In what way is macOS more closed than Windows? The kernel is open source, the app store and cloud stuff is entirely optional, and it runs most Unix-y stuff natively.
I don’t think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It’s an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I’m back to good ol’ Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
About
Dubai Porta Potty is a slang term for a woman who purportedly allows Dubai billionaires to defecate into her mouth for large sums of money. In late April 2022, an NSFW and NSFL video of a man defecating into a woman’s mouth began trending on TikTok and Twitter, generating discussions, memes and reaction videos referencing the viral video. According to the rumored backstory, the clip depicts a billionaire committing the act on a prostitute. Discussion of the video was shared under the hashtag #DubaiPortaPotty.
Origin
Rumors of models agreeing to perform deeply scatological and fetishistic sex acts in exchange for large sums of money have appeared online since roughly 2015. Mentions of “Dubai Porta Potty” have appeared as early as December 29th, 2015, on 4chan.[2] The blog “TagTheSponsor” operated from 2015 to 2019, and the runner would pretend to be a Dubai billionaire offering women money in exchange for sex, sometimes including scatological sex acts, and post the conversations.[3] On April 24th, 2019, Redditor Dhall15 posted a Starter Pack meme about women returning from Dubai smelling poorly (shown below).
I’d also like to point out that mpv has youtube-dl built-in (and can also use the cooler fork, yt-dlp). You can open YouTube links directly in mpv and they will play with no bullshit. It can even pull 4K streams.
There are browser plugins that let you open links directly in external programs like mpv, although they are a bit of a hassle to set up (especially if you are on Ubuntu with their godforsaken Snaps).
Debian includes ffmpeg, for example, in the main stable repo. Given Debian’s reputation, I would think they are including these security patches in a timely manner, though I’m not entirely sure how to compare specific patches to verify this.
Of course, everything changes when you are selling support contracts. Canonical and Red Hat are the big two for enterprise because they provide support.
When I was last running Ubuntu on desktop, I signed up for an account and enabled these extra security updates. Yeah, it’s “free”, but it requires jumping through hoops. Requiring an account to get patches is the kind of user-hostile design pattern I expect from Apple or Google, but not in the desktop Linux world.
There are some free, open-source command line tools that can do this.
First off, there’s exiftool. It’s the go-to utility to read and write metadata in a wide variety of file types, like mp3, jpg, and you guessed it, pdf. It’s very easy to use:
To read all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All <file> (where <file> is the path to your pdf).
To erase all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All=“” <file> (that’s two double-quotes, to indicate a blank string). Please note that this will overwrite your file in-place! If you want to save the output as a new file, use exiftool -a -All=“” -o <output_file> <file>.
exiftool is likely all you need for your use case, but if you need more advanced PDF manipulation, with a truly dizzying array of options, there’s Ghostscript. Ghostscript can read, write, and convert PDFs, and provides hooks to apply any PostScript commands and options.
To simply print out information on a PDF file: gs -dPDFINFO -dBATCH <file>. This will show you the metadata, such as author, title, etc.
I’m…not going to give you an example of how to use Ghostscript to edit metadata because I’m not confident I’d get it right. The gist is that you use PostScript commands with the -c flag. It is truly arcane but extraordinarily powerful.
If you’re on Linux, you can likely get both of these with your distro’s default package manager. On Mac, use Homebrew or MacPorts. On Windows, you can download prebuilt binaries from their web sites. I think you can even run them on Android using Tmux Termux.
They are called emulators because “Terminal” used to mean a full-screen text interface to a mainframe. The functionality has carried on, which is why terminals behave pretty much the same on any platform. You don’t use your system’s regular text fields in a terminal emulator, for example.
Haven’t tried it yet, but I can see myself using it in the future. It could be great for automating Mac/iOS development and administrative workflows. I don’t think you can compile, sign, notarize, or inspect Mac/iOS apps without Xcode tools (which are, of course, Mac-only). It’s a pain in the ass to operate Mac VMs for such purposes, and it’s only getting more difficult as time goes on. IIRC Apple only allows 2 guest VMs per host now.
Not sure if there are any non-Mac tools to work with dmg files (Mac disk images).
If GUI support is sufficiently developed in the future, there are plenty of Mac apps I would like to run. iPhone app support on Linux would be an absolute game-changer.
I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
Yes!
Adobe owes a huge part of their success to piracy. It made it impossible for smaller companies to get a foothold back in the 90s because everyone just pirated Photoshop. It never would have become so entrenched (or grown so exploitative in licensing) if people had instead used cheaper/free alternatives.
Arguing that AI is not AI is like arguing that irrational numbers are not “irrational” because they are not “deprived of reason”.
Edit: You might be thinking of “artificial general intelligence”, which is a theoretical sub-category of AI. Anyone claiming they have AGI or will have AGI within a decade should be treated with great skepticism.
There’s nothing wrong with installing a .deb manually.
Personally, I’d hesitate to add any third-party repos unless there is a very good reason. In this case, the only real difference is that you won’t get the updates automatically with sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade without the repo. Either way, the desktop app will notify you when updates are available. There’s very little advantage to using the repo.
Adding a repo is very rarely required. It has deeper consequences than simply installing an app, and requires a higher level of trust. If you don’t understand the security implications of adding a repo (and its associated key), then my advice is: just don’t.
The link you posted seems to have the full url embedded so it doesn’t work in my client. I think this will work, pasted as plain text: !veronicaexplains