Please report back in a few weeks and a few months, and maybe even a year or two down the road.
Generally “I’m really (happy/upset/confused/sad) with it” after only a day isn’t really good feedback for people thinking of changing, but it does provide a good baseline to measure against once you’re more familiar with it, and getting glimpses into your learning curve might be really helpful for people looking for advice on which OS to go with.
people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.
this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the “common person” (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves… only devs.
Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary… Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.
All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of “open source” was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn’t to reinvent the wheel, it’s to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they’ll only use it if it’s square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it’s defanged cousin.
The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest
That’s a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn’t be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don’t want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn’t have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.
I’m going to start this article off by saying that you don’t have to be born in the boomer generation to be a boomer. You can be a boomer by acting like one. Hate new stuff? boomer. Run a desktop from the naughties? Boomer.
Uncharitability to those you disagree with, style without substance, and all built upon thought-terminating cliches.
This isn’t helpful or enlightening or informative, it’s entertaining but not in an interesting nor original way. It reminds me of 2010s Reddit memes where everything was about adding as many “fucks” as possible because our moms aren’t supervising our internet time anymore. It espouses a consoomer mindset of “gotta have bigger numbers and shinier visuals because all that matters is appealing to lizard-brain.”
And it’s all couched in the obvious mindset that any criticism will be met with “ok boomer” (I’ll almost be insulted if I don’t get one) because being superior is more important than being right. Y’know… like a boomer?
You’ve got a point, focus on that: you can make the case that Linux fits your use case, or that certain mindsets within the Linux community are hindering progress. But please do so in a way that doesn’t just lend itself to more infighting and drama. That shit is for shallow people who have nothing to contribute and only serve as the cultural detritus that destroys communities and community-driven projects.
If I’m going to have a lot of icons on the desktop, I’d want one of the visually uncomplicated ones (top right, bottom left). Otherwise, if it’s just for eye-candy and what I have to see everytime my windows are minimized, I’d either go for mid-left or bottom-right. I fall into the latter category, but y’all in the former may consider that when casting your vote
I’ve been using nala on my debian-based computers instead of apt, mostly for the parallel downloads, but also because the UI is nicer. I have one issue, and that’s the slow completions; it’s not wasting painful amounts of time, but it still takes a second or two each time I hit tab. I don’t know if this is the same for...
So, I recently moved about 6 months ago. Have only given my real address and name to the DMV, Phone Company, Internet, and rental property(obviously knows my real address)...
This is a myth that’s been addressed by the project. For starters, there are no disclosures about the amount of nodes owned by the Government/NSA/CIA/etc. You’re probably thinking how the project, in 2012, received 80% of its funding from the US Gov source.
You may make the argument of “follow the money”, or you could also make the argument that this type of tech this widely distributed benefits the government too (field agents for some agencies allegedly use Tor, as do foreign defectors) and compromising the network would lead to a potential vector to compromise their interests.
It’s also worth noting that Tor uses 3 hops (entry, relay, and exit nodes) and you can check the location/IP of your current route at any time to ensure geographic diversity. An actor would have to own all 3 to know what you were visiting and trace the traffic back to you.
there is no such thing as a zero-trust society (although I now want to write that scifi story and tease that idea out). As such, the cost of living in a society will always be some amount of infringement of privacy beyond complete anonymity. Even you were comfortable giving your address and name to 4 other parties (under the presumption that only they would use that information), and even then how many individuals within those organizations have access to that information?
Thus privacy cannot be thought of as an all-or-nothing battle. Privacy is a compromise between total anonymity (un-people) and convenience (you can’t get public utilities to your house if they don’t know where you live). The fact is that we have the level of privacy we do right now because of a lot of resistance and hard work. If it wasn’t for all the survivalists and conspiracy theorists and paranoid software devs and whistleblowers and tech journos and anti-authoritarian content creators and anti-surveillance artists and even ordinary joes like me who just want to use online services withouth the digital equivalent of the weird kid in class who stood over your shoulder and watched everything you did (x1000), things could and would be much worse.
If you must think of it as a war, consider it to be analogous to state-vs-collective wars of history: our “opponents” are organizations that are constrained by their hierarchical nature to certain unspoken rules of engagement, and we are a guerilla collective bound only by our shared value(s). Think the Texas Revolution, Vietnam, African National Congress, Zapatistas, IRA, Black Panthers or pretty much anything the Romans did with northern European Barbarians. I won’t sit here and lie to you that the devastation that happened to these peoples and their homelands was “winning,” but I can tell you that the dominators certainly didn’t get their way either.
Fine, in that case: more comfortable than the alternative. No one’s kicking down your door and forcing you to get phone or internet, you don’t have to live on-grid to survive, it’s not illegal to not own a vehicle.
They hated her for she spoke the truth. We (DIY people) hate to acknowledge that not everyone sees value in investing as much time and energy into perfecting their workspaces as the nerds have, and would rather have their tools Just Work™ so they can get to work on the projects they do care about. I say this as someone who still gets frustrated and argumentative when my friends say they prefer spyware-ridden OSes that remove control from the end-user because they don’t require end-user micro-management to maintain and work.
X vs Wayland might as well be Grub vs rEFInd or systemd vs SysVinit to most end-users: it matters from a technical perspective, but most people just want something that will allow them to go about their business without sinking hours into getting the “correct” option to work. And it’s important to remember that we all fall on either side of this divide with some aspects of our life, even if it’s not computer-related. How often do we agonize over finding the “correct” pipe wrench when our sink is leaking, despite what the plumbing nerds would criticize you for using? Do you sink hours into picking the right books on conflict resolution when you argue with your spouse, or do you post on AITA and hope they give good advice? Do you agonize over having all the right utensils and ingredients so you can eke out the most subtle flavors from your cooking, or do you use the pan that you got at the local superstore?
For the four groups enumerated in the article, this still is not important. It may affect them in ways they are unaware of, but you will not be able to change their minds using technical arguments at this point if they have not already been convinced by the wealth of information and support that is readily available.
Not for AdSense ads, like what YouTube uses. Click-Through Rate (CTR) is only used to determine how much of a cut Google gives to the ad hosts, the advertisers just bid for the spots. The advertisers can see the CTR metrics, and so they might be willing to bid more, but that’s not guaranteed.
So google makes money either way, and the advertisers spend money either way. The only difference is that your favorite websites and youtubers get paid too.
edit: hey guys, 60+ comments, can’t reply from now on, but know that I am grateful for your comments, keep the convo going. Thank you to the y’all people who gave unbiased answers and thanks also to those who told me about Waydroid and Docker...
Surprisingly profound for just another windows v linux slapfight. I recently watched Cory Doctorow’s DEFCON talk on enshittification, and something he brought up is how once-good, now-shitty social media platforms held their users hostage by being the only platform with all their “friends” (or at least that specific group of people)—the alternatives being to organize dozens of people to migrate to a new service or losing all those friends.
As a user, the best way to handle applications is a central repository where interoperability is guaranteed. Something like what Debian does with the base repos. I just run an install and it’s all taken care of for me. What’s more, I don’t deal with unnecessary bloat from dozens of different versions of the same library...
I was having a friendly discussion with someone this morning about PC and Laptops for work/education stuff, he suggested that I could use a chromebook for all this stuff and this would be a good idea and make things easier. I strongly disagreed with this, mainly because I hate laptops, the keyboard and touchpad make me angry and...
I can’t use a laptop for work (graphics intensive, need a powerhouse) but I would if I could. I love being able to use it literally anywhere I go—at my desk, in bed, on the toilet, on vacation, on the bus, at a cafe, etc—and…
I installed a headless Debian OS, added a keyboard-focused window manager and I don’t have to futz with the trackpad nor find a place to put an attached mouse. It also is a much slower drain on the battery. Best of all worlds.
I use it for web-browsing, word-processing/spreadsheets, checking email, making memes, coding, managing my home network, controlling my headless SBC, and modding. Also occasionally for cyber CTFs or remoting into my desktop at least to do so.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux and FOSS. I have been using and installing distros on my own since I was 12. Now that I’m working in tech-related positions, after the Reddit migration happened, etc. I recovered my interest in all the Linux environment. I use Ubuntu as my main operating system in my Desktop, but I always end...
My first experience with linux was Ubuntu. Sue me, it was listed under most “most user friendly distro” listicles when I wasn’t smart enough to realize those were mostly marketing.
It worked fine for my purposes, though it took getting used to, but it would wake itself up from sleep after a few minutes. I would have to shut it off at night so that I wouldn’t wake up in a panic as an eerie light emanated through the room from my closed laptop. I did my best searching for the problem, but could never find a solution that worked; in retrospect, I probably just didn’t have the language to adequately describe the problem.
Nothing about the GUI was well-documented to the degree that CLI apps were. If I needed to make any changes, there would be like one grainy video on youtube that showed what apps to open and buttons to click and failed to solve my problem, but a dozen Stack Exchange articles telling me exactly what to do via the terminal.
I remember going off on some friends online when they tried to convince me Linux and the terminal were superior. I ranted about how this stupid sleep issue was indicative of larger, more annoying problems that drove potential users away. I raged about how hostile to users this esoteric nerds-only UX is. I cried about Windows could be better for everyone if the most computer-adept people would stop jumping ship for mediocre OSes.
I met another friend who used Arch (btw) within a year from that hissy fit, and she fixed my laptop within minutes. Using a CLI app nonetheless. I grumbled angrily to myself.
A few years later and everyone’s home all the time for some reason, and I get the wild idea that I’m going to be a(n ethical) hacker for whatever reason. I then proceeded to install Kali on a VM and the rest is history.
The point being that some people labor under the misguided belief that technology should conform to the users, and because we were mostly raised on Windows or Mac, we develop the misconception that those interfaces are “intuitive” (solely because we learned them during the best time in our life to pick up new skills). Then you try to move to linux for whatever reason and everything works differently and the process is jarring and noticeably requires the user conforming to the technology–i.e. changing bad habits learned from other OSes to fit the new one. The lucky few of us go on to learn many other OSes and start to see beyond the specifics to the abstract ideas similar to all of them, then it doesn’t matter if you have to work with iOS or TempleOS, you understand the basics of how it all fits together.
TL;DR Category theorists must be the least frustrated people alive
What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
I can agree with the google placement if you’re assuming the searcher has experience with search operators, most of the time if I’m not wasting time crafting my search results to exclude all the SEO spam sites and Q&A sites written with the same amount of padding as a middle school book report, DuckDuckGo will give me better results than Google.
Switched from Ubuntu to Debian yesterday
Why switch?...
Thoughts on Post-Open Source? (www.theregister.com)
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use....
Linux Boomers (janethemotherfucker.wordpress.com)
I’m going to start this article off by saying that you don’t have to be born in the boomer generation to be a boomer. You can be a boomer by acting like one. Hate new stuff? boomer. Run a desktop from the naughties? Boomer.
One of these 6 will become Plasma 6. Wallpaper Which one do you prefer? (lemmy.world)
Slow Nala completions - Janky hack m8 (github.com)
I’ve been using nala on my debian-based computers instead of apt, mostly for the parallel downloads, but also because the UI is nicer. I have one issue, and that’s the slow completions; it’s not wasting painful amounts of time, but it still takes a second or two each time I hit tab. I don’t know if this is the same for...
Feeling like Privacy is a lost war.
So, I recently moved about 6 months ago. Have only given my real address and name to the DMV, Phone Company, Internet, and rental property(obviously knows my real address)...
A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article
Link to article: gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…...
deleted_by_author
What can you do on Linux that you can't do on Windows?
edit: hey guys, 60+ comments, can’t reply from now on, but know that I am grateful for your comments, keep the convo going. Thank you to the y’all people who gave unbiased answers and thanks also to those who told me about Waydroid and Docker...
Who does flatpak/snap benefit?
As a user, the best way to handle applications is a central repository where interoperability is guaranteed. Something like what Debian does with the base repos. I just run an install and it’s all taken care of for me. What’s more, I don’t deal with unnecessary bloat from dozens of different versions of the same library...
Do you prefer PC or laptop? (freeonlinesurveys.com)
I was having a friendly discussion with someone this morning about PC and Laptops for work/education stuff, he suggested that I could use a chromebook for all this stuff and this would be a good idea and make things easier. I strongly disagreed with this, mainly because I hate laptops, the keyboard and touchpad make me angry and...
Why is Linux so frustrating for some people?
Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux and FOSS. I have been using and installing distros on my own since I was 12. Now that I’m working in tech-related positions, after the Reddit migration happened, etc. I recovered my interest in all the Linux environment. I use Ubuntu as my main operating system in my Desktop, but I always end...
What is the least SEO-fucked search engine?
What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?