Darren

installing anything

I’ve been using Mint and KDE Neon on two of my machines for the past year, and I still have to search for how to install an app image properly.

Its one of those things that isn’t the end of the world, and I guess there are increasing numbers of Snap/Flatpak packages. And, of course apt. And whatever application manager your distro comes with.

But some software is available either to be compiled by the user, or as an app image. And I don’t understand why that image can’t just be dropped in an application folder and run, the same way it works in macOS.

But I’m a relative noob. I assume there’s a historical reason.

Surely not Elton?!

It pains me to say, but the stock Google camera app is by far and away the best option I’ve yet found on Graphene. Which has to pair with the Photos app, or you can’t actually do anything with the photos it takes.

However, you don’t have to sync either with Google (though you do have to sign in), you can set Graphene to only allow them access to the folder they need (while they think they have wider access), and you can turn off network permission.

I looked into Ubuntu Touch last week as a potential alternative to Graphene on my Pixel 9.

The most recent Pixel it supports is the 3.

So Graphene it is then…

My bank app doesn’t work with Graphene, which is a pain in the arse, but not the end of the world. I mean, they still have a website I can log into.

I’ll be keeping the fuck away from books then!

I believe macOS 26 will be the last that’ll run on Intel hardware. So functionally, a year from now, Hackintosh is dead. Well, Hackintosh running the current macOS, of course. I imagine there’ll be a thriving community working to keep existing hardware chugging along.

It’ll be interesting to see the momentum of Linux on Macs though. If Asahi manages to crack those last few hurdles with the M1/2 hardware, it’ll be a rock solid OS, particularly as ARM64 software becomes more common. Suddenly you’ll have a bunch of incredibly capable Macs going cheap because they can’t run the largest macOS.

Which 4th May is this from? Because if it’s from 2007 then that’s a perfectly reasonable mid-range machine, but if it’s from last month then I really hope he’s only using it as a personal Linux box for tinkering.