Hasbro/WotC quietly cast Resurrect on DnD novels (inc Ravenloft) ►
◄ Project Zebra: Black vistas whose end was deeper than the pit
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title reference: Gunship, Run Like Hell.
Quite a lot of big software updates recently, some good and some bad.
At last, Android VLC 3.6.3 in the Play Store has working repeat and can remember A-B loops when switching between apps. Most of the time, although it seems that if the application gets force quit by Android due to memory constraints it does fail. Beta and nightly versions I tried whilst waiting for 3.6.x to be released didn't behave at all with either feature.
Gimp 3 is here, with non-destructive editing including text
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/gimp-3-0
https://librearts.org/2025/03/gimp-3-0-released/
Microsoft Publisher is coming to an end
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/microsoft_publisher_eol/
Chrome is now actively killing off Manifest V2 plugins and so is Edge, so people will be noticing Ublock Origin vanishing. Ublock Lite in Edge seems reasonable, and I don't really watch YouTube in a browser or on a PC any more and Firefox or Freetube will do if I need to. In Chrome it currently seems possible to manually re-enable disabled V2 plugins. It seems to be going by whether developers have confirmed extensions to be V3 compatible (one I use is literally just a toolbar icon that opens the Downloads page, for example).
As the Register put it recently, "Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you"
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/08/pi_hole_6_flyby/
It also mentions Privoxy, which this year updated to 4.x, so whilst Debian still has the 3.x in its repositories it's simple to just download and install the latest. Strangely, the proxy settings screen in Plasma states "Not all applications will use this proxy setting. In particular, Firefox and Chromium or anything derived from them, or anything using QtWebEngine - which includes Konqueror using the WebEnginePart, Akregator and Falkon - will not use these settings. Some applications may allow the proxy to be configured in their own settings." Which doesn't seem to tally with the Chromium browsers I have installed, which use system settings.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/proxy-settings-cant-be-saved-in-kde/58871/6
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Privoxy#Usage
systemctl start privoxy.service
systemctl enable privoxy.service
update System Settings
export http_proxy=localhost:8118
systemctl list-unit-files | grep privoxy
restart for good measure
check http://p.p/
Privoxy plus Ublock Origin or Lite it is then, with DNS over HTTPS for Firefox to ignore crude censorship.
There's a timeline for Plasma losing support for dedicated X11 sessions
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-transfer-progress-graphs/
https://blog.vladzahorodnii.com/2025/03/13/kwin_x11-and-kwin_wayland-split/
As before it's a self-selecting sample of 80% of users with telemetry enabled that are using Wayland. It'd be interesting to know how many users that is, versus estimates of how many people may be using Plasma, since the latter is unknown but Linux users skew towards telemetry being a hard no. Of course since developers are running Wayland, that's the direction of travel and it's a case of watching whether Plasma Wayland regains missing features. I'm not inclined to spend time or energy testing regularly yet, and am alert to the possible need to switch desktop environments again.
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