Category: Ubuntu

vivaldi replaces firefox

whbeebe

Today I installed the Vivaldi browser on my little Raspberry Pi 5 system running Ubuntu 24.04. After a very short time using Vivaldi I must say how great it is, even better than on my AMD/Intel Linux Mint system. Vivaldi on this system provides me with one of my favorite Vivaldi features, side-by-side tab tiling. I use that feature when blogging as it allows me to write on the left tab, and to see a preview on the right; or if I’m using photos from my Flickr account, to copy links from my Flickr photos to use in my blog post.

btop showing minimal system usage with Vivaldi

As I wrote above, Vivaldi has minimal resource impact on the RPi 5 running Ubuntu 24.04. The reason for the spike on the right is due to pulling the terminal to the front and then getting a screenshot for this post. Otherwise, the system basically flatlines.

Vivaldi side-by-side tab tiling

As you’ll note above, I’ve got side-by-side tab tiling set up for writing, in this case writing this post on the left and the preview on the right. This layout for me is far more efficient than having to switch back-and-forth between individual tabs in the browser. The only odd thing to report is the keystroke to set this up: chording [Shift] and [Ctrl] keys to select the two tabs to tile, and then to bring up the right button menu to select tab tiling for the two selected tabs.

I’m going with Vivaldi because I’m dropping Firefox. Why am I dropping Firefox? Because there’s a report out that Firefox is blocking anti-censorship add-ons at Russia’s request. This from the holy keepers at the Mozilla Foundation.

This is my first, and last rant against the Mozilla Foundation. I’d rather move on and do useful work with Vivaldi on this little Raspberry Pi 5.

Update

It looks like Mozilla has caved into criticism outside of Russia and unblocked the extensions (see link 2 below). I’m not going back, however. They shouldn’t have caved into Russia in the first place. Firefox is dead to me.

Links

  1. Firefox Browser Blocks Anti-Censorship Add-Ons at Russia’s Request — https://qoshe.com/the-intercept/nikita-mazurov/firefox-browser-blocks-anti-censorship-add-ons-at-russia-s-request/173740673
  2. Exclusive: Mozilla reverses course, re-lists extensions it removed in Russia — https://www.osnews.com/story/139943/exclusive-mozilla-reverses-course-re-lists-extensions-it-removed-in-russia/

fastfetch replaces neofetch

whbeebe
fastfetch running on Ubuntu 24.04 and RPi 5

It’s been the gist of many posts how neofetch is no longer supported, and it’s been years since the last release. And that lack of support for neofetch is beginning to show when certain features don’t work the way they used to. So I went asking the Great Internet Oracle what was a suitable replacement for neofetch, and their were a lot of votes for fastfetch. I pulled the installation packages for Linux Mint and Ubuntu on RPi 5 and installed on both. It works just fine.

fastfetch running on Sonoma 14.5 and M1 Max MacBook Pro

Fastfetch appears to be available for many operating systems, especially Linux. There is no release package for macOS on the fastfetch GitHub repo, so I downloaded the source from the repo and built it on my MacBook Pro. It built without error and runs just fine.

If you have Homebrew installed on macOS, you can install fastfetch within Homebrew, and it will be the current release. I built my copy because it’s absolutely easy enough to do.

If you do decide to build fastfetch on macOS, then you’ll need CMake. I installed CMake on my Mac via Homebrew.

Links

fastfetch — https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch

Homebrew — The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) — https://brew.sh