Danie

Custom Home Assistant Floor Plan Dashboard with Real-Time Controls Do you want a graphical floor plan of your home to show what lights are on or off, whether someone is at your doorbell, etc? There are probably lots more ideas to show the status of many things graphically, and to be able to even control them from this view by clicking on the item in the image. This is a good step-by-step tutorial showing how to put this together. The example showing the layering of the images can be applied to anything else as well. It does involve many repetitive steps to put it together, but it is certainly not difficult to do. Like most things in Home Assistant, start small with one function, and add to it later on. See the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2BRnh1LF6A #technology #homeassistant #opensource #homeautomation

Pix payments happen in 24/7 real-time, are free, and supported by the Central Bank of Brazil "Launched in late 2020, Pix quickly became Brazil's most used payment method, sharply eroding the share of cash, cards, checks, bank slips and other forms of payment in Latin America's largest economy. By cutting out intermediaries, Pix has squeezed revenue from card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, card processors including Cielo, StoneCo, PagBank and Getnet, and banks that once charged more for traditional transfers." This system is very much like the PayShap system in South Africa, but a big difference is in South Africa the banks are often charging nearly normal banking rates for using the system, which has stifled its adoption. In the Brazil the opposite is true, where the norm is cost-free, or very close to it with other banks. I understand there is a Big Power which is not happy about this as they see this as stifling their business, but surely the world is about innovation and cutting costs through increased competition. It is not about banning something competing with you, but rather to embrace change and evolve with the times for the benefit of citizens and consumers. In many 3rd world countries such a system also increases safety when cash need not be carried. Viewed another way, when we pay with cash, those are direct transactions without a middle-person (just VAT being added sometimes). This system really replaces cash. Some quotes from the EBANX site below show over 70% of all Brazilians use Pix as their preferred payment method, making it more popular than credit cards, and merchants that integrated Pix through EBANX saw a 16% increase in revenue and acquired 25% more new customers. It is probably time for the banking system to be overhauled a bit, not only to reduce costs, but also to improve flexibility. This is not going to replace banks yet, but it is up to banks to really start competing more now. See https://www.ebanx.com/en/online-payment-methods/pix-payment/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) #technology #banking #Brazil

Keratin extracted from sheep's wool repairs teeth in breakthrough “The finding could support sustainable, low-cost treatments for early tooth decay within the next two to three years, according to the researchers. They reported their findings August 12 in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.” See https://www.livescience.com/health/keratin-extracted-from-sheeps-wool-repairs-teeth-in-breakthrough #health #teeth

Did a video about my recent trip in the Jimny through the Cederberg Mountains - https://youtu.be/8qwyq7fYsBY?si=BbvvQIjYg4DWbEgi

Mastodon social network is bringing quote posts to the Fediverse "Mastodon is officially rolling out quote posts. Starting next week, you’ll see an option to quote another user by selecting the repost — or “boost” — button, allowing you to add your thoughts to someone else’s post.” I know there were concerns about this, but it does seem to be the way to go. For influencers or bloggers, it does at least link back to their original post for attribution, which is important to them. It also seems users will have the option to disable it for their posts, so surely this choice to have or not have, is the best of both worlds. ActivityPub, which is what powers the Fediverse including Mastodon, is quite significant as it is an open standard and is probably the most used social network protocol outside of the centralised social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. See https://www.theverge.com/news/777067/mastodon-quote-posts-fediverse-launch #technology #Mastodon #socialnetworks

Pessimists Archive educates people on and archives the history of technophobia and moral panics Pessimists Archive is a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends. Explore the timeline of technologies at the footer of their site. “We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old. Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.” It's quite true, I suppose that having a bigger picture context of things, does help put them in perspective. I typically think back to the early 1900s about the panic spread about motor vehicles and having to have a person walking in front of the car with a flag to warn pedestrians. Similarly, with the early steam locomotives that were rumoured to stop cows producing milk, and also travelling too fast so that humans on them would not be able to breathe properly. So much FUD that we have just forgotten about (for good reason). And of course we must not forget that many legacy industries spread all sorts of propaganda and ideas specifically to discount some new advances, because it is in their interests financially to prevent people moving away from using their product or service. The site really deals mainly with the long forgotten technophobia issues, and not with some of the more current ones. It is always best to look back historically, as there is less emotion and personal involvement with those times. They do interestingly enough tie some technophobia together that relates to similar fears, just which re-appear later with newer technology. See https://pessimistsarchive.org #technology #conspiracytheories #FUD

Switzerland releases its own AI model trained on public data and its open source “Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget. The model’s source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace.” Of course, being Switzerland, this is an attempt to adhere to the European Union’s copyright laws and voluntary AI code of practice, which may set it apart from some other AI models. Some may argue then it is won't be as good as some other AI models, but I suppose the analogy may be a thief could be richer than most workers who earn their honest dime through their own hard work. See https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/770646/switzerland-ai-model-llm-open-apertus #technology #privacy #AI #opensource

[URGENT] DEF CON Researcher Exposes How Password Managers Betray Your Trust "Czech security researcher Marek Tóth demonstrated at DEF CON 33 how a single click on any malicious website can steal passwords, credit cards, and 2FA codes from 40 million users of major password managers, with vendors like 1Password and LastPass refusing to fix the vulnerabilities." What this brings home yet once again is, in regard to security, the easier something is to use is usually not better for security. In this case, much of the issue is around the autofilling of passwords on page loading (because that is easier). So, to some extent, this is all helped along by settings we choose to set. Again for subdomains vs exact domain, it is easier to match to just the base domain… Many password managers will be addressing these issues in the coming week or two, but it is worth rethinking your "ease of use" settings on your password manager so long. See https://www.sambent.com/urgent-def-con-researcher-exposes-how-password-managers-betray-your-trust #technology #security #vulnerabilities

You can once again buy an official Commodore C64 "Basically, there is a whole gamut of ways to get some part of the C64 experience, ranging from emulator-only to a full hardware DIY or pre-assembled format. Each of which come with their own price tag, starting at $0 for running VICE on your existing system. With so much choice we can only hope that the renewed Commodore company will become something more than Yet Another C64 Experience." The video in the linked article gives a good run down of the various Commodore C64 options up to now, before ending with the details and cost of the revived "official" C64. Apart from holding the world record for the most microcomputer sales of all time. I had one as well, after my ZX81, and it was a major breakthrough with colour graphics, sound, etc. I have very happy memories from that C64, although I must say I did enjoy my Amiga 500 a lot more as the game quality was just that much better, and it had a lot of games. I still play some of those Amiga games today such as Ports of Call every now and again on my Linux PC using an emulator. So the question is, would there still be interest in 2025 for the C64? Well it certainly has been modernised a bit with regard to HDMI and peripheral support, and apparently many thousands of the unofficial C64s are still being sold. See https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/commodore-is-back-selling-new-c64s-but-should-you-buy-them #technology #Commodore #retrocomputing

Homepage - An Open Source Self-Hosted Dashboard Homepage is a modern, fully static, fast, secure fully proxied, highly customizable application dashboard with integrations for over 100 services and translations into multiple languages. Easily configured via YAML files or through docker label discovery. With features like quick search, bookmarks, weather support, a wide range of integrations and widgets, an elegant and modern design, and a focus on performance, Homepage is your ideal start to the day and a handy companion throughout it. My video explains why I moved from Heimdall to Homepage. It also shows what various service and information widgets are available, what my dashboard looks like, what the various parts do, and how the configuration files work. My docker compose file is also unpacked. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvB0Jcn3e3g #technology #selfhosted #opensource #dashboard

Various desktop Linux tips for newbies I'm also seeing more and more new Linux users popping up. They're noticeable for often saying "why did they not do this earlier". The point is, today's Linux is very different from 20+ years ago. It generally just installs and works, often looking very similar to what users experienced before (meaning basically everything can be done in the graphical menus and windows). Linux gets a bit more interesting if you venture into using the AUR or Git versions of apps (you have to enable this, as these are more bleeding edge). This is where dependencies may break, and you need a bit of terminal skill often to fix things, but the good news is, you're not losing any data. Over the years I've also opted to having all my user data (the stuff under /home) in its own partition so that is it fully separate from the main OS. The reason was in the early years I used to format the drive and do clean installs, or was distro hopping. Nowadays, I just use Manjaro KDE, and it just keeps updating all then time - have not reinstalled for many years now (and no nagging to activate it or end of life coming). You may wonder what happens if a distro is no longer supported? Well firstly it keeps working, and it may well still pull some patches and updates. But usually you will be able to migrate to using some other distro, and your user data all stays intact. But this is also a good reason for picking one of the many mainstream distros, that should be around still for a very long time (measuring that long time in terms of Windows release cycles). No-one has to move to Linux, but for those curious enough to want to find out more, the usual approach is to start with a liveboot version and just run it from a USB stick or external drive to test it out a bit. The next step is typically to install it side-by-side with Windows, but I'd really recommend a separate hard drive, as Windows does some odd things to the boot partition sometimes. Linux can access the user data on a Windows drive, but I'd be careful with that, as Windows can lock the drive if it uses hibernation mode. The point is, lots of things are possible for Linux. One will find of course that many companies only bring out their software for Windows and macOS. And example is Stream Deck. But I discovered two excellent 3rd party apps that work even better under Linux with Stream Deck. Da Vinci Resolve for example produces world-class video editing software that runs on Linux natively, but there is also Kdenlive that will work just as well for most users. So always do a bit of research before buying software or hardware to choose wisely. Personally, for me, it's more about the freedom to what I want with it. See https://akselmo.dev/posts/how-to-linux-2025 #technology #Linux #opensource

Using Signal groups for activism "Things are heating up. Millions of people are taking to the streets against Trump's rising authoritarianism. Communities around the US are organizing to defend against ICE raids, to protest Israeli genocide, for mutual aid, and for other forms of fighting fascism. Signal can help people safely organize in all of these contexts. Signal groups, in particular, are more powerful than you might be aware of, even if you already use them all the time. In the linked post you'll see how." Of course, activism is also about a much wider range of topics than the above, and many have been running for decades. Apart from activism in 1st Word Countries, there is also activism in many 3rd World Countries, which in many cases are really life and death situations if users are caught. Signal is not THE most private network around. There are many others like Threema (not public link group invites though) and SimpleX (really open group invites with custom names per group) that enable far more anonymity. In other words, they don't require any form of registration or a mobile number to work, meaning there is even less to link back to any individual user. But this is why I wanted to make this post. It often comes back to many people wanting to find their friends on their chat app. Yes, finding friends makes communicating easier, but that in itself does leak metadata. The reason I only have two or three contacts on Threema and SimpleX are that it is way more difficult to build out your network. This is where Signal does strike an excellent middle path - it is simpler to use and find friends, whilst also going as far as it can to guard your privacy. It has some good group options (including an announcements only group) and most importantly where it differs from WhatsApp and Telegram, are that it's metadata cannot be accessed by Signal (WhatsApp goes as far as actively sharing users metadata with advertisers and partners, which is why WhatsApp has so many businesses on board). Telegram may handle far bigger numbers for its groups, but the problem is users do need to set up their privacy settings very carefully, and their metadata is at the risk of being subpoenaed now, and of course Telegram's encryption is proprietary. Signal's groups are limited to 1,000 users, and another issue may be that there is one profile across all groups (unlike SimpleX where you choose a name for each group you belong to, but it does not scale well to large groups at all). Signal does hit a sweet spot though and should really be adopted by a lot more mainstream users. Signal's user privacy is way ahead of both WhatsApp and Telegram, yet it is just as easy and intuitive to use. But, as I mentioned above Signal is not perfect. To summarise those shortcomings, they are: 1. Even announcement-only groups are limited to 1,000 users (Telegram has 200,000 for normal groups and unlimited users for broadcast groups). 2. A phone number is required to register the account initially (SimpleX and Threema do not require anything). 3. The profile your friends see is the same profile seen in a group (SimpleX allows different names) so select your profile name with this in mind, although the phone number is hidden by default. See https://micahflee.com/using-signal-groups-for-activism #technology #privacy #chatapps #activism

How to Clear RAM Cache, Buffers, and Swap in Linux Without Reboot "Like any other operating system, GNU/Linux has implemented memory management efficiently and even more than that. However, if any process is eating away your memory and you want to clear it, Linux provides a way to flush or clear the RAM cache. In general, it is not a good idea to manually free up Buffer and Cache in Linux which might be used by the Linux kernel, which is designed to manage these resources efficiently, and manually clearing them can disrupt system performance." So, you can choose to apply any of these commands, and they won't do any harm, but the closing thought is that you should not normally really need to do so. Linux will use available RAM anyway so do not think that if it only uses 20% of RAM that is better than 80%. See https://www.tecmint.com/clear-ram-memory-cache-buffer-and-swap-space-on-linux #technology #Linux #opensource

You can watch YouTube on Jellyfin with TubeArchivist This is quite interesting, especially for those with bandwidth issues or wanting to watch offline (dare I say without ads or tracking...). TubeArchivist actually will run completely self-contained on its own, but there is also a Jellyfin plugin that will integrate it into Jellyfin, and the power of Jellyfin is the organising and curating of what you watch. You can tweak many settings, including resolution, but of course it may still fill up your disk storage over time. There are quite a few handy stats though and that includes how much disk storage is being used. Also, interestingly, it will pull through the views and likes from YouTube. The linked article is especially useful with regard to the integration with Jellyfin. See https://www.xda-developers.com/free-plugin-to-watch-youtube-on-jellyfin #technology #videos #Jellyfin #opensource #selfhosting

Proton's New AI Assistant Lumo Offers a Private and Encrypted Chat Alternative On the plus side (not the Plus plan) this is an AI assistant that promises to keep your conversations completely private, even for the free version. "Proton says Lumo doesn't keep chat logs on its servers, and everything stays encrypted on your device using the same technology that protects the company's other services, so no one else can read your conversations – including Proton itself." On the not so Plus side, there is a Plus version, but it appears that Proton "Unlimited" plan subscribers, like myself, are limited to the free version only. Which is OK, but it may be time to reconsider that naming of that plan as it is getting further and further away from "unlimited". Some quick comparisons by running through some queries I already did in Perplexity is leaving me with a feeling that it is not as intuitive as Perplexy in terms of interpreting my actual question, and the answers are a bit more vague versus Perplexity's. It does however also provide sources for its answers (not all though). And of course a Proton subscriber, I don't get anything extra on the AI. So, I'm a little mixed on this one, but I suppose its privacy first focus may be plus for many. See https://www.macrumors.com/2025/07/23/proton-lumo-encrypted-ai-chatbot #technology #AI #privacy

I'm finally able to use Wayland on an ongoing basis It was the need for Waydroid only working under only Wayland, that forced me to again have another go at Wayland this week on my Manjaro KDE Plasma. Yet again I hit some issues, one or two of which were show-stoppers, but I have finally overcome them, and although there are some irritations, they are now pretty minor, and I have workarounds to make everything work now. These were all issues that made Wayland feel, for me, it was not quite ready for full prime time. Key for me was to be sure that: * Steam games worked * KMyMoney finance app worked * My hundreds of shortcuts in Steam Deck worked * OBS Studio worked * VLC Media player worked * Wayland was stable without intermittent crashes I suspect that XWayland has largely been the reason everything now seems so much better. For KMyMoney I had long since sorted out that if I added the environment variable "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb", this sorted out the non-display of the application. This may even not be needed any more. My biggest challenge had been to find alternatives to the excellent xdotool utility, which I use extensively in Bitfocus Companion for my hundred plus productivity shortcuts. Not only is xdotool exclusively for X11, but it is really easy to use as it uses the key names such as Enter, Space, etc. Yes there is ydotool, but it is really difficult to do set up say 'xdotool key Ctrl_L+f' in ydotool as this must be 'ydotool key 29:1 33:1 33:0 29:0' and just don't dare forget one of the key up sequences otherwise it will all break. I started looking into dotool this week as well as other options. Nothing beats xdotool for simplicity of use. I'm not sure why or when, but I tested out an existing xdotool shortcut... and it just worked! Wow, OK so this must be some XWayland improvement. This made me very happy, as converting everything to ydotool would be pain times 100. Wayland still has its 'security' limitations on insertions into keyboard/mouse input, so I do sometimes get a popup that I must accept, but it works! Wayland also does not like keystrokes to be inserted into background windows, but I see there is now an application called Kdotool which I must still explore. The other irritation was not being able to resize application windows. Normally, I'd move the mouse cursor to any corner of an app and then drag it bigger or smaller. Wayland was just not allowing this to happen. So what I've discovered to make this happen is two things: One can hold down the Meta key and then hold the right mouse button near that corner, and then do the usual resizing quite quickly. How will I remember the key combination? Well with my Stream Deck, as I now have a key mapped to hold the Meta key down, and reminds me to right-click the mouse. The other thing I discovered was, resizing does sort of work if you have extremely fine motor skills. You have to position the mouse about a pixel outside the corner of an app, and then you can grab and resize it like 'normal'. If you do this on the corner or just inside the app, it does not work. So the issue seems to be that the resize handle area is extremely small. I've looked inside the window theme settings and cannot seem to see anything that would make this larger. Yes, I know there is a setting called 'Enable extended resize handles' and I have that ticked already. There is also a window menu that has an option for resizing, but that is too clunky to use, so the above two workarounds see m to work OK for me for now. Another thing was my mouse cursor 'sticking' as it moved across screen one to two, and from two to three. It only happens when I move it fairly slowly. Turns out this is a feature for those not wanting to go past the screen edges. But there is a setting not only to adjust the stickiness, but also to disable that. So sorted too. I have some open apps that show blank icons in the toolbar. This is not too serious, as if I hover the mouse cursor over them, their preview shows what they are. For now too, it is only my Joplin notes app that does this under Wayland. OBS Studio works as-is. The only issue seemed to be the screen to capture. It is a super easy fix, but must be reversed if you ever use X11 again. Basically I had to just add a new screen capture and I think its properties were for Pipewire capture or something like that. Everything else worked as before. The last thing that was broken, was VLC media player was giving codec errors on playback. The short of it was I just needed to install additional codec plugins (not sure why, as it all worked as-is on X11). Or one can also install the Flatpak version of VLC and that works out of the box (or is that inside the container?). Other media players like MPV just worked as normal without any changes. Some screenrecorders, like Vokoscreen will work, but they lose their ability to record only a window or a rectangular area, as they are X11 specific. OBS Studio can do the job, but I also installed Kooha which does do rectangular areas under Wayland. I've now been using Wayland for two and a bit days. No need yet to go back into X11 to do anything, and Wayland has been stable so far. I've tried two games under Steam Games, and they are working, and my Stream Deck shortcuts for those games are also working fine. Very ironically, the Waydroid app is not starting after the second day. It was the reason for me re-trying Wayland again. But that is not really a Wayland issue itself. It looks like I'm now fully moved over to Wayland, and my mind is at rest, at least for the showstoppers I had before with it. #technology #Linux #opensource #Wayland

Harper is a grammar checker that is on-device and open source "When it comes to grammar checking, Grammarly is the premium tool for it. It's a proprietary tool and it was among the first one to make a mark as a web-based Grammar checking tool. Then there is LanguageTool that is/was open source, made in Germany and offers hosted service for free or for a price (you get additional features). LanguageTool was acquired a couple of years back and since then it's privacy policy has changed as it processes data on US servers, instead of European ones." I'm trying out Harper and although it works fine, it is a very new product (less than a year old), so there are some improvements that can be made. For example, I'd like to see auto-correction rules we can add ourselves for whenever I type teh to be changed to the. But it is being updated regularly I see. Right now too it only supports English (but being open source I think that will change soon). It has plugins for Firefox, Chrome, Obsidian, WordPress, and it can be integrated into various code editors as well as into JavaScript/TypeScript/Rust codebases. There are no mobile apps as the view is that most keyboards have their own built-in spell and grammar checkers. But the privacy-first approach does mean no data going into someone's cloud, and does mean also better speed and even working offline. That would also mean right now no syncing of personal dictionaries across devices, but I'm sure that can be added in time to use Nextcloud, Dropbox, and other personal cloud services. See https://itsfoss.com/harper-grammar-checker and GitHub site at https://github.com/Automattic/harper #technology #opensource #spellchecker #privacy

KDE Itinerary is a digital travel assistant with a priority on protecting your privacy This is an open source Linux and Android app, that syncs between devices using services such as KDE Connect, Nextcloud, or DavDroid. It does itinerary planning for various modes of transport and accommodation booking, complete with map views, boarding passes, train coach layouts, etc. It can even do real-time delay and platform change information for trains, and give weather forecasts for destinations along your trip (services permitting, I imagine). The focus is on privacy, though, so this does not seem to be a travel sharing app that shows photos etc. See https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/itinerary #technology #opensource #travel

Jack Dorsey interview on the problems with Big Tech social media Really interesting insights into the beginnings of Twitter, and why any company running a centralised social network can be a problem. Investors/VCs = profits = permissions needed ≠ open protocols. He covers the cycle of how new profit based ventures want to lure in as many users as possible, and then close the taps and squeeze out as much profit as they can. As much as a profit corporation (or public benefit corporation) wants to do what is right for the Internet, the problem is their loyalty to shareholders/investors comes first. Jack explains the why's of this quite well in the interview, and the solution he sees is to have open protocols and permissionless access, as this would prevent many platforms from being able to take decisions that cause greater harm than good. The drive toward open standards was undertaken for much the same reason when it comes to all sorts of standards, whether they be document standards, units of measure, USB interfaces, tyre sizes, etc. Open standards promote interconnectivity, more competition, less vendor lock-in, etc. All of these benefits users and consumers. It is the same with social networks. A centralised social network is easy to target for censorship, managing permissions for access, government control, etc. Unfortunately centralised networks with centralised control and investors/VCs, means money to advertise, create great looking user interfaces, to influence politicians and media organisations, etc to use them. But these could still play a role with open protocols and permissionless access, where they channel that money into the influencing and great UI, but still compete openly using open protocols. Users can choose to use their app or service, but they won't be locked into it. Everything could change tomorrow if all users demanded only open protocols and permissionless access (both already exist with networks like Nostr, Secure Scuttlebutt, and others which do not require registering for an account on any server). Certainly, any social network would have to then follow the users... but that will never happen as that is not how users think or act in the real world. One way would be for governments to enact laws that only open protocols are allowed to be used, but that also won't happen in practice. We've seen many governments enact regulations that bound them to only using open document standards, and then they continued to use .docx formats. So it is quite clear that we know technically would be the best way forward, we also know those solutions actually exist, but how to move the masses to them to create a tipping point... Big unknown! So where we sit right now is, many users have already opted to go the way of open protocols and permissionless access, and although these networks are flourishing in their own right, they do not represent anything close to a tipping point of change. Part of the challenge may be that these are all separate networks (you need to choose one or more to use) and there is no network of networks (a single protocol to rule the interoperability between all networks). But despite that, the foundations are laid, and fundamental to that is that a user owns and controls their profile. No-one can take away or ban you from using your profile on Nostr, Secure Scuttlebutt, and similar networks. I'm hoping the Revolution.Social podcast series will start to create greater awareness around this challenge, and try to establish a greater global consensus around moving towards a new tipping point for creating a protocol to rule them all, owned by no-one, but used by all. That also needs to mean that your profile is portable enough to be used everywhere, and not be locked into a single network. But listen to episode one of this podcast to understand why this is needed and to understand why any corporation running a centralised social network, is never going to be in the interests of its users or the Internet at large. See https://revolution.social #technology #socialnetworks #decentralisation #openstandards

Bluestar Linux: Arch Power, User-Friendly Polish “While the Linux universe is full of distros—314 active distributions, according to Distrowatch—there are arguably only a handful that strike a good balance between high performance and great aesthetics. One such distro is Bluestar Linux. Those coming to Linux from Windows or macOS will find the Plasma desktop environment to be a natural progression from their previous operating systems.” Personally, I'm quite hooked on a blend of an Arch based distro with a KDE desktop environment, so I found this option quite interesting. Arch distros are certainly getting more and more popular. My own days of distro hopping though have long been on pause, and I suppose I'll only hop again if something is very seriously bugging me on Manjaro. Being Linux though, any distro really does not stop you running anything made for Linux (and usually even for Windows), so don't think the default selection of software offered by Bluestar would in any way limit you. See https://fossforce.com/2025/07/bluestar-linux-arch-power-user-friendly-polish #technology #opensource #Linux