In theory, no.

In practice, yes.

There is also testing, but that is just to place thing in before promoting them to stable so has the same release cadence as stable.

Small point of clarification: Debian Testing is more fluid than Stable. While Stable will not receive any feature updates in its 2-year lifespan (only bug fixes and security patches), Testing does receive feature updates, up to the point where it is “frozen” for the final stages before release as the new Stable. Usually that happens a few months before release.

This is why Debian 13 “Trixie” has some packages that were released toward the end of Debian 12’s lifecycle.

For example, Debian 13 Trixie was released in August 2025, and contains KDE Plasma 6.3, which was released in February 2025. It does not include Plasma 6.4, which was released in June 2025, because that was after the freeze.

So in practice, you can expect Debian stable to have feature releases that are ~0.5-2.5 years behind the latest, and Testing to be 0-6 months behind.

It doesn’t need to be good to replace jobs, as long as there are no consequences for the people making those decisions.

I’ve lost count of how many “oops, it was AI’s fault, not my fault!” stories I’ve heard, even within highly regulated fields. Like, lawyers submitting documents with completely fake citations, and then…no real consequences. Seems to me like that should be cause for immediate disbarment, but no, apparently not.

I almost started a little rant about Ignaz Semmelweis before I got the joke. :P

Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.

It’s like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it’s all bloated, slow, and only “consistent” with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.

It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.

But at least we’re not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that’s nice.

All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, “cheaper”) to develop software, not faster to run it.

Same experience here. Swype was the original and somehow after all these years still the best?! Or maybe I’m misremembering because my standards were lower back then.

GBoard is noticeably better then Heliboard. I still use Heliboard but it is frustrating sometimes, to the point where I wonder if I should just start typing with my thumbs instead. Might be faster on the whole, since I sometimes lose 5-10 seconds correcting the swipos.

I will start submitting gesture data ASAP. The keyboard world needs this.

What fresh hell is this?

Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

I love Debian. I’ve bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Debian.

The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it’s just outdated.

Like, “Debian is hard” and “Ubuntu is great for beginners”. That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.

My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn’t have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 “Trixie” does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12’s life cycle. If I’d waited another 6 months (or if I didn’t need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would’ve stuck with Debian.

I’m fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it’ll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won’t worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I’ll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I’m not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.

Wow that gpt rewrite is awful. Not just bland as hell but it also changed the meaning. The first sentence is very different.

Yes. I’ve recently come to realize that anytime I use ketchup, it’s better with a ketchup/mustard mix.

(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…

Unrelated, but can you tell me how you set up your Mac OS 8 Platinum theme?

On the one hand, sure, it would give the administration an “excuse” to escalate still further.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? They’re not going to stop escalating no matter what. There’s no point in trying to appease fascists. They’ll take whatever excuse, no matter how flimsy, whenever they feel like it regardless. That’s how we got here.

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

I’ve yet to see a major media outlet call it what it is.

It’s sheer cowardice at this point. The president himself has called it war.