I know KDE has a calendar, not sure how well it’d work for your use case but it’s there!

Sounds like quite a nice weekend. Best of luck & get well soon to your doggo!

TV’s backlight died a couple of days ago and I’m waiting for the replacements to arrive (hopefully tomorrow), might be a bugger to fix but it’s worth a shot anyway (only a £20 part and if I can’t fix it it’s going in the bin and being replaced anyway).

Otherwise, family from abroad are staying nearby this week so we’ll be taking them around the area!

Fair enough, i guess being that cheap it’s like many things - a roulette wheel of quality. Probably one of those things where I haven’t used anything else so don’t know what’s good and what isn’t!

Glad i recommended taking my judgement with a pinch of salt.

I’m not massively experienced with 3D printing so take this with a grain of salt.

That said though, I would personally consider what you would be doing in the future: If you’re just going to use it occasionally for small projects then it probably isn’t worth spending more than about 300€, but if you’re likely to use it a lot and eventually start to print more complex / intricate things and/or more often then getting a slightly nicer one would end up being worth it in my opinion!

Personally I have an Anet A8 (about 200€), it’s very basic and needs a lot of manual fiddling. Fortunately though, with a bit of tweaking in a slicer, it can produce quite nice prints in a reasonable time which is just fine for me as I only print infrequently and mostly things that don’t need to be too precise. There might be something better for that price point but if you’re just looking for something cheap that gets the job done then it’d probably serve you well!

Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people’s experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn’t really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I’m aware.

In any case with the way ubuntu’s going I’m really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don’t think I’m alone)

From what I understand and to continue your example of Ubuntu-based distros:

As you say, Ubuntu itself is corporate-driven, so there are things in there that exist pretty much solely to benefit Canonical (e.g the telemetry they recently introduced if i recall correctly)

Most of the time when basing distros off of others, I think it’s to keep a lot of features - either to save dev time or because they only want to tweak a small portion of the distro and not write a new one from scratch.

Because devs can modify the entire codebase, they can remove features that are corporate-driven (telemetry and such) and effectively create something fully (or mostly) compatible yet without such features.

Another major example imo is the removal of snaps, which most people (myself included) strongly dislike - as far as I’m aware removing them in Ubuntu itself is quite a difficult process as it’s baked into the distro itself. I imagine a lot of people want something like Ubuntu as it is quite friendly and has one of the lower bars of entry for Linux, but object to corporate things like telemetry and the overall monstrosity that is snaps.

Apologies, i went down a bit of a tangent, but I hope that roughly answers your question!

I thought thunderbird still is a mozilla project to this day? I use it and it still comes up as mozilla thunderbird on installers and the like. I definitely agree with your virtue signalling point though, I like that they don’t shove it in your face every time you open the app, it just does its job.

(Partly continuing from part 1) Unless I’m greatly mistaken mozilla are a pretty big company and quite profitable themselves and they very much have the capability to install solar panels and such, and how else do you think unifying them would be beneficial? All of the major google-suite-alternative open source applications are working very well alone and some element of separation and competition seems ideal in my opinion. Interested to hear your thoughts behind this.

I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure what you mean by having less dependency on google - firefox is the only major modern browser not to be chromium-based) and thus at least partly google-based too), and why would unifying many open source apps under one company be beneficial? Signal, mozilla, proton, libreoffice, etc. all being separate entities actually seems better for privacy and decentralisation imo! Also, firefox offers a vpn and email client (thunderbird) and ecosia seems a bit odd to put in here seeing as a core part of it is adverts (and if memory serves i think it might even use google search apis or something?) Sorry if I’ve come off as too critical as I quite like the idea of having one unified open-source suite, but I feel like it’d be either unnecessary or impractical in most cases.