I am using Brave on Mint and it give some free money 
Privacy. Security. Freedom
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fwiw…
Linux Mint with Mate desktop and Firefox+NoScript works well for me. I did try Brave for a time but it was doing odd site not found errors where Firefox in the same context was just working. I’m still not liking Thunderbird for its searching email but it works ok.
One option which can work well but for audio is vncserver/vncviewer… so, some lite client remoted to a more powerful box, which works for not just dumping old laptops. The downside to that is a missing GPU on mini-PCs.
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I’ve used Brave browser for over a year … you don’t have to turn on the ad system, but I don’t mind the few extra clicks – have made over US$300 so far … mostly due to rise in price of BAT token, but hey, I won’t complain.
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Over the last two years we thankfully got rid of a lot of (initially) non-essential features including GUIs. It has been a great period of increased focus, which I think was extremely important to get to Fleming sooner than later. I loved the introduction of CLI.
Now, considering where development is at (I suppose, a MVP feature complete skeleton architecture is in place), I feel that perhaps we could go further and drop (initial) support for Windows at least and MacOS as well. I would drop support for behind-the-NAT too until we have everything working reliably from the cloud.
Anything it takes to get to a solid and stable foundation first. We should be able to run stable testnets 24/7 over periods of weeks and months. It would be okay if there was some hand holding involved, even if that would (temporarily) centralize those testnets, or if security would be (initially) limited, which could be mitigated partially by limiting node creation to e.g. forum members.
My gut feeling says that we still need more functional/architectural layering and (perhaps temporary de-coupling) to avoid having to get one huge feature set where everything depends on everything else working from day one.
Like everybody else, I am looking forward to Fleming testnets that could stay up for months, so in my powerlessness of not being able to contribute otherwise I am just sharing thoughts based on not so well informed impressions with the hope that it may be a helpful nudge somehow. Focus 2.0: Linux only, cloud only, and stable through some hand-holding?
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I am using Brave on Ubuntu and it gives me free money to give to @Dimitar. You should too. All of you 
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Well give @dimitar some for his marketing
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There’s ungoogled chromium as well, which goes even a little step further and gets rid of everything googley but keeps the chromey feel. Even if you don’t care about tracking, it is more lightweight so should be nippier, that spyware stuff is just unnecessary crap in any case.
Any qutebrowser users? I learned the basic vim keybindings thanks to qutebrowser, it’s so quick and lightweight and keyboardy
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I don’t think there is much of anything Windows or Mac specific other than installation and initialisation scripts. So, maybe not much of a saving there.
I think it may be more important to bring everyone along on the test net journey too. We shouldn’t underestimate the social impact of this and the positive vibes we all feel from it.
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This
I take @drirmbda’s point about speeding development by concentrating on the CLI, but @Traktion has it right when he says it is only the initial setup that is platform-specific. Our testnet audience for the next couple of months is likely to be CLI proficient, or at least not entirely CLIphobic - CLIcurious, anyone?
So a basic “How to Get Started” - with callouts for the Mac and Windows users should do for now.
In support of this, I give you SN Testnet review spreadsheet - feature request - #7 by VaCrunch
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I can’t speak for windows, but the test-nets work well on my MAC. Easy set up, when doing it manually directly from GitHub, no problem. Installing through Terminal is a bit of a pain, but I have even managed that in the past. That being said, I’m converting my Windows 10 to Ubuntu soon, as I think Linux is better, and stable, and more like what an operating system should be.
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Can you please explain this?
The great thing about CLI (terminal) is it lets you copy and paste commands quickly and painlessly, as opposed to having to go through long clicking sessions.
I haven’t actually used Windows in a long time, but as far as I know, there isn’t even a real terminal installed by default, which obviously makes e.g. following simple instructions more complicated.
This is why I think focusing on only Linux and CLI would make sense at this stage of the project.
Its a lot better now - thankfully.
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That’s good to know! I don’t want to crowd this topic but I would like to know what has changed. I’ve heard about something they call Power shell or something.
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Its Powerful
its not bash but it will do if you have the misfortune to be on a Windows box - also they have a Linux subsystem for Windows now that I heard decent reports of - I have never bothered looking though - Why go out for mince when you have steak at home?
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I just can’t get it to work sometimes through commands. Don’t know why. So I download the CLI from GitHub, and update, and install everything from there, as the commands work flawlessly. If I need to rm the current node, I just manually delete it from my system, to make double sure its gone, before starting a fresh test net node.
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Thats the simple beauty of rm -rf ~/.safe
Wait til you discover what the up-arrow and ctrl-r can do for you… It saves so much typing
ctrl-shift-c and ctrl-shift-v to copy and paste in/out of the terminal as well - Analogs of the common ctrl-x , c and v in both Windows and Linux CLI.
Cmd-X, C and V on Macs
EDIT: and as @Sascha says - the best of the lot is what can be done with the tab key – look up “Tab completion” - the CLI can be VERY fast and powerful when you learn a few of the tips and tricks - and you actually DON’T need to do much typing of long complicated commands - well not twice anyway. - its the DRY principle again – Don’t Repeat Yourself
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One thing I really love is command line completion with Tab. I just googled it and it looks like Windows finally has that in its “PowerShell” or “Intellisense”.
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“tabbing it out” is just so second nature to me now that I completely forgot to add it into my post above – Thanks
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I just use a Linux Virtual Machine on my windows machine. I will do a guide when I get some time.
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Powershell has been around a long time and is quite nice. You can actually download it for Linux, now. So, you can get Bash natively on Windows and Powershell on Linux. What a world we live in.
Windows 10 has come a long way in allowing CLI interaction. You can manage any aspect of Windows with PS.
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