St. Petersburg’s and Moscow’s old stations were built to show off superiority of communist state. That’s where you can see lots of polished stone, sculptures, giant golden light fixtures, stained glass, etc. Focus was not on the people. Then starting around 1970s the stations were built with much more utilitarian design. Modern stations built in Moscow in last decade or so look very nice though.
NYC subway is just gross. I guess they are seriously underfunded to afford proper cleaning and renovation
Well, my original plan was to copy configuration over after I install apos that are not available as flatpaks. Looks like I can copy configuration for those too, just to another location
That’s what I mostly do now. But it requires some extra work, as some apps are not available in Ubuntu DEB repository. Also, I don’t like the approach that Canonical takes, pushing snaps so much
I see your point… I use Debian for my self-hosted environment, so having similar system on desktop may save some cognitive load. My main arguments against Debian are (maybe misinformed though):
No btrfs support in installer OK, Debian wiki says it’s there
Major annual upgrades to keep up with stable look more scary than more incremental and frequent updates of Fedora. And using Sid as someone suggested sounds too crazy for main PC
So yeah, looks like it’s just upgrades… Gives me something to think about while I’m moving my apps to flatpaks
Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.
I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.
I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak
Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.
Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?
Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.
Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.
It just gets… dumber? It’s pretty subjective though.
Spoiler alert- Creatures from other dimensions with mind control technology spanning entire spacetime cannot squash humanity because of a single human/protomolecule hybrid - Laconia’s absolute compliance with Duarte ruling is so mindless. No conspirators apart from a lone mad scientist… no one even tried to use protomolecule technology to take over the power. - Humanity adopted protomolecule technology and colonized hundreds of worlds all within lifetime of main characters. The power belongs to Laconian empire. But they still cannot get insurgents found and punished. There is a fucking asteroid base, and Laconians cannot find it.
Not a dumb part, but the main characters, being separated for a long time, don’t get their own interesting storylines. It seems like authors got bored with characters and didn’t know what to do with them. New characters are usually boring. Duarte’s daughter, Kamal’s son - they are just background… The only strong character in focus is Tanaka.
Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I’m not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn’t slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it’s other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.
uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.
“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds. It’s a standalone novel in a much bigger Revelation Space series. But the plot of this book is quite independent of the series, you don’t need to know the lore to understand it. I think it is very well suited for a movie or a short series.
The setting is hard SciFi, very detailed, but not too crazy.