Since MV3 Chrome has not had better extension API support, although Apple’s insistence on publishing them on the App Store means availability is still restricted. I’ve found that using `xcrun safari-web-extension-converter` on almost any Chrome extension works fine and I’ve self-signed a few (eg. Bypass Paywalls Clean) with Xcode to run on my Mac and iPhone.
> Apple’s insistence on publishing them on the App Store means availability is still restricted.
This is not true. You can distribute Safari extensions outside the Mac App Store.
While it's true that you can't distribute Safari extensions outside the iOS App Store, mobile Chrome doesn't even have extension support, so in this case, Safari has vastly better extension support.
You do still need to notarise it with an Apple Developer membership, right? Else you have to enable unsigned extensions every time you open Safari. The cost barrier is still there even if the approval barrier isn’t.
Yes, but your initial comment was kind of a strange way to phrase a cost complaint. After all, Google insists that extensions be published in the Chrome Web Store, and that requires Google's approval, a process that can often take much longer than App Store approval.
I suspect that the difference in extension availability is mostly due to desktop market share, since Safari is nonexistent on Windows and Linux.
There’s quite a difference between a one time $5 fee and an annual $99 fee for the economics of publishing a free browser extension.
Given almost 100% compatibility with the same Web Extension APIs that Chrome uses, I think you’d expect near-parity in extension availability between Chrome and Safari if that barrier didn’t exist.
> There’s quite a difference between a one time $5 fee and an annual $99 fee for the economics of publishing a free browser extension.
Yes? I didn't deny that. I said your initial comment didn't mention cost.
> Given almost 100% compatibility with the same Web Extension APIs that Chrome uses, I think you’d expect near-parity in extension availability between Chrome and Safari if that barrier didn’t exist.
It feels like you ignored the points I made in my last comment. Why would you expect near parity in extension availability when you can't even develop Safari extensions on Windows and Linux computers?
“publishing them on the App Store” was intended as (perhaps imprecise for you) shorthand for all of these distribution issues.
You very much can develop Safari extensions on Windows or Linux because they use largely the same APIs as Chrome extensions as I already mentioned. Any differences are well documented. The only thing you need a Mac for is, again, distribution. If not for that it’s really not that different to developing a website that will open on Safari without access to an Apple device.
Once upon a time Apple had a separate Safari extensions website where they allowed extension developers to publish or sign extensions after registering for free as they recognised these barriers. They could either be distributed on Apple’s extensions gallery or you could distribute the files yourself.
I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !).
Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops.
Just try Debian Testing
(and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)
This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers.
But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.
Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them.
No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.
Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.
I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.
> Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.
You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you.
> I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck.
One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.
Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.
Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers).
Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)
In what way do you think this is meaningfully occurring? I ask because I have not heard of Chrome or Firefox being inhibited on energy efficiency by platform limitations.
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
I own two consumer-grade Deco XE75 access points which I purchased several years ago as the most cost-effective 6E compatible access points available. They have proven to be exceptionally reliable.
Although I have previously encountered significant issues with WiFi, I now do not see a need to replace these devices despite the availability of WiFi 7.
My deco seems to be really poor at picking a channel at boot up. When I have performance issues running the optimizer almost always moves it to a different channel and solves my issues.
I just ran the optimiser after reading your post and it changed the 2.4GHz channel - I think the main reason I've been so happy is that the laptops and smartphones I primarily use support 6GHz where there is no interference and channel selection doesn't matter.
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