There’s a balance between principles and practicality and for a lot of people it just hasn’t tipped yet. I’m kind of in that boat myself.
On principle, I’d like to eliminate Google from my life entirely.
In practice, there is no good alternative to Google Maps. I’ve tried a bunch of OSM-based apps and they’re just not there yet. So I use Google Maps. Not happy about it, but I still use it.
Definitely not the start of the joke, but I couldn’t tell you where it did start. I think it long predates the internet. I would guess that it goes back to cultural conflict between British and French aristocracy in centuries past, but at this point I think it’s very far removed from the origins.
In the US, I think using France as the butt of random jokes got a boost during George W. Bush’s presidency because France publicly opposed the US’s invasion of Iraq, which caused some absurd and petty reactions from US politicians, like renaming “French fries” to “freedom fries”.
I have no idea why Disney decided to change that line. Perhaps it has more to do with the suggestion of interracial partnerships than with France specifically? Either way, Jesus Christ, Disney…
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.
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn’t set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I’m not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it’s no big deal.
Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I’ve personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven’t done side-by-side comparisons, so I’m not sure exactly what that means.
Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637 , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there’s a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
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.
I’m seeing it working correctly on web now on two different instances, so…I dunno, guess I’m crazy? I was sure it wasn’t working yesterday. I actually tried to use it in a comment just a few days ago and gave up.
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.
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 know that this is possible, but I’ve never actually heard of it being done on streaming sites. I’ve only heard of it with e.g. prerelease copies of movies sent to critics or something like that.