I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...
I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS....
If your use cases (a.k.a. requirements) are met by your current distro, never switch.
If you are satisfied with stability, availability of support, quick availability of security patches, never switch.
This is particularly important when you are using your Linux desktop as your daily driver.
Most you can do is to check what additional features other distros are offering (rolling release, hardened/zen kernel, x86-64-v2/3 support, file system type, user base, availability of packages, package formats, overall documentation etc.), validate if you really need those features.
If you are interested or just curious to test those features, install that distro on a VM (QEMU/KVM) to try it out first safely. Use it on VM for a while, make yourself comfortable with it. Once you are satisfied with it, only then switch.
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
Quality control is important for a project that is going to be supported for long time, and used by many. Slow but steady is a right approach for open source project, IMO.
Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of...
This is how I explained it to one of my friends who is/was definitely a member of “I’ve got nothing to hide” club -
Suppose you are in a pay-to-use toilet minding your own Business.
That pay-to-use toilet is managed by a public/private entity called ToiletBook.
Suddenly you notice a (hidden) camera in the room.
When confronted, the owner confirms the only reason they took your picture to suggest you the perfect underwear based on your size. And, there is a legal guarantee that picture/data will never be used for any other purpose and only be processed by machine.
Will you still go to such toilet?
BTW, that friend stopped talking to me afterward; not sure why 🤔 (Edit: I should stop giving shitty examples to anyone, as it seems ) 🤐
The application will stream the selected monitor if the mutter screencast portal is available. If it is unavailable, a fallback to X11 based frame grabbing will happen. As such, it should work fine in almost all setups.
I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones, which I have been using since 2022. Today, I was sitting on the bus when some random person connected to them and started playing Free Bird....
Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’...
This Vulkan 1.3 support for NVK is thus one of the many new features to find in the Mesa 24.1 release due out in Q2. This comes following all of the necessary extensions being wired up and NVK continuing to mature at a rather brisk pace.
The really powerful thing about Facebook ads is in your ability to layer targeting options on top of one another, gradually making your audience more and more specific. An extreme (and hilarious) example of the power of hypertargeting was featured in AdWeek last year, when a marketing pro targeted his roommate with ads so specific the poor guy thought he was being cyberstalked.
The news was already posted here last week, but I found this great technical explanation of the flaw. Long story short: Apple is using bad cryptography. They got alerted by researchers back in 2019 but didn’t fix it.
Endeavour OS “Galileo Neo” is out with new ISO spins to incorporate the Linux 6.7 kernel. This doesn’t affect existing Endeavour OS users who proactively update their packages but is intended for new users and those deploying new installations that may depend upon newer hardware support found in Linux 6.7, such as for...
The Linux DMA-BUF protocol for Wayland is widely used these days and supported by multiple compositors for negotiating optimal buffer allocation parameters between clients and compositors. The current fifth version of linux-dmabuf was marked as stable with it working out well and no need for any other changes before removing the...
Reddit API blew up and now I run Linux? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
I feel like I’ve been gaslit into running FOSS but every success only brings me closer to fighting god
(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?
I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...
I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping
I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS....
This is how I KNOW it works as intended (i.imgur.com)
British man Aditya Verma appears in Spanish court over plane-bomb hoax (www.bbc.com)
TL;DR...
AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support For Ryzen AI On Linux (www.phoronix.com)
GNOME Sees Progress On Variable Refresh Rate Setting, Adding Battery Charge Control (www.phoronix.com)
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data – The Markup (themarkup.org)
Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of...
GNOME Network Displays Adds Support For Chromecast & Miracast MICE Protocols (www.phoronix.com)
How private is Apple's Private Relay, really?
You’re forced to use Cloudflare. Don’t they track … everything?
Securing Bluetooth Headphones
I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones, which I have been using since 2022. Today, I was sitting on the bus when some random person connected to them and started playing Free Bird....
Share your Linux-related Blogs/Websites
I follow two already using FreshRSS and I’m looking for more...
Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies – The Markup (themarkup.org)
Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’...
Mesa's NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Now Exposes Vulkan 1.3 Support (www.phoronix.com)
This Vulkan 1.3 support for NVK is thus one of the many new features to find in the Mesa 24.1 release due out in Q2. This comes following all of the necessary extensions being wired up and NVK continuing to mature at a rather brisk pace.
NVIDIA 550 Linux Beta Driver Released With Many Fixes, VR Displays & Better (X)Wayland (www.phoronix.com)
AdGuard Temp Mail: new temporary email service launched - gHacks Tech News (www.ghacks.net)
AdGuard Temp Mail’s addresses are temporary and aren’t stored long by design:...
On the fence about the importance of privacy? Start researching articles about using advertising data points(example article linked) (www.wordstream.com)
I’m wanting to get a better understanding of what the actual data is that advertising companies have on us, we all know its “a lot” we often hear....
The AirDrop flaw exploited by China, explained (blog.cryptographyengineering.com)
The news was already posted here last week, but I found this great technical explanation of the flaw. Long story short: Apple is using bad cryptography. They got alerted by researchers back in 2019 but didn’t fix it.
Arch-Based Endeavour OS Updates ISO With Linux 6.7 Kernel, Mesa 23.3.3 (www.phoronix.com)
Endeavour OS “Galileo Neo” is out with new ISO spins to incorporate the Linux 6.7 kernel. This doesn’t affect existing Endeavour OS users who proactively update their packages but is intended for new users and those deploying new installations that may depend upon newer hardware support found in Linux 6.7, such as for...
Thunderbird's Devs: Rust Is Coming (linuxiac.com)
Planned work for the 2024 release of Thunderbird.: developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap
Wayland Protocols 1.33 Released With DMA-BUF Stable, Adds Transient Seat Protocol (www.phoronix.com)
The Linux DMA-BUF protocol for Wayland is widely used these days and supported by multiple compositors for negotiating optimal buffer allocation parameters between clients and compositors. The current fifth version of linux-dmabuf was marked as stable with it working out well and no need for any other changes before removing the...
AMD Core Performance Boost Patches Posted For P-State Linux Driver (www.phoronix.com)