As for workspaces I personally use them as “names” on the top bar and can switch between workspaces so fast, almost like tabs in a browser.

Not as fancy as Gnome, but boy this is really useful. And practical.

I’ve also added mouse gestures on my desktop via Easystroke so I can move windows on any workspace via these gestures. So easy.

So I’d say that Gnome looks fancy, and it is very cool for those who do not do a lot of work on their machines and have to switch between many work spaces and lots of apps. And I’d say XFCE is extremely underrated, perhaps because out of the box it looks terrible. Maybe try TROMjaro…see how it goes.

@BobIsMyManager @Ephera Probably should be better than this, but for sure an instance needs to be very open about this practice.

@BobIsMyManager @Ephera Yes this is a decent start and I wonder too if it is automated. It should. Plus, if there is a new block, should create a notification for all users by default I would say.

@Ephera But my point is that this practice is harmful for the fediverse as a whole. Non transparent, decided for thousands of users, shallow decisions in many instances. To move from one federated platform to another is not as easy as you make it sound. I know, I have done that and I also manage a few instances. So this is a non-solution.

The solution is to, for one, make all instance-level blocking of users or other instances transparent and notify all users when any future such decision is taken. And second, try not to panic. It is fine. Words, no swords, we are dealing with. Users have a lot of control over that they see. Teach them to exercise that. This is a far better approach.

@Ephera People keep on saying that…same with those who keep on saying: if you do not like google, use bing. Don’t like Facebook? Use Twitter. And they are blind to the point that’s being made.

@poliverso Yeah I wish there were better tools for the admin…I get you. And thank you for the nice words!

@poliverso I see…we have over 600 and over 50 accounts that auto-post from RSS sources…I didn’t seem to get any heads-up as if we were spamming…but well that’s gone now anyway…

@poliverso Yeah but I think admins should chill a bit. Else they will ruin the fediverse. How many users you have?

@poliverso This is why the admins should stop banning left and right. Let the users decide. So what if I see lots of posts form you instance!? I, personally can block or ignore, but not as an instance admin to do that for so many users. This is why I keep on insisting that admins should block users/instances for all of their users. It is a very bad practice. In any case, I hope your instance didn’t get to be very damaged.