OS News reports about the layoffs at Mozilla, and one has to agree with their words about the Firefox browser:

I’d like to remind everyone that I’ve been warning the Linux world about the precarious, uncertain future of Firefox for years now. The single most important desktop Linux application is in a death spiral and entirely dependent on free Google money. Not a good base to work from.

With today’s news, I only feel strengthened in my conviction that the major desktop projects in the Linux world need to come together in a serious manner to discuss the establishment of a browser project optimised for Linux. Pick an engine, let the GNOME and KDE developers build a native UI on top, and take matters into your own hands. If you can build the two best desktop environments in desktop computing today, you can build a first-class browser together.

This is existential.

Their proposal makes a whole lot of sense to me. It would behoove the Linux distributions to join their efforts and either save Firefox, or agree on an alternative browser. Given how difficult it appears to be to maintain a browser engine, I'd say it makes sense for them to contribute to the already existing project. {link to this entry}

Today, all of a sudden, I was surprised as soon as I logged into my GNOME session by a warning that my root filesystem wass running out of disk space. As in, all of a sudden, I only had about 300 MB free! Upon some examination, it seemed clear that the directory /var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects was eating up several GBs of data. A quick search turned up the solution here:

	# flatpak uninstall --unused
	

That worked for me. It automatically cleared about 3.8 GB of disk space (?!). Further down on the same page, I read that, if that command doesn't work, the following one may then do it:

	# flatpak repair
	

{link to this entry}