Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,

Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.

Well these days we have flatpak to solve the “not in the repo” (or ‘old version in the repo’) problem.

It’s a fair point but I would rather diversify and also use something that is open / less opaque

A few years ago when my org got the ask to deploy the CS agent in linux production servers and I also saw it getting deployed in thousands of windows and mac desktops all across, the first thought that came to mind was “massive single point of failure and security threat”, as we were putting all the trust in a single relatively small company that will (has?) become the favorite target of all the bad actors across the planet. How long before it gets into trouble, either because if it’s own doing or due to others?

I guess that we now know

For a low end, small, low consumption Intel box for HTPC/Kodi, Home assistant, Frigate, small Home Server or all of the above, I can recommend any N100-based box or mini itx mobo. It’s very fast compared to prior Intel low consumption CPUs (apollo lake etc), does 4K, HDR, AV1.