I’m getting that with Gmail and 2 google sheets open (just as an example workload), my system says Zen uses 899 MB of memory, while Firefox uses 1261 MB. However, the way they split tasks into different processes (or at least the way my system monitor groups them) seems to be different, so I’m not sure how much of that difference is real.

Looking at the browsers task manager, they report about the same amount of memory by the browser itself, and for tab handling FF seems to grab more memory when opened, then decrease over time, whereas Zen seems to have a more consistent memory consumption. Sheets tabs use equivalent memory in both, and Gmail uses about 20% more memory in Zen. Both use an insignificant amount of CPU, of course.

Zen does feel more responsive, but it’s not a dealbreaker. Good to know the customizations aren’t causing catastrophic resource usage though.

Hmmm this feels like Vivaldi built on Firefox. I like the tiling for tabs! Overall pretty good, would like to see the tab tiling separators smaller, but that’s a small gripe. Looking forward to see where this goes!

I just use Zettlr (a markdown editor optimized for writing research papers). I wish it wasn’t an electron app, as it’s paggy as hell sometimes on Linux, but it’s the best balance I’ve found between features, ease of use, and stability.

Darktable if you’re ok with a steep learning curve, RawTherapee if you prefer an easier-to-use UI with a few less features.

I’m not familiar with fwupdmgr, so I’m not sure either about it delivering bios updates. A good tool to know about for sure, though!

I don’t mean use the RSS feed to actually deliver, I just mean a blog-style announcement. Of course, to be security conscious you shouldn’t follow any links in that announcement to download it, but still.

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten bios updates via apt…not sure if that’s a laptop thing, a manufacturing thing, or what.

Yeah! I only discovered them a couple of weeks ago through this community and they’re fantastic.

Specifically to make something which is not mission-critical reliant on any underlying software…but that’s almost impossible. Not reliant on the base operating system would be a nice start.

While it is true that the ad business model is changing as you describe, Google’s strategy with respect to it is also absolutely about monopolizing the ad market.

I mean any technology solution can suffer the same fate, but you would hope that it wouldnt be an issue at the same time if they’re separate tech stacks.

Yeah the issue is that so many companies were at the intersection of two monopolies – either one failing has catastrophic effects, and there’s no backup plan.

I’ve tried to use scribus, but the interface is pretty clunky and it doesnt react well to high-dpi screens in my experience.

I’m curious about what you think is missing from Inkscape. I use it and illustrator for design work all the time, and I’ve never run into issues with something missing from Inkscape.

Hmmm I guess I haven’t really compared them on documents over about 20 pages, and even then it was just a qualitative judgment.

Jabref is so great, but do read the documentation when you start. Its easy to use without reading any of it, but there’s so much functionality beyond the basics that I just found out recently, and makes it so much easier to use!

LaTeX is just fundamentally not that fast, especially when pulling in lots of packages. I’m running it on a server with a i7-12700K and 64 GB of RAM, but I didn’t really notice a slowdown when running it on an old laptop, they’re both about the same speed as the official overleaf. With longer or more complex documents, I usually split it into multiple files and edit them on their own, then use \include{} to being them into the final file with proper formatting and the right preamble. Of course, thats using a local MikTeX install, so YMMV.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered why you can’t like “pre-compile” a bunch of packages into a binary and include that to speed things up. I’m sure there are good reasons, I just don’t know them.

Oh I got it running eventually. If you were on Linux, it’d be fine, but since on Windows the docker engine runs inside WSL, the ports exposed to a browser in Windows are not the same as what Overleaf is trying to expose in WSL.

I checked it out, seems interesting but I still prefer Feeder. Mostly because I couldn’t get Read You to actually show text/images from a page, for instance XKCD.

Also LyX will not seamlessly interconvert with a TeX file, even though it seems like it ought to. Pandoc conversion between TeX and markdown seems to be less fixing each time, but is also not 1:1. For writing where I care about being able to draft quickly, I’ve settled on writing markdown with embedded LaTeX with something like Zettlr, then converting to a LaTeX with Pandoc for final formatting. You can also convert to Word better from md than from TeX, for those collaborators who refuse to comment on a PDF.