sir_reginald

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 6 months ago)

As always, use free software. Look for Lemmy clients in F-Droid. Voyager is a good one.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

whats libreboot? does (what im assuming is) a bootloader really have that much impact on performance after the PC has finished booting?

It’s more a BIOS replacement, not a bootloader. It can have a slightly performance decrease due to lack of optimisation vs the proprietary BIOS.

But the real issue is that Libreboot is supported in a very specific list of motherboards, which means that you don’t get to run the latest hardware.

Last I checked the newer board that supported it was like 4 years old. It might have changed now, tho

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

I also thought of Unity the DE before reading the article

I understand the confusion. This doesn’t belong to a Linux community. I mean, I see the relation with FOSS but I’m sure there are FOSS communities out there. The article doesn’t even mentions Linux, just Windows and Android.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

We have lost much having to wait for meds patents or other useful technologies.

And even in the entertainment industry we have probably lost so many masterpieces that could have been inspired by copyrighted material. Of course, that we will never know.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

because most people are unaware of keybindings and when they inevitable tap on the new dedicated key they’ll probably be shown a subscription screen for Copilot Premium or whatever they call it.

IMO it’s a very disgusting and intrusive way of fishing subscriptions to the AI thing they’ve invested so much money on.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

they are downvoting you, but you’re absolutely right.

they can’t hardly be repaired and it’s impossible to upgrade them at all, even something as basic as swapping the SSD needs desoldering. They are still sold with 8 GB of RAM as the base and they can’t be upgraded.

it isn’t worth it at all.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

not exactly. You can of course still get existing works by pirating them.

But if the Tolkien works entered the public domain, anyone could use them for any creative purposes freely. And yes, a lot of the new material would be trash. But some excellent works would appear to.

A good example of this is Lovecraft’s works and the Cthulhu Mythos, that although not public domain until recent years, Lovecraft encouraged others to use his own creations on their own stories, thus expanding the literary universe of his own creation. Some stories are awful, but there has also been a ton of great works based on Lovecraft’s creations that couldn’t have existed otherwise.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

Write an article.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

If you really need Brave, install the Flatpak. Not official, but neither it is the one from the package manager.

I’d also recommend to just install Ungoogled Chromium instead of Brave and be done with it.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

she’s providing games for free, who cares if she’s a narcissist.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

yeah, that makes it look like a bot posted it

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

Google’s implementation of RCS is proprietary and that’s what most providers use. Relevant discussion here:

forum.f-droid.org/t/…/13423

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

if you’re a developer, there’s a very easy and practical way of testing this without trusting anyone’s (not even Google’s) word:

compile the most basic of flutter apps or some demo and see if the app makes any kind of request to the internet.

edit: a single web search reveals that Flutter has indeed Google telemetry enabled by default. developing your web searching skills is a good habit for developers.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

There are tons of them

Edit: fmhy.net is one I recommend.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

for starters, it’s Cloudflared.

They admit to be sending your IP to Bing with every search too.

“For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting”

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

this is just low quality content trying to grab a few clicks. it should be removed.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I’d advise against using Brave, but that’s a different topic.

Just use the Flatpak. Do not care if it’s official, most packages in traditional package managers are not packaged officially, yet we use them all the time. Check the Flatpak repo instead to see if there’s something wrong.

Maybe check ungoogled chromium too while you’re at it.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Your options are reduced to the following:

Flatpak

Linux only package manager that works across distros. It supports sandboxing via bubblewrap, but be cautious because by default most programs in Flathub are not as sandboxed as they should. You can host your own repository but it is heavily centralized towards Flathub, controlled by Red Hat, IBM.

Flatpak uses OSTree to distribute and deploy data. The repositories it uses are OSTree repositories and can be manipulated with the ostree utility. Installed runtimes and applications are OSTree checkouts.

AppImage

You’re basically packaging your program and every single dependency up to the C library. Linux only.

An AppImage is basically a self-mounting disk image that contains an application and everything the application needs to run on the target systems

source (incredibly biased towards AppImage)

Snap

Canonical’s take at flatpaks. They are quite similar, but snaps use AppArmor instead of bubblewrap and the server is proprietary, so an inferior option and should be avoided. The only “advantage” is that it’s used by default in Ubuntu.

Nix/Guix

multi distro package manager with reproducible builds support, more akin to a traditional package manager (eg apt)

Snappy and Flatpak talk about how they make library versions work better together and blabla and how they solve a lot of issues but that’s just a praetext, the real elephant in the room is that they are a big wink to proprietary software, they were designed for that, they just can’t say it so they focus on other things in their PR statements.

How Nix and Guix work is that they are traditional “package managers” as such the user or the distributor must have access to the source code to compile it into a package, the interesting difference is that it is capable of keeping library versions apart and will automatically share libraries if they are exactly the same. But packaging still occurs downstream, not upstream.

Snappy and Flatpak allow packaging to occur completely upstream at the developers side, which means they no longer have to cough up source code to whomever who will package. Which leads to an inferior solution to the user with far higher memory and storage consumption.

source

Pkgsrc

this one is something in between Nix and traditional package managers. It’s main advantage is that it works in other UNIX-like OSs, like FreeBSD, NetBSD, IllumOS as well as in Linux. The only not Linux specific option in this list (other than docker, which is not a package manager but a container)

Docker

I wouldn’t recommend this one, since it requires packaging a whole OS that creates a lot of overhead. And it can be tricky to use with GUI programs.

Overall, I think that Nix/Guix present the most advantages, with Pkgsrc being a less known close second and Flatpak being in the third position due to it’s relative popularity and overall advantages over snaps and docker. Docker might be decent option if it’s a program designed for servers, tho.

I’d also recommend that you add your program to the AUR, because even if it only works on Arch and Arch based distros, it’s incredibly easy to do and maintain as long as the building of your program doesn’t change drastically between versions.

Edit: formatting

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

read OP’s post. if it not were for privacy in the first place and people ripping media, there wouldn’t be any copy left of those shows.

Of course not all pirates archive, but there’s an important percentage that do. Non-pirates are running out of options because each year less and less audiovisual productions release as physical media (old DVDs, more recently blue rays) and are only available through a subscription model where you do not own the actual content.

So piracy is pretty much the only route available to archive a lot of content.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

each instance and community has their own policy. you have to either follow it or if you disagree, you’re free to create your own. you can’t do that in Facebook or whatever. so no, just because a random post was removed from a certain instance, it doesn’t mean Lemmy is censored at all.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

this has nothing to do with communism.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

half of these are not even barely security related.

and if you meant privacy, well, definitely none of the images either. SimpleX, SearXNG, Tor and I2P

PS: I find it hilarious that you include proprietary software like Vivaldi or Obsidian. That is how flawed this post is.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

basically Newpipe but only source available, not really free software or open source, so they are restricting your freedoms.

Just keep using Newpipe instead.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago

Why all the hate?

Have you read the article? They install their VPN before the user decides to use that service, when they could simply install it when the user decides to subscribe to their VPN.

I’m going to be downvoted for this but it’s recommended on privacy guides because they generally lack strict criteria with browsers. Both Firefox and Brave make automatic connections that shouldn’t be allowed.

sir_reginald, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I mean, as long as you visit libgen with https your ISP shouldn’t be able to tell if you’re uploading books. But yeah, if Tor doesn’t slow down the upload too much, it’s a good protection measure.

For checking on metadata, I recommend you to use Calibre. It allows you to view and remove undesired metadata and you might also use Calibre to automatically add the correct metadata to the PDFs so they are searchable in libgen’s database.