At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza had been held in a notorious detention centre already facing allegations of torture and unlawful deaths in custody, officials from Gaza’s health ministry have told the Guardian.
The director general of the health ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, and a spokesperson for Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies are being examined, said a document found inside each body bag indicated the bodies all came from Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert where, according to photos and testimonies published by the Guardian last year, Palestinian detainees were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies.
“The document tags inside the body bags are written in Hebrew and clearly indicate that the remains were held at Sde Teiman,” Bursh said. “The tags also showed that DNA tests had been carried out on some of them there.”
I thought this would be relevant to Linux, since the options available to us Linux users are either unmaintained, hard to use, require a subscription, an account, or to upload your content to a server.
BentoPDF is the opposite of all that.
I just hope they add a dumb-proof way to install it (PWA? Flatpak?) for easy access.
Can I just save this as an html file (with all js inside, in a script element) and use this single html file to work with pdfs (after opening it in a browser)?
Lost in the awfulness of this entire pointless genocidal vanity revenge project is just how historically badly it is going for Russia. From an initial goal of total conquest, in a month their truce startping point has slid from 1) Total Capitulation to 2) All 4 'annexed' regions plus Crimea, disarmament & constitutional neutrality to 3) Give us Donbas, and maybe our stooges in the U.N. can run Ukraine to 4) Please freeze the lines and give us something, and stop hitting our gas facilities. Trump, as always, overplayed his hand with leverage he doesn't actually have, and now has nearly no sway over Ukraine - Zelensky is tellin him flat 'No'. European and domestic support is probably enough to keep Russia from any meaningful strategic wins at this point against a severaly degraded and over rated Russian army.
Ok dude while yes voting for the lesser evil is not the best option it's still better than just letting the evil evil win. Until there is another candidate that has a real chance of winning that is not a Democrat or a Republican then voting for the lesser evil is our best shot. We may not have another election because Trump is in power or at the bear minimum these next 3 and a bit years are going to fucking suck the first year already has.
So you just say fuck it for the time being and just watch people's family's be ripped apart because you didn't vote for the lesser evil? (For this administration I know it wasn't because of people not voting trump was just way more popular than Harris)
It's absolutely incredible how stunted people are in their political thinking that they're unable to imagine any meaningful political action aside from pulling a lever every 4 years. The west is so cooked.
I can imagine more meaningful political action than pulling a lever every 4 years but you can both pull the lever and do the political action it doesn't have to be one or the other
I live in a shithole western country too. The fact that my country is going to shit doesn't preclude me from understanding why. Meanwhile, if you want to see a country that's not going to shit just go look at China or Vietnam.
...yes voting for the lesser evil is not the best option it’s still better than just letting the evil evil win.
Who said that we should just let the evil win? I don't see that anywhere.
It's so weird to me how many people accept the binary that's been handed to them. As though the ones that hand you that choice would ever let one of the options be to your advantage.
The meme is literally about not voting for the lesser evil (which is currently the only other actual option in our political system) that in turn means letting the evil win
which is currently the only other actual option in our political system
Premise: false
Isn't it weird how continuing to do the things that got us here, isn't fixing the problems that were created? I wonder why that could be. I guess we'll never know.
I'm not sure that you're gonna find "The Answer" that you want on here, but this is my attempt: Vote for someone that isn't the lesser evil. Self Organize on a local level. Fight fascist supporters even when they pretend to be the good guys. Unionize.
I feel like we'd see a lot more progress if these types of comments were higher up in the chain, instead of buried at the end of a conversation. I see a lot of ridiculing people for not knowing this stuff, a la: xkcd.com/1053/
I understand it's the ignorant masses' responsibilities to educate themselves. But like, we could all stand to make it easier on one another instead of jumping down each other's throats all the time.
Also this isn't directed at you in particular, just in general. I just liked your response, and I wish more people would give answers like this.
When the Democrats run a candidate who tries to act more hawkish on Iran than the GOP, gives a big speech about how we're not giving our over funded military enough and how she'll give us the "deadliest military in history," gives a speech on immigration where she literally says DO NOT COME , all while currently and presently doing all that they can to assist Israel conducting an actual fucking genocide...
... it should be really obvious that people like you don't even know that the fuck is going on. You're not even supporting a lesser evil, at this point it's just a fucking more polite evil. They'd still be ramping up deportations, you just wouldn't have Kamala posting dipshittery gloating about it on Twitter, AND FOLKS LIKE YOU WOULD BE AT BRUNCH NOT GIVING A FUCK
You should've seen the hoods the other guy would have made us wear. Enabling a genocide of our colonial subjects is a small price to pay to maintain 5% of our dignity. I'm on the left btw
"Hey, so electoralism is a rigged game, because only wealthy and prestigious families have enough money to finance the popularity contest to get themselves or their puppet candidates elected."
Marxists in the 1800s, with the rise of representative governments:
"Hey, this system is proving to be the safest shell for capitalist rule, because wealthy capitalists are able to stack every election to get their puppets elected, and people have the illusion that they live in democracies"
Goldfish-brained liberals in the 2020s:
"Electoralism is gonna work this time, we just didn't vote hard enough before!"
I'd love to have a discussion about this. I am a socialist through and through. I believe that the system needs to be dismantled to achieve any meaningful change, and that no progress can realistically be made within the system.
I'd argue that there are 4 actions within the system. Vote red, vote blue, vote third party, and don't vote. I'd argue that all 4 options will never lead to meaningful change. However, given this, every American who is eligible to vote is forced into playing the game, there is no way to abstain. Even not voting leads to a meaningful outcome within the system, and thus is still playing the game.
If no actions within the system can change things, I pose that the only way to disrupt this system is by dismantling it from the outside via revolution.
This however, cannot be done overnight, even if you are consistently acting on it. These types of things take a general sense of civil unrest to get kicked off. I believe that under capitalism, this unrest is inevitable, and once it hits a tipping point, the revolution will start. In the meantime, I feel we have two actions we can take.
First, we should be ushering in the revolution. Organize, make people aware of the alternative, disrupt the system in any means you reasonably can, try to get people to be sympathetic to the cause, etc. Don't slack on your responsibility to prepare and eventually initiate the revolution.
Second, since we have no choice but to play the game we've been dropped in to, you should vote for short term damage mitigation. If you are forced to take an action within the system, I feel people have a moral obligation to try to reduce the harm to others as much as possible. This involves making a vote, since not voting results in almost the same outcome as a vote for the candidate furthest away from the one you considered least harmful.
I have yet to see an argument that shows how not voting is going against or dismantling the system. However, considering so many people believe that not voting is the right choice, I'm really interested in hearing someone explain it to me, as there must be some reasoning behind it that I'm not seeing.
The simple argument is that electoralism cannot work. Therefore, workers should front and vote for our own parties, to measure strength and prove the inability to gain change via electoralism.
I don't know if I understand what you are suggesting. Are you saying the working class should vote third party, or each person should vote for themself? Or when you say vote for our own parties do you mean not vote at all?
The working class should vote for socialist parties like PSL, participate in them, and organize with them. That's about the best we can do within the bounds of electoralism, but we should use that to organize for dual power and revolution.
I agree with both of you that we need to vote for socialist parties and organize with them. But that doesnt mean to support the lesser evil argument. Lesser evil argument will be that we need to vote for Hillary in order to avoid Trump for example, that is absurd and is the reason we cannot support this lesser evil stupidity. I hope Carrot is not defending this lesser evil position.
If you abstain from voting then you're basically lumping yourself in with people who don't care or actually are fine with the status quo. If you cast a blank vote then you're expressing your disapproval of all the candidates. Essentially saying "I'm willing to vote, but it won't be for any of you guys". This would make sense if the system worked but it doesn't.
I’d argue that there are 4 actions within the system. Vote red, vote blue, vote third party, and don’t vote. I’d argue that all 4 options will never lead to meaningful change.
Second, since we have no choice but to play the game we’ve been dropped in to, you should vote for short term damage mitigation.
Let's draw the logical conclusion here.
Short term damage mitigation is the goal. There are three options that incur short term damage. Option 4, however, lets one continue working or resting, therefore incurring no damage at all.
As all 4 options don't lead to any meaningful change, option 4 is the best option.
I don't think I understand what you're saying. Are you saying that the time it takes to look into a candidate is the damage being done? I was thinking on a larger scale. All 4 options lead to a politician getting sworn in, who will inevitably, directly cause people to die. Picking the option that appears to be likely to kill the least people would theoretically cause the least damage in their 4 years. I'm calling 4 years the short term here.
Damage mitigation isn't the only thing. By voting for the party you support you're showing solidarity with that movement and also demonstrating to everyone else how the system doesn't work.
how not voting is going against or dismantling the system.
Its refusing to play their rigged game, and spending your energies elsewhere.
Every single positive change from the US came not through voting or participation in the electoral process, but from force or the threat of force from below, usually in the form of mass protests, or enemies of the US empire defeating them militarily.
Windows 10 died a few days ago, leaving users with three options: stick with the OS, upgrade to Windows 11, or switch to an entirely different platform like macOS or GNU/Linux. But months before Microsoft dropped support for the OS, Linux-focused companies were already campaigning to poach Microsoft customers and convert them into Linux users.
The Document Foundation, the folks behind LibreOffice, started its push as far back as June this year, criticizing Microsoft's decision to end support, which would render millions of perfectly functional PCs obsolete, and presented Linux as a cost-effective and secure alternative. We have also seen initiatives like The "End of 10" Campaign by KDE, making the case for Linux and providing guides and info on how to switch.
Of all the projects trying to poach Windows users, Zorin Group might be the most aggressive, launching its biggest OS upgrade, Zorin OS 18, on the very day Windows 10 died.
In a recent post on X, Zorin Group celebrated the launch of version 18, claiming that it hit 100,000 downloads in "a little over 2 days". The company called it its "biggest launch ever" and claimed that over 72% of those downloads came from Windows.
Zorin OS 18 just reached 100,000 downloads in a little over 2 days 🎉️
Over 72% of these downloads came from Windows, reflecting our mission to provide a better alternative to the incumbent operating systems from Big Tech.
Thank you for making this our biggest launch ever! pic.twitter.com/6U4h3EQ3dq — Zorin OS (@ZorinOS) October 16, 2025
So what's the big deal with Zorin OS 18? The new version comes with a redesigned desktop that feels a lot more modern. It uses a lighter color palette and a taskbar that has a floating, rounded style by default. The developers also introduced a much better window tiling system. If you drag a window to the top of the screen, a layout manager pops up, similar to Windows 11's Snap Layouts. The main difference here is that Zorin allows you to create your own custom tiling layouts.
As for Windows app compatibility, Zorin OS 18 now includes an updated version of WINE 10 for better support of Windows software. On top of that, there's also an expanded database that helps when it detects a Windows installer. The system checks the file and suggests the best way to run over 170 popular apps, whether that means installing a native Linux version, using the web-based alternative, or firing it up through WINE.
Microsoft isn’t offering support for it, but their help was barely useful to begin with.
There’s a few small hoops to jump through to enroll in the Extended Security Updates program, after which Windows 10 devices will continue to be functional and secure for at least another year.
Ultimately, I’m all for folks going out and dabbling in Linux. Unfortunately, most consumers are interpreting this situation as a requirement to rush out and buy a new Windows 11 PC and that’s bad.
There are two massive hoops as far as I am concerned, no local account & ms office forcing the use of one drive. I know these arent that big of an issue for most people, but I will never do either of those things.
I'm not all too familiar with mass grave, but it does seem like a similar loophole to the win11 updates without TPM 2.0, in that it works but ms doesn't want it to, so you may run into the issue of your system bricking or ms holding your data hostage. Also as far as I can decipher ltsc only fixes the security issue, as far as I am aware the one drive push is still there regardless of version.
All in all, I believe that there are workarounds, but if ms is so keen on making it this hard to stay on win 10 I would rather just take the adjustment period to a Linux distro.
IoT is Internet of Things, devices where you usually don't know there is even Windows to begin with, due to some McDonalds Menu Picker overlay or whatever. There is no market for Microsoft acc or OneDrive as they are by themselves are rarely meddled with and are installed en masse. They would get security updates for 10 another years. But besides some differences, only corpos and no end user have a reasonable access to said release, so if you may be checked for legitimity of your software e.g. you try to use it in your business and get caught, it's obvious you haven't bought keys for it. So it's for personal use only.
It's okay, Microsoft can't hurt you here anymore. You have just been living your whole life in an abusive relationship. It's okay we will be nice to you.
If just this one OS, that i havent even really heard of, hit 100k downloads in two days, then there must have been like 100M downloads in the last week or so for all linux distros combined. Now i wanna see someone try to aggregate all download numbers from the major distros into a time plot to see if there is a noticeable change.
I think you'll be disappointed, the zorin boost is due to their marketing as Windows esque, I believe they just tell people how they are like windows. Extrapolating downloads for more linuxy distros from one that is supposed to be windows:Linux edition is not going to work out very well.
"Zorin Group" never heard of that. Seems to be a shop that just wants to lift along with the Windows 10 discontinuation tbh.
And if their selling point is running windows apps then they have no chance. You can't get better at being windows than windows already is. You'll always be one step behind the real thing.
And really you don't need to, most linux apps are much better now that windows apps are more and more dumbed down. Look at the "new outlook" for example. It doesn't even do local storage anymore, you must import all your email into the microsoft cloud overlord.
I guess it is the year of the Linux desktop for at least some people.
I've used Linux desktop in various forms for just over two decades, this has to be the fourth time it felt like Linux was having its chance to seize marketshare. Each time it ends up not being the mass adoption that people hope for but it feels like the community grows each time so I think it is neat nonetheless.
I'm ok with that. You hit a point where a community sustains, and is good. Lemmy is a great example of that. Often, when it grows past that, it can become.. unsavory.
Anecdotally, I was tinkering with it earlier this year and finally stopped being lazy and flipped my main PC over. After I talked about it enough in my friend chat, three more friends followed suit and a fourth is going to soon. It's not just the end of supporting Windows 10, it's all of the repeated bugs, glitches, and AI garbage Microsoft has been pushing everywhere so aggressively. People who would likely only rate themselves as "mildly" tech savvy are sick of it and willing to make a move, I feel.
I'm all for Linux adoption. However, seeing less tech-literate people feel as if they have to choose between an unsecured device and spending money they don't have on a new Windows 11 machine really makes me angry.
Most won't understand what no more security updates mean, and some overreact and get really worried.
Stop calling yourself a "refugee" whenever big tech fucks up something you were using. Anyone who thinks having to switch software is worthy of that word has no idea what it's like to be a refugee. Check your privileged ass.
For Years, you had the Option to use Linux. Since the release of the win 11 beta, Linux has not made any relevant big steps. The leopards have simply decided to eat your face this time.
A refugee would be someone losing their home in a bombing. A windows 10 turned Linux user is more like a Trump voter turned no kings protestor because he though sending the government emails will sure stop the anti trans laws.
And no, sOmE uSeRs hAvE tO uSe WinDoWs is not an argument. If everyone who was still on windows until now was reliant on it, why are they installing and switching to Linux? Every new Linux user is someone who was simply too ignorant to install it.
I worked for almost 2 years at a company with my Linux PC, until one day I requested a laptop for travel and they were shocked that I didn't had one, I asked for one with Linux but was told that that's not possible, that they only had windows laptops. I thought, okays this is temporary, as soon as I'm back from traveling I'll return the laptop and things will be back to normal... when I came back and wanted to return the laptop they said that that was my work computer that I should use for everything, I was like, "you do realize our work runs on a Linux server, right?". But nope, I had to use the Windows laptop until I quit a few months later. I knew of at least a couple other devs who were running Linux, but didn't say anything because then they would be forced to switch too, but at my exit interview I remarked that forcing me to use Windows was part of the reason I had left.
I guess my point is maybe don't make a big fuss and don't try to convince HR people about it, they just don't understand.
I work in IT (security). The reason they are so adamant on Windows at least in our place, is because it offers so many opportunities to go BOFH and lock everything down so much so the user can hardly do their job 😀 No other OS offers that, even Mac.
They think they need this to be secure. I beg to differ but unfortunately Microsoft is constantly feeding them with 'best practices' and other BS.
For Years, you had the Option to use Linux. Since the release of the win 11 beta, Linux has not made any relevant big steps.
I would argue it doesn't need to. It's pretty perfect these days as it is, especially with KDE (and the great thing about it having so much control over how your computer works and feels, Windows can never offer that).
Thats what I mean, in the last few weeks/months, there was no big thing that win users needed to be able to switch.
Linux in a vacuum is a great OS, and what it cant do in the context of Windows is more a „Proprietary formats and software being Industry standard” problem than a Linux problem.
I'm not saying that everyone should just abandon the standards , but that if you need to have these standards, nothing is going to change in a production envoirment that magically makes Linux work for you (in home you can argue about VMs and proton, but that's not a valid tactic for companies), and you need to keep using windows.
And the other way around, if you don't need any of these standards, you don't have any reason to still use Windows, except that you don't want to change.
Yeah and also, many of the drawbacks of windows don't really apply to companies. All the AI and MS account crap? Just switch it off in intune and M365 portal. Telemetry you can minimise with group policies. Crapware you can simply not install. It costs money? Sure but at a corp level so does Linux because they always want to pay a vendor so they can blame them when something goes wrong.
So we're bashing the people who installed Linux now if they used something else first? What, if they've ever used windows we should send them to the Gulag? Wtf is this take? Like hey you dumb fucking person who finally figured out how to get away from the corporate software you were taught to use in high school, you are FuCkInG iGnOrAnT for putting yourself in this position in the first place!!1!
Let's not talk about the multi billion dollar industry spent locking people into an ecosystem from day 1, because blaming high schoolers and teenagers for not switching to an OS best know for running web servers is an awesome use of our time.
Speaking from experience: no one thinks about operating systems as much as we do. We are not the norm. Most people don't want to use the computer to begin with, but conceded its faster than hand writing everything. The guy who paved my driveway will never install Arch, because he only uses the computer to get paid. My office's cleaner doesn't understand how computers can even be unsafe.
When I went to primary school we had windows computers. Same thing in high school. In uni, because I did comp sci, I used Linux and found it was better for me. 350 people went through first year with me. Most of them continued using Windows, although a good chunk used Mac too. Like 10 of us used Linux. It is easier not to switch and that's not going to change. So can we stop having a go at people for not having the same interests as us, because that's the only difference.
I'm not trying to insult you just make you and others laugh. Its kind of a stupid joke but maybe you are taking this place a bit too seriously. The world is fucked up we need a laugh sometimes. This is one of the only places on the internet where people would actually care about something like a refugee.
Being an edgelord on someone voicing an opinion about something serious can be construed as very unfunny, I don't know why you seem defensive, you are the troll in the situation.
No I'm not trolling and I'm not an edgelord. Many refugees sort of deserve what they get because they support authoritarian regimes. Go to Africa or the Middle East and you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who wants to genocide all gay people or people of other religions or something. It's not really an accident that they ended up in that situation, it's generations of shittiness and ignorance and immortality. Unfortunately the only way to be free is to arm yourself and educate yourself and fight for what is right. Nobody is going to give it to you. Nobody going to solve your problems for you. Those people who claim to care about your safety or something are just trying to use you because most humans are terrible.
I'm old enough to have seen this "flocking" several times. Some people stay and are pleasantly surprised. Most people go back a few weeks/months later, and leave a "Linux suxx" post behind them. I don't expect this time will be any different, and that's totally fine.
Many people will definitely go back, but the percentage staying might be better this time around. Linux has gotten a lot more usable and stable for those tech inclinced enough to be able to install it thanks in part to proton, immutable distros, flatpacks, Wayland, and improved defaults. Mint and bazzite are pretty darn good for daily use. I've never stayed on Linux as long as I have with this run, and I really don't feel much of a push to leave it. Most everything I want to do just works.
I agree, I notice more new blood around Linux compared to the previous "OMG, Micro$oft suxx, let's all ditch Windoze!1!!" craze (I guess it was Win8.1 -> Win10, maybe?)
many people will go back, but of these, i’m sure many will also come back eventually
i’ve tried a bunch of distros in my last 2 years with windows. many didn’t satisfy my needs at the time, so i stayed on windows.
but now, it’s been over a year since I definitely switched to linux, and over 6 months since i nuked (accidentally, but shhh) my windows partition. and i don’t plan on going back anytime soon.
Yeah it's been a long road for me to be fully Linux on my personal systems. I think I started messing with Linux circa 1997 and didn't switch over fully until I think Windows 7 went EoL.
right now im on Fedora KDE! it works well enough for me, it’s modern, it looks good, and most importantly (for me) it supports fractional scaling well (my laptop needs fractional scaling and that’s been the thorn in my foot for a while)
I love and hate bazzite. It's still what I use daily, but man is it weird. Just small little bugs, an it is an immutable os so that threw me off, couldn't do my wild an whacky project but atleast most everything worked right out of the box!
I’ve looked at Linux for years but it was always so intimidating to me. I finally installed it when my pc was being aged out of windows 10 and honestly it’s really fun to play around with even though I’m not super tech savvy. It’s easy enough to find a solution online if I run into any problems and everything is free!
This is usually the case, people make it a monster in their heads but it's not bad as long as you're willing to accept it's a different OS to be used differently.
But this time Linux actually plays video games right out of the box. No trickery. Just install steam and the rest of the experience is smooth as butter
this was so surprising to me; my favorite game (tropico) didn't have blinking tiles/polygons on my linux rig than it did on windows.
it was super strange because i put linux on my old windows laptop and it also got the blinking; but the game got better when i bought a linux-only laptop with zero proprietary stuff on it (not even the bios). go figure.
I agree. This time, it's actually different. Big name streamers and YouTubers are showing their support. Not just people in the tech industry, but random channels like EmKay and PewDiePie.
Linux is better than ever. Steam is a breeze. Wine support has never been better.
Meanwhile, Windows has more nasty surprises, underhanded backstabs, and security nightmares than ever before.
Ads. Steering me to store all my data in Microsoft’s cloud where they do (or inevitably will) scan it for profiling, AI training, government surveillance, etc. (which also annoyingly locks file handles when documents are open). Shoving AI into every product, even when it’s completely useless. Sunsetting useful products. Changing license terms for paid products, forcing subscriptions. Requiring online accounts only and eliminating workarounds. Removing features and replacing them with incomplete UI offering less control. Massive security holes. Annoying patch/upgrade system that interrupts me while I’m working. Flaky, bug ridden tools (Teams, etc) And updates that break hardware.
Yes, I find Linux terribly unusable on my laptop, way too many driver issues, hard to get into a secure state, and I miss apps like signal (no official build) mpc-hc (the replacements are all trash) and a functional version of thunderbird (lol at the tray icon third party implementation that just doesn't work). Etc, etc. I don't have a ton of unique needs but I do want theto work
^and this is of course with KDE, gnome is all that but with just a trash user interface. How many gestures do I need to use to make my computer treat me like an adult ffs.
It's still of course on my server (an old laptop which ironically can't be used as a laptop because at some point after some random update the login service broke and won't accept input from the keyboard lol) and other headless devices I don't have to actually use, thank god.
The signal org produces a debian-compatible package and an apt server. I suppose there are hoops to jump through to make that work reliably on other distros but by that point my interest in using Linux was dwindling. (I actually moved for the performance benefits which didn't materialize I think due to linux' piss poor memory handling -- I have a pretty low end laptop with only 16 gb of ram. the above we're all just issues along the way).
If you care to trust random strangers with your secure messenger that's a choice you can make (admittedly the desktop isn't particularly secure to begin with but even more reason to use the actual org's build imo). I'm sure christian heusel is very reputable.
I don't consider "wanting a secure app to be installed through first party means" to be particularly unusual. I know in Linux it's standard to just install random stuff from the internet with root. I've obviously done that myself, but for secure stuff I want first party. Making a flatpak wouldn't be hard (they probably just need to review someone else's work -- it's like an intern project)
So I went and looked it up, and signal-desktop is listed as a reproducible build, so theoretically you should be able to go and check that it conforms to the source
Please make sure all your drivers are up to date and your screen is set to the correct resolution because it seems to be that you’re missing the bigger picture.
“Underhanded backstab” being the correct expression or not aside=> W11 sucks ass imo, get mad if you want to. (Something tells me this isn’t about proper word choice for you though, but feel free to correct me on that if that is a thing you care about)
I mean your point may have been windows sucks ass but I'm aware of where I am and that's a completely uninteresting claim here. Why not rant about water being wet -- it's just as unique or interesting as your take on windows.
What I specifically asked about is underhanded backstabs, because that's a unique and interesting claim I haven't read 464335735 times before on lemmy.
Well, you’ll have to ask the person making that claim to begin with. I just added my take on the list of annoyances about W11.
I find your interest in the expression itself rather uninteresting. I do hope it goes without saying people say these things without meaning them literally.
All in all the step from W10 to W11 is such a letdown one might compare it to a backstab, underhanded or otherwise.
And with that I’m done defending an expression I didn’t use to begin with. Good day.
I think it's easily good enough for general use. It's only certain types of gamers (anti-cheat support is still pretty terrible), and people who are heavily attached to a specific Windows program that they spend a lot of time using, that will have trouble switching across full time. For everyone else, Linux is superior because it runs so much faster than the now incredibly bloated Windows. Depending on the distro, it's also arguably simpler than Windows too.
I think a lot of people expect Linux to work like Windows, and that's why they go back to Windows, even if some stuff is easier on Linux.
Many of us probably remember times when we tried to download random applications through a web browser, because that's what Windows expects you to do. People will try that, and be confused, why stuff breaks or not work at all.
I mean I love linux but the biggest hurdle is that certain software/games just aren't compatible. I use my pc for sim racing in vr a lot. With no ability to use iracing or my vr in linux I'm stuck. While I hate Windows and would prefer to use linux, I'm not going to abandon my hobby and all the equipment I have for it just to use an os I prefer. Throughout many different domains of use for a computer their are many different variations of stories like mine. Until the software and games people use can be supported in the linux ecosystem 'good enough' never happens. Like for basic computer use linux is already better than good enough its fantastic, it just works has intuitive user interfaces the bones of the OS are there. The problem is that many companies and software providers just aren't filling the gap that is the needs beyond basic web browsing, media playback and, playing older/indie games without anticheat. Without the substance people expect it doesnt matter how good the bones of the system are they are gonna be trapped in windows and linux will be stuck as the outcast programmers and enthusiasts use while knowing they have to still use windows for the niche use cases they have. And time and time again, eventually running 2 systems gets tiring and linix use/adoption slows back down again.
Let me guess, you might have tried Linux on n the past but only really started using Linux full time around 2021/2022, because every time I see someone saying "Linux only became user friendly around year X" is always around a 1 year mark after they started using it daily, because it's a lot more a matter of being used to than actual usability. I have been using KDE since 2004, and while things have changed it wasn't all that much, I don't remember any big usability refactor or anything of the sort happening, I'm fairly confident that if I were to put you to use a KDE 3.5 UI you would feel right at home.
I was one of those nomadic users, every year, since 1998 with Mandrake Linux.
I have always been in love with the idea of an open source OS, but if I couldn't game and work on it, it wasn't ready. Every year, until Valve made it easy to game on Linux.
I made the switch when Proton was released and never looked back.
My point is, every time users go back to Windows, they have their own personal reasons, but those will some day not be the truth anymore.
Gaming for me is the only thing I don't use Windows for. But for gaming I still do. Because I mainly game in VR and that's still so far behind on LInux 🙁
But I have 20 odd computers in the house so it's easy to have one with windows around (two in fact, another old one with Win 10 LTSC for programming some old radios).
I love KDE for all the options it gives 🫶 I don't like Gnome, Systemd and all the other redhat influences but they are easy to avoid these days.
Because I mainly game in VR and that's still so far behind on LInux 🙁
This is a major sticking point for me too. I've got a dusty Win10 partition I haven't booted in ages, and I was keeping it around mainly for VR, but then Microsoft had to go and just extinguish that too.
Monado is making impressive progress but it's a huge pain because they have to reverse engineer stuff with zero help from the manufacturers, instead of simply interfacing with the hardware.
I refuse to let Meta have any of my money though. I hope a good affordable VR kit comes out that isn't another hyper-proprietary blackbox.
my buddy wanted to switch from w10 to mint and i tried to recommend kubuntu because of wayland, i told him mint will be laggy because he has many screens with different refresh rates and mint can't handle that. he wouldn't listen, installed mint, and a few weeks later went back to w10 raging how linux suxx it's so laggy. could've just installed kubuntu but no, it had to be w10.
oh, always thought it was an x11 issue and affected AMD too. well anyway he's broke and he got a high-end nvidia gpu for next to nothing so I'm not going to even try to convince him to get another gpu
I've been trying to switch to Linux for at least 5 years. I wouldn't say it's any better now than it was then. I desperately want to love Linux, but it fights me at every step of the way. As a media pc... I have had zero success using it as a media pc. My one requirement is an on screen keyboard, but it doesn't come with one, and all the offerings I've found are shit. They won't work in some windows, or at all.
As a laptop... This has been the most successful. I've not had any real issues with Linux on various laptops, other than finding replacements for certain windows software, but that's not really a Linux problem.
As my main pc... Gaming has been fine. Hdr has only really recently become a thing, and it seems fine. However, I'm constantly coming across stupid things are ARE a Linux problem. Downloading and installing software has too many methods. I understand downloading a file to install something. I understand downloading a script to install something. I even understand why you'd need to make that script executable before it'll work. I don't understand what to do with a bunch of random files that claim to be an installer but don't seem to have an install script or a .deb package. I don't understand why once I map/mount a network drive, it fucking disappears after a reboot and needs to have the mount process be automated at every reboot.
Linux is just hostile to users. And while it is, it'll never massively succeed.
Same. I loathe Linux. I've been trying to use it since I was 19, periodically installing one distro or another, and I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I'm not saying it is bad or anything but I do not have the patience to fight with an OS over every tiny thing or having to look up a guide for every installation or having to double check what will work and won't because you're going to need a container.
Linux, I'm sure, is great but it's also one of the least user friendly operating systems out there, regardless of Distro. I keep trying to use Linux Mint and it keeps driving me up the fucking wall. Either Linux supports nothing without a battle or nothing supports Linux without a battle and I'm not remotely interested in fighting with my PC to do something simple. The second that that shit gets sorted is the second I'll be fine.
Well that is a weird experience. I can imagine having issues with one device or one or more applications, especially when trying to use windows software in Linux, but having to fight everything seems... Extreme.
Each person knows what it feels more comfortable with.
Linux is not inherently hostile, it just has a very different way of doing things that what you're accustomed, so you perceive it as hostile. It is sometimes easier for someone who never touched a computer to learn Linux that someone who grew with Windows to unlearn the habits.
There's nothing wrong with feeling comfortable in Windows, it's the system you grew up with and know how to work with and maintain.
Windows, starting with 8, is inherently hostile to its users in ways that are very difficult or impossible to mitigate. It's a black box of complicated machinery, a lot of which is trying to spy on you, steal your data, show you ads, upsell you on their stupid cloud services so that they can steal more of your data, etc. At this point, disabling all of this is really difficult and unreliable.
Linux on the other hand is like a box of spare parts that you can build whatever you want from. You really do need to read the manual, or else whatever you build will look and work like shit. However, if you do build something good, it's yours now in a way that a proprietary OS never will be.
For anyone wondering, linux offers over a dozen virtual keyboards and btw they aren't called on screen keyboards. All of them work great. And lots of distros come with one included.
I understand downloading a file to install something.
That's a terrible start. Software installation sources by priority: 1. Package Manager 2. Flatpak (Graphical utilities like Discover unite these two) 3. AppImages downloaded from the browser 4. Rpm/Deb packages downloaded from the browser, but really should be avoided 5. ONLY IF YOU REALLY KNOW YOUR SHIT YOU CAN RUN SCRIPTS TO INSTALL STUFF
You can add other stuff like toolbox after n.2 once you've got more experience.
Mint or any other ubuntu-derivative distro is 10000% the move. I've been running ubuntu as my os for a while now, and I've spent nearly the last decade on linux (makes me feel old saying that lol).
The other distros have a lot of strength, but at the end of the day i want to spend my time messing with things i want to mess with. I don't want random weird issues that I have to constantly debug, and everyone can agree that stability is debian's (and therefore ubuntu's) undisputed strength
If you are new I suggest bazzite, and get lutris to install windows apps outside of steam. It takes care of most of the stuff and to install software, on bazzite you use "sudo rpm-ostree install " and then reboot because bazzite uses an ostree system, or just get it in a flatpak if available. Between bazzite and knowing how to install packages outside of the flatpak repository, that should cover most of your bases for a few years and you can learn other stuff when you have the inclination. ChatGPT is really knowledgeable about Linux since it's open source. It's often much faster than digging through forums just be specific when you speak to it.
Also if you get your setup in a decent shape, you can shrink the partition and image it with dd with a single command, and then compress it to have a full system backup, which is basically your own image. Then you just write it back with a program like etcher later if you screw up your system and then just reexpand the partition to the full drive. If you get bazzite though you won't have much need to use the terminal or install anything outside flathub which will keep you from breaking the system. Also update the system occasionally, to get security fixes once a week or two is probably fine if you don't have open ports to run a server and aren't running random software.
Seriously, if I was new to Linux, coming from Windows, asking for a cheat sheet or Linux for dummies manual, everything you wrote would sound like absolute gibberish to me.
If this was someone's response to me when asking for advice I'd immediately reinstall windows where at least (from the perspective of a typical end user) they speak words that make sense.
It's the easiest way to get into Linux if you need good GPU support and I assume most people play video games. Bazzite is what finally got me into Linux because it mostly just worked out of the box which is something most Linux distros I tried before that never did. I would always end up breaking them in a day or two trying to get the GPU driver installed or something. Bazzite is really good for beginning users. Not the greatest for mid tier when you are trying to gain a deeper understanding because it replies heavily on containers and file system overlays.
Also you have to remember that for people who aren't ultra Linux nerds. It's an incredible amount of work to get Linux to work. It's often days of painful configuration and research per machine. This, and a lack of gaming support is the main reason I think most people avoid Linux, which is why I suggest bazzite, as the shit just works distro.
It seems to be okay for me, there is maybe a handful of things I install, and I don't want fedora so much as that's what bazzite is built on. If it breaks I'll just move on as I'm getting a bit more familiar with Linux. I will probably install Debian or mint or something with a much more simple file system when this one breaks.
Even though bazzite is fedora-based you're not really meant to interact with the fedora side of it all. At least that's the impression I've gotten from it.
I dont think it matters really for installing little programs. You probably shouldn't change your kernel or something. When you update the system it's just using rpm-ostree and doing a standard update through the repos, then it updates flatpaks. On the steamdeck since it's arch it will break pretty easily if you update the wrong thing, but bazzite is built in fedora.
The rpm-ostree systems is also good for anything that breaks because it's basically a snapshot system. Everytime you install something or update it creates a snapshot of your old working install which you can easily roll back to if anything breaks. You could use containers for stuff but that's not really necessary. It does probably make the system more stable in ways but then you have to deal with the headaches of using containers and having everything isolated from each other. For web services though containers are worth it as it greatly increases the security of the system.
Just ask people here, people just love anyone who switches over to Linux and want to learn about it. Because we actually love this operating system. Its so good.
When my kid started using Linux, once he knew how to start programs and install things, we went through where the files are on the file system and how to get there in a terminal. I think thats a good starting point so you understand the foundation of the system.
And then go though a basic Linux command line tutorial to learn about the common tools for listing files, filtering results, renaming and deleting files etc.
You can do that stuff in a graphical file manager too but you dont really get that understanding of how things work until you do it in the command line.
Depends on what you feel lost about, if it is the basics in general then I would suggest you start of and read about the basics here labex.io/linuxjourney they write about the very basics in a very simple way. I think they did a good job, they start of with what Linux is, what distros are to commands from the most basics as how to navigate in the terminal to more advanced combinations. They also have vms where you can try out the commands if you haven't switched yet.
If it is a cheat sheet as in commands then i would say it is better to make your own of the commands you care about but you can start of by using other ppls list like this one geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/l… but it can be overwhelming for you so use the linuxjouney first. Also it is very important to learn how to look up how to use the arguments in the terminal with man or -h to make it faster and less painful to use.
If you are lost about programs then there are a lot of good GitHub pages that links to useful programs and cli tools, you just need to search for awesome Linux list
When looking for programs is it very important that you know what distro you are on, what desktop environment (like kde, gnome, xfce) and what window composition you use (usually Wayland or x11, x11 is older and is more compatible).
For new ppl do I think Ubuntu based is best because almost everything has a Ubuntu version, when you feel ready can you test out other distros. I haven't tried bazzite, I started of many years ago on debian (a few random ones like arch and mint) and then pop os for many years and now cachyos, I liked my journey but that doesn't mean it is correct for others.
I would suggest to have all of your data you care about on a separate disk or have automatic backup of it so you can break your os without care. And if you start customizing would I suggest setting up a GitHub repo and commit your changes everytime you like what you see so it is easy to go back if you regret something.
I hoped this helped on your journey, I didn't want to overwhelm you so I hope I kept it simple enough 😁
Dude, I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years and nowadays I barely need anything beyond what I do on Windows and Mac. Just remember that everything is a file lol
Thanks for that, I've saved your post for when I switch. My laptop runs windows 11 but I'm not enjoying the experience. Used linux a bit in the 90s but I've forgotten everything and will have to start from scratch. Yep, when I get some time I'm going to make the jump.
With most modern distros, I would say that most typical users shouldn't have to go to the command line any more than they had to in windows (which is to say very seldom).
Yet there is that lingering reputation that you have to be some sort of command line guru to even think about using Linux- and that simply isn't true. Hasn't been true for decades.
This is true, but I think it is good to know the basics because sometimes is it easier just like it can be easier in Mac and windows.
I think it is good to know about the tools you have so you can do the best decisions for your use case.
But like you said the terminal is not a must (for most) so if you feel uncomfortable about it then the terminal is not a reason to not switch to Linux.
Glad I could be of help! Knowing the basics about the terminal (cli) will help you a lot with your raspberrypi when you wish to fix/change/do things on the fly. I often use ssh to connect to mine to do stuff from my phone haha
For all their faults, LLMs are pretty damn good at basic trouble shooting of Linux. Ideally prepare context for them with installation details. Use CLI client, recommend opencode CLI, plan agent is good to inspect the commands it will plan to run and let's you inspect and think through what it is doing. Can also ask for clarifications along the way.
Honestly, if you go that route I'd probably recommend using an LLM only for information and asking questions, but run commands yourself and actually read it's responses. If you don't understanding something, ask for elaboration. Otherwise, you risk too much automation, letting it set up configurations you don't have actual understanding of and making a spaghettified mess.
I've been a Windows user since 95. I tried a few times to move to Linux, but basic user unfriendly problems always brought me back to Windows. Now there's no option to go back. Linux Mint has had some bumps, but I'm properly motivated to jump over those hurdles now. I've become a proud Linux user this last week. Finally free of Microsoft's gravity.
I've been on Mint for 2 years now. So far the only roadblock I've hit is my obsolete audio interface not talking to it, and that's not Mint's fault. Everything else was a seamless transition for me. I will admit that I'm not super enthusiastic about GIMP though. Welcome to the club.
It's a laptop. Really I just need to buy a slightly newer interface. My old one was running in Windows 10 with a Windows 7 legacy driver. I haven't been bit by the recording bug lately so it hasn't mattered. I've been focusing on playing badly around campfires instead. Eventually I will get around to it. My list of hobbies is stupid long.
Right on. It's mostly the 1/4" and XLR inputs that I need. I should have picked something up by now, I just haven't. I'm sure Uli has something available that'll talk to Linux.
Aww, man alive. Most perfect desktop environment I've seen in years, and then it's a full OS rather than just a DE. Had been looking in the ArchWiki for how to install it and everything.
I remember someone on Discord server I used to be on kept telling people to "use Linux" which back then, I thought it was some scary OS for people who's tech savvy and wrote him off to be annoying. It was few years when I have my own laptop as early birthday present that I find Windows 10 annoying and remembered Linux exist so I run up a virtual machine and watch so many videos on YouTube about it. Then, I made USB-Boot and installed Linux Mint.
Far from perfect but I feel so much more comfortable using Linux over Windows, feels so much more smoother
As a Linux Noob, Linux was lot easier than I expect it to be. Think it was me having the "This isn't Windows so I might as well as research about anything Linux related" mindset which it paid off for me. It got to point where Windows is now my secondary OS (Mainly to use it to use Tomb Editor to make custom Tomb Raider levels which is annoying to get it running with Wine which I don't know how to troubleshoot at all.)
It's ironic how it's now my main OS and if you told me several years ago that I would be mostly using Linux, I would think you're talking total nonsense.
I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like "now it won't boot". Once you get over that initial setup, it's not much different than windows or apple.
If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.
I think about half the time I've installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.
I'm really enjoying the learning curve with Linux because it's a valuable skill to master. On the other hand, every time I've had to "go under the hood" with Windows, it's been to keep it from doing something awful to me.
I hope this doesn't mean the enshitifcaiton of Linux as we start to cater for people who don't want to learn.... We watched it with Microsoft products, though they also had a profitable reason to nerf their software.
Being simple to use out of the box is NOT a bad thing on its own. We are simply used to seeing the proprietary profit-driven version, which is the path to enshittification. When something works great out of the box but you still own your machine and have access to any damn thing you want that's hidden from view by default, that is just a good product.
I've been an engineer in electronics and software for over 20 years. I have a masters in software engineering. I currently work on C and C++ code every day for embedded systems, including one that's embedded linux. The terminal is my comfort zone. Screens full of super-legible monospaced text please my eyes.
I run Linux Mint Cinnamon (btw) on every computer of mine, even my work machine, and I don't care who knows it!
I recommend it to anybody of any skill level who will listen.
It doesn't have to. KDE is a great example here. Out of the box, it's extremely simple to use, as well as familiar in look and feel to Windows. But if you want to - it gives you a lot of customization options. So it doesn't seem to lose out on anything due to being simplified by default.
And frankly, a lot of Unix software could use a similar approach. I know it's not that simple, but it helps the users greatly - particularly new ones, but experienced ones too. Perhaps this wave of Windows refugees will in some way lead to progress in this area.
My biggest concern is the whole "removing powerful features = user friendliness!" mentality that these big tech companies have been pushing for years.
Why make users smarter when you can make software worse and charge more for it?
The dummies don't get the bigger picture, they just see "nobody needs powerful features that make things too confusing for me!" My hope is that they don't flood Linux with this drivel - profit margin or not, it's a toxic cultre that has already been created in commercial software.
oh yeah this is a fantastic language learning tool
(although it can bring up problems with tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai, Mandarin, Cantonese, etc where the lyrics often abandon the words' inherent tones and follow the song melody instead. )
I have lrcget run on my library to grab missing lyrics each night and use Symfonium for listening and displaying the lyrics. If I need to, I go out to Genius.
I tried a lot of them. SongSync was the only app that gave me decent results. It can download synced lyrics like you want, but it depends on the lyrics provider. Spotify doesn't work, Apple does but kinda broken. Stick to the other options.
You are going to fuck this up. Don't come crawling back to me when you lose all your data since the dawn of time and you completely brick this goddamn computer. This is your one and only warning.
With this ~~character's~~ file's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a ~~saved game~~ backup to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.
I would argue is less secure because there's more potential for signals to be intercepted, and you are only in control of a portion of the network (the other half being in control of your service provider)
When you're on you're own Wi-Fi you're usually much closer to your access point and in your home where you control the network (which has less range) and the space around it.
Either way the difference is minimal as both can be intercepted and attacked
Decrypting the 4g/5g network will require a key from the telecommunications company. I argue it's insignificantly less secure because a malicious actor can intercept it and decrypt it if they manage to steal the key from the company.
Practically, only your government would be able to get a copy of the key. But they'd also be able to watch your actual cable internet as well. And when your government gets interested in you then you fucked all the way up.
Say you access a VPN located over seas from your phone while on mobile data. Then your traffic is encrypted and your mobile data provider (for your phone) should only see traffic to one IP address.
Say you access the same VPN while at home connect to wifi or Ethernet on a PC (or on your phone), then your ISP should only see traffic to the one IP address (that's located over seas).
Now let's say your are tech savvy enough to run a Wireguard setup and or Tailscale setup at home and make your own VPN. Then you access that from work or from overseas with a mobile phone or laptop. All your traffic should now show as connecting to your homes IP address directly, but keep in mind your home ISP provider then sees you connecting to sites like Google, Facebook, or Lemmy.
Using a VPN makes the original question redundant. The VPN would have everything super encrypted for either home wifi or home 4g/5g. Your question transforms into "can i trust this vpn company"
It's going to depend on what types of data you are looking to protect, how you have your wifi configured, what type of sites you are accessing and whom you are willing to trust.
To start with, if you are accessing unencypted websites (HTTP) at least part of the communications will be in the clear and open to inspection. You can mitigate this somewhat with a VPN. However, this means that you need to implicitly trust the VPN provider with a lot of data. Your communications to the VPN provider would be encrypted, though anyone observing your connection (e.g. your ISP) would be able to see that you are communicating with that VPN provider. And any communications from the VPN provider to/from the unencrypted website would also be in the clear and could be read by someone sniffing the VPN exit node's traffic (e.g. the ISP used by the VPN exit node) Lastly, the VPN provider would have a very clear view of the traffic and be able to associate it with you.
For encrypted websites (HTTPS), the data portion of the communications will usually be well encrypted and safe from spying (more on this in a sec). However, it may be possible for someone (e.g. your ISP) to snoop on what domains you are visiting. There are two common ways to do this. The first is via DNS requests. Any time you visit a website, your browser will need to translate the domain name to an IP address. This is what DNS does and it is not encrypted by default. Also, unless you have taken steps to avoid it, it likely your ISP is providing DNS for you. This means that they can just log all your requests, giving them a good view of the domains you are visiting. You can use something like DNS Over Https (DOH), which does encrypt DNS requests and goes to specific servers; but, this usually requires extra setup and will work regardless of using your local WiFi or a 5g/4g network. The second way to track HTTPS connections is via a process called Server Name Identification (SNI). In short, when you first connect to a web server your browser needs to tell that server which domain it wants to connect to, so that the server can send back the correct TLS certificate. This is all unencrypted and anyone inbetween (e.g. your ISP) can simply read that SNI request to know what domains you are connecting to. There are mitigations for this, specifically Encrypted Server Name Identification (ESNI), but that requires the web server to implement it, and it's not widely used. This is also where a VPN can be useful, as the SNI request is encrypted between your system and the VPN exit node. Though again, it puts a lot of trust in the VPN provider and the VPN provider's ISP could still see the SNI request as it leaves the VPN network. Though, associating it with you specifically might be hard.
As for the encrypted data of an HTTPS connection, it is generally safe. So, someone might know you are visiting lemmy.ml, but they wouldn't be able to see what communities you are reading or what you are posting. That is, unless either your device or the server are compromised. This is why mobile device malware is a common attack vector for the State level threat actors. If they have malware on your device, then all the encryption in the world ain't helping you. There are also some attacks around forcing your browser to use weaker encryption or even the attacker compromising the server's certificate. Though these are likely in the realm of targeted attacks and unlikely to be used on a mass scale.
So ya, not exactly an ELI5 answer, as there isn't a simple answer. To try and simplify, if you are visiting encrypted websites (HTTPS) and you don't mind your mobile carrier knowing what domains you are visiting, and your device isn't compromised, then mobile data is fine. If you would prefer your home ISP being the one tracking you, then use your home wifi. If you don't like either of them tracking you, then you'll need to pick a VPN provider you feel comfortable with knowing what sites you are visiting and use their software on your device. And if your device is compromised, well you're fucked anyway and it doesn't matter what network you are using.
If it's from a random thief, both are about equality secure, they rely on proven cryptographic methods.
If it's from somebody powerful enough to make an ISP bend the knee, then they are equally insecure because those cryptographic methods assume you trust the underlying infrastructure. If you do not though, then yes using a VPN will help as you are adding your own level of encryption on top.
I use a Windows VM for apps not available on Linux and just want to cut out all the telemetry possible.
AtlasOS is installed as a Ameliorated Playbook and makes a ton of opinionated changes that aren’t privacy or necessarily performance related. Disabling the Windows 11 right click menus in favor of the legacy one, disabling window shadows, changing the wallpaper, etc. Privacy+ looks appealing, I wanna know if anyone has tried both and can tell me differences, like if one or the other improves privacy more.
Could you please use the cross-post feature instead of making a separate post in each community? That way our front-ends can consolidate multiple cross-posts into one post instead of it being listed multiple times.
Honestly, doing it your way looks like spam. This is what I see in my feed:
Oh sorry, I had heard that was fixed awhile ago but apparently not.
What I don't like about lemmy crossposts is having the whole post text inside block quotes, and sometimes isn't formatted properly. I think that and showing a link to the original post is bad design, like why would it matter if a post is a crosspost or not?
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Simon Willison writes a fawning blog post about the new "Claude skills" (which are basically files with additional instructions for specific tasks for the bot to use)
How does he decide to demonstrate these awesome new capabilities?
By making a completely trash, seizure inducing GIF...
He even admits it's garbage. How do you even get to the point that you think that's something you want to advertise? Even the big slop monger companies manage to cherry pick their demos.
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …
In March 2016, someone conjectured on math stackexchange, in a 1-point question, that “Any entire function without zero is constant”. People quickly responded with the obvious counterexample of the exponential function, and explained why the OP’s argument failed.
But in October 2025, if you do a Google search for “non-zero complex function” its AI nonsense tells you, based on that obscure math stackexchange page, that:
“... a key theorem states that any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant, often written as f(z) = e^g(z) for some other entire function g(z), notes MathOverflow and Mathematics Stack Exchange.”
FFS Google, turn off this garbage generator and just link to entire pages people can read and assess for themselves, and which (if you put some effort into making your ranking algorithms work *against* the SEO spam and the AI slop) might have a decent chance of being accurate.
I'm starting to suspect that mathematics is not an emergent skill of language models. Formally, given a fixed set of hard mathematical questions, it doesn't appear that increasing training data necessarily improves the model's ability to generate valid proofs answering those questions. There could be a sharp divide between memetically-trained models which only know cultural concepts and models like Gödel machines or genetic evolution which easily generate proofs but have no cultural awareness whatsoever.
Kind of a ramble: So, I’ve been out in the wild recently. I use discord and have noticed that in most of the servers I’m in, either they have an explicit no-genAI policy or quarantined sections where genAI content is allowed. On one podcast’s server, I posted a complaint about some genAI content that was posted to the podcast’s socials, and the embed was removed because it showed the genAI content- 10/10, love to see it. On another server, I figured out that the channel was created specifically because they had a sealion problem but didn’t want to ban their sealion (it appeared to be just one).
An interesting (read: stupid) thing about this sealion was that they are a self-styled leftist that was pro-AI. I won’t try to replicate any of their nonsense here, because A) it was nonsense stemming from a refusal to believe any anti-AI data and a lack of understanding of how LLMs work, and B) I don’t want to look like I’m posting about some kind of argument I had elsewhere here in order to score internet points, as I’m self aware/anxious enough to know that I sound exactly like that right now.
They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin. There isn’t much about this guy on the internet. All I can gather is that they are some kind of breadtuber or in the breadtube orbit. It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”. Either they don’t understand how the technology works (i.e. ignorant) or are accelerationist, wanting both the destruction of the environment and art (i.e. wilfully stupid)
Anyway, this exploration has shown me that some leftists don’t support copyright protections. I understand that from a couple different perspectives: 1. The main beneficiaries of copyright protections are large media corporations, and 2. it can be interpreted as trying to capitalistically extract fictional value, much like a landlord charging rent. I’m not trying to debunk this (I don’t think I’m representing this well enough). My thought is that I don’t give a shit about corporations losing money, what I care about is the work of individual artists being under/de-valued. Copyrights are an imperfect method that artists use to try seek justice, so it’s a grey area for me. Coffin in the article linked paints the situation as black and white: anyone who tries to stop someone “stealing” is actually rent seeking, whether or not they are a megacorp or a starving artist. (edit) I think this comes from Coffin's "extremely pro-AI" agenda, i.e., being anti-AI is enough to be reductively lumped together under some conspiratorial pro-capitalist agenda.
End of ramble, sorry that there wasn’t much of a point or structure here. Would love to hear any thoughts that come out from reading this.
E: note that is posted as a common criticism of Coffin.
E2: ::: spoiler re: video above: I really didn't know about this before writing that edit. I did some more reading. Coffin is something of a pick-me internet guy, his entire personality crystallised by that video. He's moved from internet trend to internet trend, one of note being gamergate, formerly anti, now pro (yes, as of 2024). He also did rap parodies? Anyway this isn't about him. :::
[Copyright i]s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money.
I wanted to point out something else: that our world consists increasingly of nothing but large numbers (also known as bitstreams), and that - for reasons having nothing to do with emergent properties of the numbers themselves - the legal system is presently committed to treating similar numbers radically differently. No one can tell, simply by looking at a number that is 100 million digits long, whether that number is subject to patent, copyright, or trade secret protection, or indeed whether it is "owned" by anyone at all. So the legal system we have - blessed as we are by its consequences if we are copyright teachers, Congressmen, Gucci-gulchers or Big Rupert himself - is compelled to treat indistinguishable things in unlike ways.
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. [...] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for "Generative AI" who gets trotted out to say "We want these tools to succeed". No, we don't, you blithering bellend.
My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?
If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.
I’m sure this is fine, largely because he is an idiot. Probably bad news for other shareholders and customers though.
Anyone else getting “when I die, you’re all joining me in my mausoleum” vibes from musk?
note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!
compute! in space! "what do you mean 'compute what'? compute!" I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it'll run Gemma![0] magic!
SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.
scan-time "inference", like you'd definitely know every parameter you'd want to query and every result you'd want to have, first-time, at scan! there's a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.
and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that's before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list
good god.
I guess the one good bit here is that it isn't the "we're gonna micromachine them in orbit!" bullshit fantasy, but I bet that's not far behind
[0] - "multimodal and wide language support" so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs... input... and... response... which again goes back to all those pesky "interaction" and "network" and "storage" questions.
The NVIDIA Inception startup projects that space-based data centers will offer 10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth.
Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:
the damage is multifaceted in changing the reasoning patterns and is persistent against large-scale post-hoc tuning.
It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain't happening
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Calling someone out for fascist ideology is seen as "harassment" by the Framework team. Enjoy the Nazi bar, Nirav.
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MNT Reform's doing a similar thing to Framework, but its nowhere near what they offered. The team is completely free of venture capital, and its got a non-binary head representing it, so it should be safe from a fashtech turn.
Lunedì 20 ottobre 2025 un maxi-down ha colpito numerose piattaforme globali a causa di problemi ai server di Amazon Web Services (AWS). Il disservizio, partito dal cloud di Amazon, ha generato interruzioni e rallentamenti a catena su applicazioni consumer e strumenti professionali in tutto il mondo, con oltre duemila segnalazioni registrate negli Stati Uniti e problemi di navigazione segnalati anche in Italia.
wine updated to bleeding edge
dxvk updated to latest git
vkd3d-proton updated to latest git
wine-wayland/em-10 patches updated
fixed news not loading in black desert online (revert GL/VK patch in e...
Stamattina siamo passati a NodeBB 4.6.1, è una release principalmente di [em]bug fixes[/em] tra cui uno particolarmente fastidioso che metteva un carattere strano [code]'n'[/code] nell'oggetto perdendo della formattazione dai post che arrivavano da Mastod
Stamattina siamo passati a NodeBB 4.6.1, è una release principalmente di bug fixes tra cui uno particolarmente fastidioso che metteva un carattere strano 'n' nell'oggetto perdendo della formattazione dai post che arrivavano da Mastodon e da Friendica.
In realtà avevo già sistemato questo bug qualche giorno fa perché avevo aggiornato prima del rilascio della 4.6.1 e non appena avevo visto che questo bug era stato risolto ma ora ne ho approfittato per allinearci con la release stabile.
Multiple online platforms including Amazon's cloud unit AWS, Robinhood, Snapchat and Perplexity are all experiencing outages, according to the Downdetector website monitor.
Was hoping if anyone wouldbe kind enough to tell me if there was a good alternative to Google-Fonts ? I wish to use all those cool fancy HTML/CSS fonts without going to Google
Ummmmmm have you heard about the weegers? It's pretty bad you know, try reading a real newspaper like the New York Times instead of your usual russian propaganda...
Þe article reads like an ad, and setting up þe server side takes a lot of steps so þe claim þat it's "quick and easy" is silly.
Distributions nowadays come with wiþ sshd disabled by default. It's, like, þe first þing an experienced user enables, but I'll bet a ton of newbs never do it, and may not know how. I've even come across distributions which don't install OpenSSH by default! Insanity.
þe article implies configuring NFS or samba is harder... and I'd agree. Home LANs are often not enterprise-grade, wiþ nodes connected over unreliable and relatively slow WiFi, and NFS has several moving parts and is chatty. Samba/CIFS is better for reliability, but requires a fair bit of knowledge to configure. And when it does fail, you can be left wiþ zombie processes and hung network connections. Scp is better for straight for transfers.
Not all users are aware þat þere are Android clients which understand sftp, and not all newbs are aware þat you get free sftp wiþ sshd, or þat sshfs exists.
People keep inventing more LAN filesharing apps when ssh/scp/sftp already exist, so þere's a need ssh isn't filling. Maybe it just needs a custom app, alþough I'm fond of apps like Material Files + sftp remotes for Android, and sshfs for Linux.
However, by far þe easiest is þat I set up SyncThing ages ago and haven't had to manually copy a file since. Þe exception is music, because I don't want my entire library on my phone; I now use Subsonic + Tempo and a "mobile" playlist which Tempo syncs, but getting music onto þe server requires sftp, and just getting a directory listing is painfully slow. If Subsonic had a file upload API, bidirectional playlist syncing would provide iTunes-like music library maintenance, which was darn near perfect design.
Anyway, I agree: solutions like QuickDAV keep popping up probably because people don't know about better options.
Basically the advantage is that it’s ridiculously easy to set up. You just install the app and open it. The downside is that it’s ad-hoc. It’s not meant to be a long running server like smb.
"go to another machine on your LAN" So its basically syncthing? But that its not able to decide who gets whick file as there is only one option to log in in QuickDAV? But maybe more intuitive?
Syncthing (as the name implies) is meant to synchronize folders across machines. QuickDAV is meant to transfer files/folders from one machine to another. They definitely both have there uses, and there uses might overlap in a lot of cases, but they also have there own niches. Like, I wouldn’t use Syncthing to transfer a photo to my desktop once, and I wouldn’t use QuickDAV to keep my photos directory synchronized across several machines.
KDEConnect is honestly going to be better. It's runs on everything (yes, Gnome and Cinnamon), has transport and device security, and offers more than just file transfer.
GSconnect extension on GNOME, and its honestly amazing. Send files, copy clipboard, auto pause my music when a phonecalls comes in. Custom commands from the phone to lock my session if I'm away from my desk. Such a great application.
KDE Connect fucking RULES! The ability to send clipboard from phone to pc, send files, control media, remote mouse input, its low key one of the most useful software I've ever used.
KDEConnect is great, but I don’t think it can share a folder. If you want to transfer a folder from, say, a MacBook to a Linux PC, I think QuickDAV would be better suited than KDEConnect. Also, QuickDAV works on Win/Mac/Lin.
I just install openssh server, because I need it anyways, and use an SFTP client to transfer files. Seems to be fast, secure, and easy. No new ports to open up.
I've transferred many terabytes of data this way, no complaints. Rsync is nice for syncing huge folders, and walking away, so I'll also use that when the need arises.
You’re strawmanning their comment— I’d imagine they’d have the same, if not more, issues with snap.
Flatpak doesn’t integrate well with all systems. For me personally, on Arch, I have to update and store Flatpak versions of some dependencies, like proprietary Nvidia drivers, separately from the rest of my system and its package management system. And it does take up some space to store the runtime too.
Also Flatpaks may require some extra set up and/or workarounds due to their sandboxed environment. That’s not inherently bad and has some big security upsides, but it’s a consideration.
Also I don’t know how well it plays with immutable distros, but I’d imagine there may be similar integration issues there, too.
It’s still probably a lot easier for devs to have a consistent distribution format though, and they are typically more secure, so I’m not saying there’s not merits to only providing a Flatpak. Just pointing out that your reply here was misguided, imo.
Banks can track each banknotes serial number when you receive them from the ATM and when they are returned from the store you spent them at. This data could then be used to create a complete profile of your spending habits.
Doesn't work very well if you buy something directly from someone. Or if your cash is given out as change. Seems like it would make a wildly inaccurate profile.
Given a large enough time frame this can be treated as random noise which is easily filtered out, and this data isn't necessarily meant to track your supermarket shopping. For example, you can use it to figure out where somebody went who has gone into hiding. They might have cleared out their bank accounts before leaving and with that data you can see where these banknotes are now showing up. Just wait at the store they apparently visit every Tuesday.
That’s completely made up. Most bills are given out to other customers once used in a store, the amount of bills that are used once and returned to the bank would be well under 5%.
Fantastic fabricated story though. Money laundering which has been done for decades would defeat this, it’s a scary story to share that has zero basis on reality.
Netzpolitik recently did an article about that. I consider them a credible source. How often bills are used before there are returned to the bank heavily depends on the denomination. Larger bills don't circulate as much and at least in my country most stores return their cash income to the bank on a daily basis. People also tend to spend their money around the area where they live, so even if you couldn't figure out which exact store a targeted person spends their money at due to circulation (which I doubt), you can still quickly find the general area in which they are staying.
Bargeld gilt als anonymes Zahlungsmittel. Dabei ist anhand der Seriennummer durchaus ersichtlich, welche Routen Geldscheine nehmen. Die Infrastruktur zum Bargeld-Tracking wird immer weiter ausgebaut.
Without some type of visual confirmation, it’s all noise.
On my way home from work, I grab $600 from the atm, $300 for my wife’s tattoo, $200 for me, and $100 for wife spending money.
After the appt the tattoos artists wife takes $200 and flys across country that night. I spend my $200 at the peelers, all those go to a dozen different girls and servers. My wife the next day goes shopping at an outlet mall and spends her $100 at 4 stores. The tattoo artist spends his $100 on beer.
We live on the same block and I pulled the money out across town. Who’s is the original takers purchases….?
It’s 95% noise, it’s useless unless you’re an investigator and have boots on the ground.
Again, it’s a fun story to share around the campfire though. Is it possible, yes, can it be done in actual practice, absolutely not. Not without some other information.
Yes that would destroy some data points but we are talking about a statistical approach here. How often do you give other people cash directly in comparison to spending it at stores. Given enough time and collected information local concentrations will show up. Its surveillance through data analysis with a new veneer.
I ONLY give other people cash, all my other purchases are debit/credit. Like MOST people and stores since Covid
The only time this works, is if it’s targeted, and that means an investigator is doing it. An automated system wouldn’t know what to do with any of the data. You’re severely overestimating how much people spend cash around them, that’s usually when it’s plastic. People use cash in “sketchier” places.
Again, zero basis on reality, it gets “destroyed” at every step without some manual intervention.
I ONLY give other people cash, all my other purchases are debit/credit.
If you always use card payments whenever it's possible, it obviously isn't necessary to analyze your cash transactions to learn where you are because you are already disclosing it 😀
Like MOST people and stores since Covid
There are close to 2 billion unbanked people in the world. In the US, it's less than 6% nationally, but over 10% in some states.
Many people who are not unbanked also often avoid electronic payments for privacy/security and other reasons.
The cash serial number tracking being described in this thread is useful for locating the neighborhoods frequented by someone who (a) avoids using electronic payments, and (b) maybe obtains cash from an ATM (or perhaps check-cashing service, in the case of an unbanked person) in places other than the neighborhoods they live in or frequent.
There are close to 2 billion unbanked people in the world. In the US, it's less than 6% nationally, but over 10% in some states.
……
If they don’t use a bank, how are they pulling money out for it to be tracked?
See, none of it makes any sense lmfao.
The cash serial number tracking being described in this thread is useful for locating the neighborhoods frequented by someone who (a) avoids using electronic payments, and (b) maybe obtains cash from an ATM (or perhaps check-cashing service, in the case of an unbanked person) in places other than the neighborhoods they live in or frequent.
Which is useful to who…? The only time that information is useful, would be for an investigator, so… again… someone, boots on the ground, and doing visual verification. And an investigator and plenty of other useful metrics with less noise.
It
Makes
Zero
Sense
In
Reality!
The person originally started talking about spending habits, and shifted to finding criminals. Those are two whole-fully different situations that need different information points, and are also gathered in significantly different methods.
If they don’t use a bank, how are they pulling money out for it to be tracked?
One example I mentioned in my comment you're replying to is check cashing services. Millions of people in the US receive money via things like check or money order and need to change it to cash despite not having a bank account to deposit it in; this usually involves identifying themselves.
Submitting Organziation Name and role, if any, in the Project Glory Ltd Project owner and provider of all the software and devices/pheripherals used under the experiment.
One example I mentioned in my comment you're replying to is check cashing services. Millions of people in the US receive money via things like check or money order and need to change it to cash despite not having a bank account to deposit it in; this usually involves identifying themselves.
…
Those are done at a teller, not an ATM. An ATM requires a bank card, cashing a cheque at a teller does not. The post and everything that’s being discussed is about ATM tracking…
It doesn’t make sense when you actually understand how the system works… but of course people that don’t quite understand the system can be fooled by how it’s possible. But it isn’t, and not for the reasons you’ve suggested, as I’ve countered. It just doesn’t make sense because of all the NOISE.
No manual intervention needed just track everything and retain the data for a long time. Then you can query the database for all serial numbers your target has ever taken out of an ATM and where they where returned. Circulation will diffuse these results somewhat but that follows a normal distribution. That means it is much more likely that a bill that was spent at a store by your target which is given out again as change, is more likely to be spent at another store near that original store. Aggregate this information over a couple of weeks or months and you will get a heatmap of locations to check out. You can run this operation automatically on all bank accounts if you want. Threshold the heatmap at some significant value and you get a list of stores visited by each person with X% probability.
Except most people use multiple cards, multiple banks etc. there will absolutely need to some visual verification to be able to ever establish a starting point. It just doesn’t work.
It’s a neat proof of concept, but in reality, that would never hold up in court.
Give your head a shake, I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you actually believe this is being used or can be used for what you claim.
I'm a tradesman and get paid in $100 all the time. A guy from the city gave me $100 for a job. My wife, who is a treasurer for Girl Guides, traded her cookie money of $10's and $20"s for my $100 and deposited it in the bank. Now the FBI can prove that my customer has an unhealthy cookie addiction.
Lots of stores also gives bills back out, the system makes zero sense, it can’t track anything at all. Like maybe 5% of bills are used once and then returned to the bank.
Most places don't do cash back, and the ones that do tend to have a limit of like $40. Wal Mart is a bit of an exception, as they'll do $100, but you aren't getting a $100 bill from them through their self checkout. You'll only get 20's.
So if you go to Wal Mart, and you go to one of the few real people to check you out, and you ask for it back in a $100 bill, and the teller happens to have gotten a $100 in since they had started that day, and the front lead hadn't already cashed out the register since they received that $100 bill, then yes. In that case you'll get a $100 bill and will slightly fuzz up the tracking metrics they could theoretically do.
ATMs give out $20 bills. In order to get one back as change you'd have to pay with a bill larger than $20. I don't remember the last time I carried something larger than a 20.
I just occured to me that could be the reason for when a color printer wont even let you print, say, pure black text, even though it only has emptied some of the colored ink, but still has plenty of black ink left to do the job...
Isn't it common knowledge? I've known about it for at least two decades...
BTW - you can easily work around it. Get someone else to buy your printer for you, or trade with someone who has the same printer... Now, they will still be able to match it to the printer, if they find it at your home, but other that that, you are free...
PS. Don't use your printer to blackmail FBI or CIA. 😉
As I said - but there could be a connection. Did you use cash or a card? Some places you have a membership, or they ask if you want the receipt on your mail...
If you don't know how your credit cars ties you to a printer with a serial number, sold by a store that saves it all - then I don't want to help you. It's not a belief, it's fact. I like being asked, I don't like ignorant morons, that says stupid things and either want to pick a fight, or are truly clueless. You can decide for yourself, which category you are in... Now go troll someone else.
Doubt. Laser printers were invented in the early 1970s and were common by the mid 1980s. I don't think this tracking started until inkjets and scanners got good enough that the government got concerned about them being used for counterfeiting, I'd guess mid to late 90s at the earliest.
Photos taken by digital cameras are also trackable in a similar way as prints taken from a printer. I recall reading they were trying to identify the device after a Harry Potter book was leaked by someone taking digital photographs.
Cameras generally have barely noticeable, but uniquely identifiable, defects that will consistently affect pictures. So if you post a photo on your personal Social Media, and then you post a photo from the same camera on Hexbear, those two things could be connected. Just because it can happen doesn't mean it's practical, though.
I have no idea if this is what's been used with the Harry Potter thing.
But pictures can also be traced back to a camera based on irregularities in the camera sensor scientificamerican.com/article…
Unlike with the printers, there is probably no database of the CMOS sensor irregularities of all cameras ever made. But if you upload pictures under your government name and the take pictures with the same camera and share them anonymously, this could be traced back to you in theory.
sensor pattern noise is recognizable to an extent with pros, but usually its paired with highlight rolloff and other similar qualities. For instance, when I watch a movie, I can figure, okay, this was probably one of the arri's rather than a RED, etc. Sometimes, especially with a bit of knowledge on how/where they shot this, you can get an even better idea, close to a specific model. Of course if you're watching an actual movie, this is all after color correction so its more obvious if you have the raw files.
anyway, my point is, people who work with the cameras and files can definitely have at least a good idea of what camera something was shot with, but you'd really need a huge database and computers to do the work to match it exactly. I have colleagues that will show me something they worked on, with cameras they don't own and between the group of us, someone can immediately spot what camera it was shot on. but! like you said, if you post pictures on the internet, and then more pictures/videos with the same camera elsewhere, yeah it should be theoretically possible to match them with sensor noise pattern. they could at least prove its the same model. i'm not sure how much it differentiates between same camera models, but i can recognize my camera models dnp easy peasy. i have not had any caffeine yet so this is likely a jumbled mess of a thought and i apologize.
That's the obvious one. But you can also add data to images by adding tiny values to the pixels, it'll still look the same to us (same as printer tiny dots).
I don't know if phones actually do this. Just saying it's possible.
But many uploading sites optimize the images, so it'll be gone on reshare, but they could get it on first upload.
Any image editing tool like mspaint or similar. Just copy paste the pixels into a new image file. Though, the program youre using will probably still add it's own metadata to the new file, but all the original metadata from the camera won't be there.
Apparently! Just looked it up and reports presently say that the Serial Number of device was found to be 560151117 from EXIF data. Camera make : Canon Rebel 350 (also known as the Canon EOS 350D or Canon Digital Rebel XT);
or just the individual characteristics and flaws of the lens/sensor/postprocessing software, some of which can be unique per device, and potentially comparable to other photos made with it.
Even without EXIF data I would bet the actual encoding of the image will be identifiable to a specific instance of the camera software.
Similar to how websites fingerprint your browser by rendering something in the canvas or webgl and sending back the rendered image. The exact same rendering procedure will produce slightly different images for each browser instance. I suspect browsers are fully aware and complicit in this because why the actual fuck would they not make the rendering engines deterministic to their inputs?!
Apparently! Just looked it up and reports presently say that the Serial Number of device was found to be 560151117 from EXIF data. Camera make : Canon Rebel 350 (also known as the Canon EOS 350D or Canon Digital Rebel XT);
To be clear, this is not about EXIF data (which is its own problem).
Digital cameras can be fingerprinted from the images they produce, due to variations between pixels in any given sensor. If you're concerned about an image being traced back to your camera, you might consider some post-processing before distributing it.
No... But i've thought about how easy it would be to implement in ebooks and pdfs (e.g. my daily newspaper i can download as pdf). I've thought about this when sailing the high seas.
It's prevalent among pdfs downloaded from academic publishers (text listing the receiving IP address and/or institution running down the margins). I wouldn't be surprised if it's also done with hidden white text or in the metadata.
Most ebooks I bought recently come with a warning that the buyer's data is embedded in the file to deter from sharing it online. TBF it cannot be hard to remove it but I didn't bother to check how it's implemented.
The worst thing about that printer tracking is that we only learned about it around 20 years after they started implementing it. It's been another 20 years, imagine what they're doing now.
At launch (in 2021) the FireTV was not on the list of Sidewalk-enabled products, but given the fact that Sidewalk was enabled without user consent on many existing devices (and has been found to re-enable itself after being disabled) combined with the fact that FireTV devices all have at least the necessary bluetooth radio (even if not the LoRA part, Sidewalk can use both/either) and thus could become sidewalk-enabled by a software update in the future... I would still say that Sidewalk is a reason (among many) to boycott FireTV along with the rest of Amazon's products.
The takeaway that Amazon built their own mesh network so that their products in neighboring homes can exfiltrate data via eachother whenever any one of them can get online is not false.
Amazon Sidewalk is a new system that is being activated today across millions of Echo smart speakers and a few Ring devices. It allows those devices to act
Social graph connections can be automatically inferred from location data. This has been done by governments (example) for a long time and is also done by private companies (sorry I can't find a link at the moment).
Most modern cars are SIM-enabled and are constantly sending data back to the mothership. But even those that aren't will still collect data locally and that data will be collected when you send the car to an "official/licenced/authorized" repair shop.
I'm still driving a '99 vehicle and the most advanced thing about it are the power windows. I dread upgrading to a vehicle that can break in so many new ways. I hate that everything has touch screens and the software on many is awful and if it breaks, surprise, you have no music in your car now.
Those still have an ECU that stores most of the same data. It knows you speed, it knows how hard you brake, etc. anything with an OBD will store data. And that’s carssince the 70s
Depends on the car. Most older cars are concerned with basic OBD stuff, faults, and engine management. I have a 2012 and it doesn’t record anything interesting at all. Just engine data. You are right though, a few do save data, I just don’t know which ones, what year they start, and the depth of data recorded. The ‘70’s still had most cars running a regular analog mechanical system or maybe an electronic ignition controlled by an ECU. The ECUs most similar to today’s started becoming more common in the ‘80s.
You’ll be surprised, they take snapshots at certain points. In a collision all vehicles will store last 5 or so seconds of data, speed, see if brakes are engaged, stuff like that, it’s all used in collision investigations. There’s not a single car I think that’s doesn’t do this. As I said, it’s in some form, but your vehicle does know if you’ve sped if it has an obd on it.
What do you think basic OBD stuff is? It’s all that information and that’s used to see if anything’s wrong with the vehicle.
I’m pretty familiar. I think you’re more referring to modern CAN bus systems that record everything under the sun. Basic ECUs from back in the 80s just didn’t do as much. Even my ‘12 only has OBD2 and the data collection is limited. I have some fairly advanced diagnostic equipment to read all this stuff. The only thing I can’t do is program it, but I’ll be doing that soon enough.
You can look this up for your model. When I was looking this, there was a youtube video showing how to physically renove chevy's onstar thing in the car
A lot of stores track your movement through the store with the WiFi or bluetooth your phone sends out, unless you have that turned off. Since it's "anonymous" not even stuff like the GDPR requires to notify anyone of this.
Ah, shops where I go are not even able to tell whether the beer I'm drinking while shopping is mine or I stole from the shop. Though, they do annoy me when they say I should have left it outside. They do annoy me a lot.
Not really. It doesn't really rely on MAC adresses, it relies on your phone to constantly blast out "IS ANYONE HERE $HOME_NETWORK_NAME?" (or bluetoothely named "DYPROSIUMS AIRPODS!???") and it just catches that and then uses classic triangulating to see where you are. They all do that to quickly connect to WiFi without you having to actually type in the SSID because that shits for nerds.
Would or is also a really good way to sniff WiFi passwords. If anybody says "Well yes, I am indeed $HOME_NETWORK_NAME" your phone just hands them the password. It's probably wrong for THAT network but it does mean you can just collect a whole ass batch of home wifi passwords.
Especially given how many people don't change shit about their ISP-provided network if you just cyle $common_standard_wifi_names you're off to a good start to be able to easily infilitrate half your cities WiFi.
Tons of websites record your mouse, keyboard, and scroll activity, and can play back exactly what you saw on your browser window from its backend dashboard as a video. This is called session replay. There are pre-made libraries for this you can import so it's super common, I believe Mouseflow is one of the biggest providers.
When a mobile app, Windows app, or even website crashes nowadays, it automatically sends the crash dump to the app developer/OS vendor (the OS often does this whether the app requests it or not because the OS developer themselves are interested in what apps crash and in what ways). We're talking full memory dump, so whatever private data was in the app's memory when it crashed gets uploaded to a server somewhere without your consent, and almost certainly kept forever. God help you if the OS itself crashes because your entire computer's state is getting reported to the devs.
Your phone's gyroscope can record what you say by sensing vibrations in the air. It may or may not be something humans will recognize as speech if played back because the frequency range is too limited, but it's been shown that there's enough information for a speech recognition AI to decode. Good chance the accelerometer and other sensors can be used in the same way, and using them together will increase the fidelity making it easier to decode. Oh did I mention no device has ever implemented permission controls for sensors so any app or even website can access them without your consent or knowledge?
nah only the minidump is reported back which only contains the memory the crashing stack is using. Sending the full dump would requires uploading gigabytes of data which would cripple any home internet as they mostly have very limited upstream bandwidth.
Though iirc a system crash report can include a kernel dump, which can contain things like private keys.
Though realistically, Microsoft controls your OS. They could easily add code to allow them to grab whatever they want from your system without any logging (by your system anyways).
That actually makes me wonder if there are any apps that run on both a system and the router that system is connected to to determine if the internet traffic as reported by the system (to the user) is the same as what the router sees as a way to detect anything using network resources but bypassing the normal network stack.
you certainly can just run wireshark on your PC and your router, then compare them in the end of the day (with your router's file filtered your PC's source address)
Maybe this. Most smartphones have a modem inside, this modem has a separate closed-sourced operating system and it usually has the main priority in controlling the smartphone relative to the processor running the main operating system, such as Android. Sometimes the modem has access to the microphone or memory, even bypassing the CPU. Although maybe everyone already knows that.
I've wondered for a while if something like this is why Google allowed their bootloaders to be unlocked, because they can get at everything anyways.
And I bet that if that was the case, they've backed off that for future phones because of those stories about law enforcement seeing having those phones as suspicious, which could hurt sales, since I bet the majority of pixel users don't switch operating systems.
They run a mini Linux distro and you can ssh or tyy into them if you have a serial port. They have access to much of the hardware but usually over something like a serial interface but still can inject code and stuff. They are a completely secret self-contained computer and I don't even think they get updated for security. They could easily be hacked by anyone probably mostly government regimes. There is only a few companies that make them and they are ultra secretive and protective over them. This is the main reason it's nearly impossible to get an open source phone. Arm is proprietary, modems are proprietary. They run blobs. I have probably the one phone in existence that can run an open source modem firmware, and interestingly I have figured out that there is basically no security whatsoever on the cell networks. (Monopolies gonna monopoly) So that might be one reason they are so secretive about it, another reason is because they don't want citizens being able to just have open source radios that they can't easily hack or sell to drug cartels or something.
It does have complete access to your mic and Bluetooth and other stuff since they share buses, it has access to all your data being sent. It can record phone calls. It can triangulate your position. It can even imitate other modems to pick up people's messages and calls, which means not only can it spy on you but also it can spy on other people around you. I don't think it's really possible to disable these things completely outside of physically cutting power. They boot up with the phone and can probably run even when the phone is powered off since it's a self contained system, often with a direct connection to the battery.
Between Bluetooth, and cellular modems, they have basically complete access to many bands around you, as well as sensor data and sound and video, and with satellites recording the entire planet, they can trace anyone who doesn't have a device back in time anyways. Cell towers can triangulate you as well and do. It's part of location services in all phones now. The modems can connect to almost any towers at least for "emergency purposes".
Basically the only place that's safe now is inside your own head but even that's becoming unsafe because of AI that can read your facial expressions and infer your mental state.
The ways they get around the legalities is originally with the eyes programs, where countries would spy on their allies citizens to escape domestic laws like those pesky constitutions, but nowadays they just literally sell everyone's personal data to the highest bidder, international or domestic. The CCP can buy this I do just as easily as Black Rock can, not that Black Rock is or every was an American company. These are international corporations that exist outside of the idea of a state.
It's also not the CIA or NSA spying on you, but private companies. Even the people in the CIA and NSA aren't allowed to know about the extent of the true intelligence apparatus which is completely secret, outside the law, and contained entirely in international corporations. The entire Internet has been saturated with bots since 2001 or something probably. The internet is just a massive psyop and propaganda program. The average person in the 90s would be horrified at the opinions of common people today. Nukes are also probably not real. Just a way to scare people into believing Russia and America and China are actually enemies while they partial up and nationalist culture that doesn't want to give all its resources up to the international secret world management and finance corporation. Fiat currency too is a giant scam to make sure the working person never acquires wealth, and has to work forever, and corporations and wealthy humans who's names will never be spoken publicly, can own anything and have unlimited leverage and I finite money without ever having to work or produce anything of value. The text books in nearly every school in America are made by a company in Israel who was co-founded by glisten Maxwell's father. The left in U.S politics is fake, and the whole social justice warrior movement was a clever psyop to push all the countries further right wing run by internationalist corporations btw. 25% of Americans are addicted to legal amphetamines, more on other drugs like weed which reduces people's ability to understand what's real, Md nearly half of working age people in America cannot or won't find work. Wages have been dropping for decades and now IQs are dropping. Most of human genetics have been completely ruined, as we as humanity has destroyed nearly every honest, principled and empathetic human on the planet for profit.
It's just reality and it is too much for most people. It's like that old saying. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! It's easier to believe in the fairytale. The government and God loves you. Good always wins. Honestly and hard work pay off. People are good. The state will protect you. Just go back to sleep, but make sure you show up to work on time because we are too rich to clean those floors like you common people do, and although you will never have a retirement that is both safe from the stock market manipulation, and inflation, we have boats and nice cars to buy.
Lol you better support the police state so the rich don't nuke the whole world! They have you by the balls. Why do you think they talked about nukes for like 50 years? If not to convince everyone that they need this giant security state and massive armies and trillions in military spending.
You're telling me that the US Government, Northrop Grunman, the us armed forces, the UN, and all the equivalents in Russia are conspiring to fake nuclear weapons despite live testing them over 2000 times over 70 years and that North Korea had a credible test in 2017, we just gave up in the mid 90s and were like "nah I'm bored now"?
I sometimes wonder if they are even actually real but all the hysteria around them is definitely manufactured. I do think all these countries get together like the U.S, Russia, and China to pretend to hate each other so they can justify having huge national security states and surveillance networks and trillions of dollars in defense spending. I think once you get into their club there is no such thing as borders or nations, just psyops to keep the common people controlled and on the plantations of capitalism or authoritarianism. It's not just me by the way but this used to be the common opinion of nearly everyone, even people like Dwhite D. Eisenhower, who was the supreme commander of the entire allied forces during WW2. Not that you will really find any of that information today. They have been scrubbing the internet of any and all references to real history and expanding copyright every year so they can carefully control what kind of information is available to the public.
Yes it sounds crazy but it is also much closer to the truth then what you believe. This is why people in the news media started wearing brightly colored ties now. They are clowns. They are actors. The president doesn't have any power, he is just a clown to distract the masses. The state has no power. It's just a police force for the rich to steal all of our labor and keep us from overthrowing them. Why would the CIA do anything when they have to comply with all the regulatory and transparency laws, when private companies can do it better without a need to keep records? That would be stupid at this point. I don't buy any of it and I know enough real history to realize what's going on. Yes nukes are fake, maybe they actually exist in some rusted pieces of crap somewhere built 60 years ago, but no the rich can't nuke the whole world just because you don't want to worship them.
Yes the pinephone has an open modem firmware you can install, but in order to make the pinephone slightly usable you need to have phosh, because KDE is way to slow. It's not a device that's easy to use unless you are comfortable with tweaking, and are tech savvy. It also has some issues, like a small battery and heavy energy use. Mobian with phosh helps a bit here, but it's just not really a good replacement for android phones rn. The hardware is slow because there isnt really any open hardware with documentation that exists.
There is a few android phones that you can install Linux onto that are better but you have to deal with the headache if googles bullshit and Qualcomm and mediateks bullshit in terms of bootloaders and stuff.
I'm working on my own fork of mobian for the pinephone specifically that will hopefully make it more usable as an everyday device, but it's 4g only so it only really has a year or two left of life. In a few years we will hopefully see better open phones since there is a real market opening up for them, with the desolation of android by Google.
Mobian with phosh is a decent choice if you decide to get one. At two hours of screen off time I've only used over just a out 5% of battery which is good for the pinephone, but I have a large battery. The software has come a long way in recent years.
For audio recordings, there is usually a trace of electric hum in the background that has enough randomness to yield info on when (and sometimes where) the recording took place.
It's not as much of a privacy violation as a privacy vulnerability, but it's still relevant.
A causa del mio terribile ma solito infognamento di fine settimana, stavo per scherzare sul fatto che troppo programming, con poco gaming e soprattutto niente reading e writing, fa male alla salute… Perché si sta ore fissi davanti al PC, a fare i conti con testi bizzarri in linguaggi decisamente poco umani, per poi andare […]
tanto programming con poi il malo svegling causa la quasi gran morte dell’octt… (stavo per svenire alzandomi troppo veloce stamattina)
A causa del mio terribile ma solito infognamento di fine settimana, stavo per scherzare sul fatto che troppo programming, con poco gaming e soprattutto niente reading e writing, fa male alla salute… Perché si sta ore fissi davanti al PC, a fare i conti con testi bizzarri in linguaggi decisamente poco umani, per poi andare a dormire incazzati pensando ancora a quella roba (o meglio, quello che non si è fatto), e poi la mattina dopo, ancora prima di riprendere conoscenza (!!!), si pensa automaticamente a quello, e quindi ci si sveglia subito con un bel mal di testa, solo per poi (dopo colazione eh, ma comunque) andare ad incollarsi di nuovo davanti al PC per continuare l’effettivo programming… 😭
Tuttavia, ecco, non immaginavo affatto che il lievissimo mal di testa di 1 o 2 minuti ieri fosse solo il tutorial, mentre l’effettivo momento non epico fosse un ben più lungo (5 minuti???) calo di energia vitale (di pressione, probabilmente, dato che all’effettivo la sensazione è simile a se mi rubano il sangue…tanto sangue) che boh, non mi spiego!!! O meglio, me lo spiego nel fatto che è colpa del programming, per cui scrivere tutti quegli incantesimi così forte assorbe una quantità assurda di energia magica, e quindi succede questo… anche perché, sennò, davvero non si capisce come mai io abbia percepito questo genere di scherzetti solo in queste ultime due mattine, quando guarda caso solo in questo fine settimana ho fatto granché programming, i giorni prima no. Ho già pure dimenticato metà dei sintomi, ma è veramente una cosa assurda, ad un certo punto mi si sono pure ammosciati i 5 sensi, mentre stavo sul divano sperando di non cadere all’aldilà proprio oggi… 🤢
A parte gli scherzi, probabilmente è solo che mi sono alzata troppo di botto dal letto, senza nemmeno accorgermene, e dunque sarà accaduto appunto un calo di pressione… ma il punto è che non me lo spiego così forte, al punto che stavo quasi per cadere per terra ad ogni passo, ad un certo punto dal bagno al divano. Vero è che stanotte ho dormito solo 4 ore circa, perché come ho detto il programming fa male anche solo nella misura in cui offusca la mente di pensieri — riguardo la cosa stessa, o che portano la mente a vagare su altre cose, spesso non buone, come il dolore esistenziale di sottofondo — impedendo di addormentarsi serenamente ed efficientemente, e quando mi sono alzata è stato avendo notato che avevo ignorato la sveglia per 20 minuti e quindi ero in ritardo, però insomma… 😵💫
A me comunque pare di non essermi alzata in modo fisicamente meno calmo di altre mattine, ma a questo punto mi viene il dubbio… E se normalmente io mi alzassi con abbastanza calma, ma proprio ieri matttina il programming mind virus mi ha fatta uscire dal letto di fretta per via delle cose da continuare (e non ho avvertito gravi effetti solo perché avevo dormito 9 ore buone), mentre stamattina ci si è messo il tempo tiranno a mettermi fretta? Però, mannaggia a quel gran zio delle pere fritte…se il mio corpo è in uno stato tale che poco mi manca per svenire se mi alzo troppo velocemente, per quale cazzo di motivo le mie gambe me lo permettono??? Con lo stato mentale in cui sto la mattina presto, io certamente non mi posso ricordare di alzarmi piano piano sennò muoio, quindi preferirei che ci fosse un meccanismo di sicurezza automatico… (Anche se, qualora ci fosse, probabilmente pure me ne lamenterei, perché “come è possibile che non riesco a muovere le gambe? e se arrivano le bombe israeliane anche nella mia città e devo scappare come faccio???“… vabbuò.) 🐥 pignio.octt.eu.org/item/105934… #mattina
Our last State of the Bird was September 16th 2025 and can be found here.
This State of the Bird is a bit late due to a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that Gary kept forgetting to finish it. Also the Charts plugin in Discourse got broken so we started looking at alternatives but luckily the plugin got fixed and we now have some code to automatically gather some of the metrics.
Metrics
We have a number of metrics we keep an eye on which you can see below.
Contributors
The number of contributors continues to fluctuate a bit, but that's expected for a volunteer project.
If you're interested in contributing you can find some documentation here including ways that don't require knowing how to program.
Review requests are what we call our code reviews and is the way that all code is accepted into our code bases. This is a look at how many were open and closed each month.
This is a look at the number of issues that were opened in our issue tracker as well as how many were closed by month. We don't create issues for everything we do, this is still good to look at as it will include bugs and other issues users have brought to our attention.
This is a break down of commits to each project per month. In most cases a review request is just a single commit, but this chart helps to see what projects are being worked on.
As you can see, Pidgin 3 activity continues to dominate everything else.
Pidgin 3 is our next generation universal chat client whose goal is to give you the best experience possible when using modern chat networks.
Retrospective
Lots of work on Pidgin 3 this month including a new application icon! Feel free to discuss it at discourse.imfreedom.org/t/new-….
The big work this month that we were trying to get into the release was that we're completely overhauling the account setting and user splits APIs. However, this had some dependencies we didn't expect related to the credential providers using the account username to keep track of accounts. Needless to say, this wasn't finished for the 2.93.0 release, but we're going to keep chipping away at it.
Another huge thing we finished this month is the start of the migration guide for developers. This was a huge undertaking and still needs to have all the user interface stuff added to it, but it's still a huge milestone. It can be viewed here. We need to finish the architecture documentation too which will help fill in some of the finer points that aren't covered in the migration guide.
Also as previously mentioned in the Experimental 4 release announcement, we now have a setting for toggling light/dark mode!
Highlights
Add a Pidgin.Badges widget to contacts in the contact list
Import our new application icon from the one and only Hylke Bons
Create Purple.AccountSetting
Add Purple.AccountSettings
Add Purple.Protocol.get_default_account_settings
Create Purple.AccountSettingStringList
Update the default account settings handler to include user splits
Port IRCv3 to the new account settings
Add Purple.Account:disconnected to complement Purple.Account:connected
Fix settings initialization in network prefs
Fix parenting of Account Manager window on initial startup
A first pass at documenting how to migrate from purple 2
macOS: fix some issues with the macOS native files
macOS: hide duplicate menu items
Stop setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR in devenv
Add a dark/light color scheme setting
Add remove all and update methods to Purple.AccountSettings
Make sure accounts have names when saving and loading
Add the account name to the account editor
Update Pidgin.AccountDisplay to use the Purple.Account:name property
Update libpurple to use Purple.Account:name when referring to accounts
Update pidgin to use Purple.Account:name when referring to accounts
A few cleanups in the account api
Create Purple.ConversationManagerBackend
Update Purple.ConversationManager to use a Purple.ConversationManagerBackend
Pidgin 2 is our stable "production" release of a universal chat client. Meaning that you can use it as a single interface to many chat networks!
Retrospective
We're still planning on doing a 2.15.0 release, but we haven't moved forward on this at all this month.
Highlights
Cleaned up the app data file.
Removed the auto package spec file.
Retrospective
We still need to finish up the build environment packages so we can upgrade GTK on windows and get that all into the installer. We also need to remember to update the spell checking dictionaries as we haven't done that in awhile.
As announced in the last State of the Bird, we've started an additional user interface to keep the look and feel of Pidgin 2 and Gaim before it in GTK4 and we've chosen to name it Gaim.
Retrospective
No new work this month. We've put things on pause until the account settings rewrite is finished. We need to be able to create accounts to move forward and don't want to write a bunch of code just to rewrite it very soon afterwards.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
Once the account settings API is finished up we're going to start moving pretty quickly here.
Birb is a library of GLib utilities that we use across all of our projects.
Retrospective
We created Birb.LocalizedString to be used with the new Account Settings in purple as well as a few maintenance things. After the release we pull in the check license header script from the pidgin repo so that other projects can use it.
Highlights
Create Birb.LocalizedString
Fix some issues with the queued output stream error
Add the check license header script and make it installable
Xeme is our XMPP integration library. It is the basis for both the Link Local Messaging (Bonjour) and XMPP protocols in Pidgin 3. It is still early in development and has not yet had a release.
Retrospective
No activity this month.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
Everything! Seriously though, we're looking to get back to this in the near future.
Ibis
#ircv3-library is our IRCv3 integration library. It has seen a lot of active development as it is used in the IRCv3 protocol plugin in Pidgin 3.
We are nearing known feature completion on it and expect to do a 1.0 release in the near future.
Retrospective
Fixed some issues with the unit tests on windows by using stroul instead of atoi. We also renamed the nick projects by renaming nick to primary-nick, alt-nick to secondary-nick and added tertiary-nick. The old properties are still there but have been deprecated.
Highlights
Use strtoul instead of atoi when parsing hosts
Rework the nick properties
Releases
None
Future Plans
Continue working through the open issues and watching new IRCv3 specifications for things we should be including.
Hiya is a new client abstraction library for mDNS. It was created to help make implementation of the Link Local Messaging protocol easier as we would have to abstract out the different platform implementations and by putting it in a library that abstraction can be used by other projects.
Seagull is a new library we created to make working with SQLite feel more like a GLIB/GNOME library and force usage of prepared statements with named parameters and other similar things.
Retrospective
Just some minor maintenance this month, but we've got some more stuff coming as we're using Seagull to serialize more stuff in Purple 3.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
We have a few features to fill out yet and a few ideas that need a bit more time in the oven.
More specific details can be found in our open issues.
Traversity is a new library for traversing NATs. There are many different ways to traverse a NAT and the goal of Traversity is to hide that from developers who just need to traverse a NAT.
It is still early in development and has not yet had an official release.
retro-prpl is a new repository we've created on GitHub. This repository contains all of the abandoned protocols that have ever lived in our code base and is meant to make them easier to study and for people to use with services like Retro AIM Server, escargot, and NINA.
Retrospective
Nothing to report on this month.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
Right now we didn't add any support for protocol specific emojis because we completely forgot about them. Anyways we're looking at creating a custom emoji theme that will include everything for these retro protocols.
We're also trying to make sure that you can actually use this to connect to the self hosted clones, but we haven't gotten through verifying that and fixing what doesn't work.
Closing
We have a lot to do going forward but we're still striving hoping that the Experimental 5 release which is due 2025-12-31 will actually be Alpha 1. The distinction is whether not not we think the protocol specific APIs are stable enough for third party protocol developers.
We don't have this well defined yet, and it's more of a feel than anything, but we've had a few people tinkering with third party protocols with moderate success which is absolutely amazing!! So as they continue working on their protocols we're getting good feedback on basically everything which is extremely helpful!
We hope you all are enjoying the new format and if you have any questions of comments please leave them below!
For anime I am watching via Animekai thanks to its front page putting focus on current show schedule and an easy to use book mark system.
I am wondering is there any Stream site for Westren Movies and shows? So far most I can find seem to use a front page that focuses on what’s supposedly trending rather then current showings
Over the past several days, I have been trying to install Linux on my surface pro 2 because Windows is having issues with hogging memory, which is preventing me from finishing a drawing.
First I tried Linux Mint. After several freezes of the Bluetooth program, I was able to get my 8bitdo controller to connect, however i learned that neither using it as a wireless keyboard nor as dinput works. Mint was not detecting input from either mode, but it could detect xinput. Krita, however did not recognize the inputs because they were not keyboard keys, so i had to install a program to convert xinput signals to key presses.
Additionally, the on-screen keyboard on Mint has two options: always on when enabled, or on when a text box prompts. The former sucks to use because you have to toggle the keyboard in accessibility settings every time you want to turn it off or on, and the latter never detected a single text box in my experience. So the on-screen keyboard simply doesn't work on Mint.
I tried installing Kubuntu. I installed the Linux surface drivers recommended on r/SurfaceLinux. This resolved an issue where the pen and eraser were seen as the same. My controller also worked Flawlessly in keyboard mode right out of the gate. The Bluetooth program didn't freeze once. The on-screen keyboard is also acceptable. By all accounts the experience was a significant improvement.
Then I tried calibrating my pen. This did not work. The cursor was consistently 2-3 mm up and to the left of where i was holding my pen. KDE with wayland also does not support non-linear digitizer calibration. This is a problem because the errors in my tablet's digitizer are non linear. On windows I had created a script to add extra calibration points to rectify this. I can't do this in KDE with wayland. I could switch to X11, but then all the QoL improvements for touch screen/tablet use would be gone.
So I've been fiddling for hours trying to make a script in krita that will allow me to correct my pen inputs with an error matrix. Krita is refusing to even recognize the script is even there. Probably a Krita problem, not Linux, but blegh. I wouldn't have to do this if the system pen calibration worked.
But of course, my 5 year old experience with how troublesome Linux was is invalid today, and Linux has gotten so much better and Just Works™ now /s
I understand the frustration, but Linux only works because the community works on it together. You sound like someone who has some technical knowledge, maybe you can help the kubuntu team make the calibration a feature?
I get it, it's frustrating and it doesn't feel like your needs are being met.
It's just important to see the larger picture. Windows and iOS suck more every day. Linux gains more and more traction, more and more users as the competition becomes less and less attractive.
I hope that the next time you try, that it just works.
I have some sewing patterns that I would like to share (and hopefully swap) but all of the PDFs have a
"This was purchased by John Doe john.doe@email.com #ordernumber - if you are not John Doe, please dob in the person you got this from to company@example.com so we can sick our lawyers on them"
sorta footer on every single page.
Obviously for privacy reasons (and because I don't actually want lawyers sicked onto me), I need to remove this footer.
These are often complex PDFs with more than a hundred pages and multiple layers.
I managed to successfully remove the editing password (not user/viewing password, just can't edit without password) with qpdf --decrypt. But removing that footer has left me at a dead end. I have even tried manually removing every single instance of those footers using Master PDF Editor but saving the file flattened it and you are no longer able to show/hide layers which is essential for correct printing. (Please don't ask me how many different PDF editors I have tried because it has been so so SO many I have lost count).
Not that I really want to have to manually edit this out on what could amount to over a thousand pages but searching for a command to remove a certain phrase has come up empty. Even Master PDF Editor doesn't seem to have a bulk remove or search and replace function (just search).
Two replies there that came to my attention, while I'm unable to get back to sleep at 5am. An old one mentioning github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia which seems to be an old tool that removes watermarks, hasn't been updated in 5 years, but neither has the PDF spec?
The other is this paste of text:
if it helps anyone, here's what I do to prepare a pattern for uploading to make sure it is 'clean':
Check over the PDF files for any reference to my name/email address (usually this is in a footer on each page, and not every pattern company does this)
If my personal details are present, I unlock the files using a site like ILovePDF - There are other sites but this one has no daily limits
Open the unlocked PDF in Adobe Professional or another PDF editor of your choice and delete the footer box. You can just delete the box on the first page it appears, or the first page it is a standalone box, then save the pdf, close and reopen it - usually it will now be gone from all pages.
Repeat for any other PDF files (obviously)
Run PDF and jpeg files through an exif cleaner
Double check and upload.
I was already able to remove the edit password with qpdf --decrypt. Most of the PDF editors I used, changed the PDF too much (e.g. added margins/padding) which ruined the very specific layout needed for the patterns to work. There has to be no changes to the PDFs apart from removing the 'footer' text :/
I tried doing print to PDF but it flattened the resultant PDF so the layers were lost. Almost all of the software I used to try converting altered the PDF layout in some way and patterns must not change at all, otherwise they get messed up :/
Maybe you could just search and replace the text with an equal amount on whitespaces? Edit oh sorry I only now understood the issue is finding a tool that replaces and keeps the layers. I have never worked with layers in a PDF so I have no idea on that, sorry
My best answer at this point would be that you need to make your own program to find and remove by content. Because no other manual pdf editor would reasonably have such a feature since it's so niche.
Also vibe coding with AI tends to be very good for singular tasks like this.
I wouldn't recommend converting the pdf to anything else since that would remove the layer info unless it's to more complicated formats like EPS, illustrator, etc.
You might be able to do a find and replace with github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF . I'm not an expert on PDFs, so I'm not sure if it can be done in a way that preserves all the important formatting, but if you feel comfortable DMing me the PDF (or one of similar complexity) I could try to write a script that replaces all instances of the target text in a way that preserves the rest of the document.
Iirc, tested it out quite a few years ago, and I had to use a software that would both decompile and recompile the PDF, and while it was decompiled, I had to remove the repeating pattern I didn't want with something like Notepad++. File got recompiled a bit over 50% bigger iirc, maybe different compression methods, but the pages themselves didn't seem affected.
Sadly can't remember the name of the program I used for compiling and recompiling, only that it'd do both and that I looked for how to remove watermarks from PDFs. Also the program was certainly offline.
Found a few candidate tools though can test neither now, mutool (part of the mupdf tools), PDFtk, qpdf, pdf2txt (name sounds familiar though it might be memory playing tricks).
If any of those could be found as a single portable exe around 2020, chances are it is the tool I used for it.
There's also GhostScript, which feels like advanced tooling for dealing with PDFs. I used it to scale down the images in some game PDFs I have and save as a copy, so that my old phones could actually open them. The Warcrow free PDF from Corvus Belli went from a whopping 623MB to around 111MB. Still way too fucking large for my phones. The PDF for Mantic Firefight went from 65MB to ~20MB.
Perhaps just blocking it with a white box and then converting it into an image-only pdf. This makes the file much bigger but will keep the exact same layout while also removing the text blocked by the white box.
Or does it have any interactive elements? What do you mean by "layers"?
Just because the visible footer gets removed doesn't mean there isn't other unique tracking information hidden deep in the PDF that could still get the lawyers sicced on you. Depending on how valuable this information is to the company, and how litigious they are, you have to judge how far they might've gone and might yet go to protect it.
Unfortunately, that's why this kind of copy protection can an actually be an effective tactic to prevent individuals from sharing their copies. While there might be ways to strip this kind of hidden data on simpler PDFs... even resorting to methods like screenshotting or printing and scanning, still cannot give you absolute confidence that there isn't some subtle unique identifier invisibly hidden in the layout or through subtle inconspicuous variations, especially if you're doing this regularly and they start targeting you and your account for identification. And on complex PDFs there are so many more ways they could hide this information digitally if they know where to look for it and you don't. 99% of the time it's going to be pretty obvious to strip out, but are you willing to take that risk even if you do find a technical method of removing the visible footers? If it's a one-off, maybe you can get away with it, but in the long term this strategy is not viable and is a trap for rookies.
The only truly safe way to share digitally watermarked content like this is to buy it with a burner account and full opsec in the first place. Nobody to sic lawyers on if it's a hacked paypal or a stolen/prepaid credit card or an untraceable email and IP, or in a jurisdiction with no enforcement. Smash and grab, get the data anonymously and get out. Don't share stuff from your personal account that's literally got your name and banking information attached to it unless you can confirm it's bit-for-bit indistinguishable from other innocent copies with something like a checksum.
Honestly there are so many ways pdfs can hold unique information that retaining the same format is probably not going to work.
The 2 options I suggest are . . .
Use a tool to extra the text into a plain text fromat then paste it into word along with screen shots of any images you need.
You could try converting each page to a JPG image using something like Gimp. You could then desaturate it or convert it to pure black and white so it reveals any hidden text which you can paint over. If you want the images in colour just crop them out from the original file and paste into the new b&w copy. This is a crap description but hopefully it makes the point.
the search communities page, with local/other as 1 filter, & subscribed/not-subscribed as the other filter ( other options, don’t remember ‘em )..
IF one searches for other/remote sites, & not-subscribed, e.g. & goes through that page..
then at the bo
the search communities page, with local/other as 1 filter, & subscribed/not-subscribed as the other filter ( other options, don't remember 'em )..
IF one searches for other/remote sites, & not-subscribed, e.g. & goes through that page..
then at the bottom of the page is a Next Page button, .. which gives one a page of bullshit, because it discarded the filtering.
( it certainly discards the subscribed/unsubscribed filtering, it may have kept the local-vs-remote sites status ).
Also, if one searches for local + unsubscribed, the 2nd page isn't filtered.
This renders the 2nd-page & all other pages .. garbage.
I'm only identifying this, not complaining: the fact that PieFed exists is awesome, & work is work, so I'm grateful for what there is, that works properly, so this is only a heads-up.
Perhaps a special-page checklist for the programmers would prevent oversights ( Atul Gawande's book "The Checklist Manifesto" identified that there are 2 categories of checklists: these-people-need-to-connect, & this-task-need-get-done.
Perhaps checklists should be considered as foundational in programming as code-review, pair-programming ( near-view/in-the-trench & far-view/how-does-this-fit-in-with-everything-else ), continuous-integration-testing, etc..
Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for the wonderful contribution to our world..
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
A Palestinian government office says Israeli forces have carried out 80 ceasefire violations since October 10, killing 97 people and wounding 230 more.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
A North Korean soldier defected to South Korea across the rivals' heavily fortified border on Sunday, South Korea's military said.
The military took custody of the soldier who crossed the central portion of the land border, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. It said the soldier expressed a desire to resettle in South Korea.
It was the first reported defection by a North Korean soldier since a North Korean staff sergeant fled to South Korea via the border's eastern section in August 2024.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Hello everyone, lately I got really into Linux. I installed it in every machine I have, but I still had to try Arch. From what people were saying online I thought that it was going to be a hard and impossible task. So I bought a Thinkpad for a hundred euros (x260 if you're wondering) and I followed a guide on how to install Arch. I thought I was going to be using the terminal all the time, and had to type everything. No black screen of death, no prompt saying "Are you awake?" Matrix style, the pc didn't breack, reality didn't bend and just following simply the guide I had Arch running in fifhteen-twenty minutes no problem. Only the Network Manager wasn't on were I rebooted after installation but it took five minutes to search online how to fix it. Everything works: bluetooth, internet, apps and so on. I could leave it as it is and I could just use it as any other pc. So all I'm saying is that I'm having a great time with Linux distros, the pain to learn how install repository and other things is really worth it. Every time I learn something more about my computer puts me more in control. So thank you Linux and its community.
Welcome 😀 The myth that “Arch isn’t user-friendly” will probably never die — and neither will “Arch is unstable.” I’m honestly relieved you didn’t dare push the door to join us 😏 If you ever switch machines, you can check how Arch is supported on tons of laptops here.
My impression was always that the biggest issue is needing to pay attention to, and sometimes intervene in updates, is that not a thing with arch anymore?
It does still happen occasionally that updates need some intervention, it is still policy that you should check the blog in case, but it's only happened once in the last two years for me.
Yeah, exactly, when you want to do a full upgrade it's technically best practice to check if there's anything which requires intervention. But I never bother honestly, and the one time there was an issue it was resolved by just uninstalling one package for another.
Debian 13 is out, and it will stay exactly the same Debian 13 that it was when it released, even 5 years from now. The only changes are bugfixes, security patches, etc. No new features. This means you can basically do unattended sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade with no problems. By the time Debian 14 comes out, there will have been a ton of changes to upstream software, Updating from 13 to 14 might be a one-click fix, or it might take effort fixing configs and ensuring the new software works.
Arch Linux is rolling release, it does not have version numbers, and does not hold back a major package update just "because it changes things". This means basically every update might change things, and that can require intervention. If the Arch Linux team is aware of required intervention, it will be put on the Arch News. This is often just one or two commands. The possibility of intervention being required means unattended upgrades are a no-go on Arch, but that's pretty much it.
If you don't update your system for say, a year, everything that's changed in that time will change all at once. This is often still a few commands to fix, but could be more depending on what updated exactly. Updating regularly is reccomended, because it's easier to tell what exactly changed between updates, and thus easier to track down where a problem originates from.
For general users, updates changing things is pretty much never an issue, which is why typical end users always use the word "stable" to convey it's more colloquial meaning of "not going to break on me", rather than the technical definition sys admins use it to describe.
If arch didn't have breaking changes I don't think users would ever really mind it being rolling release, which is how you get the term "stable rolling release" for rolling distros that hold updates for long enough to generally prevent breakage, like void or tumbleweed
To the original commenter's point, as a more design and ux person I think being able to do unattended upgrades and not get any errors or stuff you have to fix is kinda important. Which is why I find it a tad irksome when technical folks act like everyone and their grandma should run arch cause it's never given them issues. It is awesome that it sounds like it's improved so much though!
Maybe I'll try arch some time and see if I've progressed enough to not find managing my system a bit more bothersome
when technical folks act like everyone and their grandma should run arch
As an Arch user, man I hate when people are like that. Arch certainly has a specific target audience. If you (the individual) are comfortable with a distro, and it works well for you, it's a good option. If Arch isn't that, then it's not a good option for you. Some people don't understand that even the "once a year single command" maintenance is too technical for most.
Having run Arch only the last few years, I don't know how much it's improved compared to say 10 years ago. I do know on most of my systems I don't spend that much time updating or maintaining my Arch installations, usually just a yay, select which AUR packages not to update (the ones I have can have issues updating sometimes), wait for 15-ish minutes (depends how much I have to compile from AUR), and that's it. From server to desktop, some weekly, others once every couple months. Although I would say it's more than average, as I have a custom repository with some nightly compiled packages, which has its own issues.
I 100% agree with this comment. Also, if that “once-a-year single command” bit was about my comment, I’d have appreciated the shout-out 😄 If not, all good — I was literally talking about copy-pasting a line from the Arch or package page. It’s nothing technical; it’s basically similar as running a pacman command.
Arch has certainly a specific target audience. That's true for every distros. The magic of GNU/Linux — you get to pick exactly how much chaos you want in your life. From super-polished plug-and-play distros to full DIY mode, there’s something for everyone. Nobody should ever be forced to use a distro. Again, it's a personal choice and the one that will make you enjoy using your system. Arch is meant for people who have time and desire to build their system and write a bunch of config files. In that sense, yeah, it’s a technical distro, and that certainly not make its users anything special. I'm still and will forever be a Linux noob compared to a lots of people.
it's funny because once you start using other distros you quickly realize how easy Arch actually is. I find Arch more straight forward and easier to use that Ubuntu. Ubuntu makes me want to rip what remaining hair I have out.
The reason people say that Arch is unstable is that you are expected to read the news on the website before every update or else your system is liable to be broken -- and sometimes it will break in spite of that. Oh, and the expectation is that you'll be updating multiple times per week, and if you don't, you will soon be in a situation where to install any package you must update your entire system.
Most other distros place no such expectations on the user.
One time I did not update an arch system for something like 6 months... You can't immagine the troubles I needed to go through to get it into a working state.
Interesting. I once didn’t update the arch system on my laptop for several years, while it was sitting in a drawer. Had to manually update the keychain but besides that the update just worked
I’ve been using Arch for over 15 years, and honestly, I never check the news before updating. Once in a while, I’ll get an error — maybe once a year — and the fix is always just running a quick command I find on the Arch site or the package page. Takes seconds, no drama.
I’ve only managed to break my system twice, and both times were 100% my fault. Even then, recovery was easy: just chroot in and run one command.
As for updates, doing them regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly) is recommended. No need to go crazy with updates. Too frequent updates are actually discouraged. Arch is a rolling release, so your packages and dependencies get updated together — meaning things don’t randomly break. Skipping updates won’t nuke your system either, and if something ever goes sideways, you can just downgrade and be back up in no time.
This has been my exact experience as well. I run updates whenever I log into the machine. Sometimes daily other times monthly depending on the computer, and very rarely have I run into errors.
To be fair, you don't need to update your system to install a package, all you need to do is run the update command just to sync up the database, then cancel out when prompted.
I've gone multiple weeks/months without updating and everything was fine.
I would also add that it heavily depends on the setup a user is running. I had been running Arch with XFCE and dwm for years on a machine with a Nvidia card and I can count the number of issues I had which were not induced by my wrong-doing with three fingers. When I switched to Plasma Wayland on my new machine I faced more issues in one and a half years than with my old setup. Also, none of these issues were mentioned on the news section but were due to Plasma updates. There are just too many moving parts under heavy development with such a big DE and Wayland is also not quite 100% there yet, so for some people it can seem like Arch is rather unstable although it still is a heavy generalisation.
I have played with Arch in a VM - I learnt a lot about how Linux works setting it up. But the tutorials and guides are good, and you end up with a lean system with just what you want in it, and pretty much all configured directly by you.
I can see why Arch is a popular distro and base for other distros (like Manjero and currently rapidly growing CachyOS).
But I'm not at the point I'd want to main it. My issue is the concern that because everything is set up by me, it's a much more unique system so if something breaks it could be a whole myriad of my own choices that are the cause. I'm nervous about having to problem solve things when they break and solutions not working because of how my particular system is configured. It's probably a bit irrational but I do quite like being on an distro that lots of other people have the exact same configuration as me, so when things break there is lots of generic help out there.
That said I would consider arch based distros like Manjaro or CachyOS as they are in that vain of mostly standardised distro.
Installing arch is not difficult. Difficult is to keep track on innovation in the linux space. You are responsible to install and maintain everything. You have to decide if you want something like selinux, at what time it is mature enough to use it, install and use it. You have to evaluate if selinux is better than it's "competitors". You have to decide which firewall you use today and as soon as a new system pops up, you have to read up on it. You decide at what time flatpak is mature enough to use it. All this and much more is done and decided by distro maintainers. They keep up with new stuff and guide you. By using arch, you decide that you want to take care of it and that is ok, but no "normal" pc user who uses her PC once a week shall be expected to read upon all the computer maintenance stuff that is just of secondary importance to her.
I installed Cachyos in June this year after years of Mint (Cinnamon).
It was a zero problem install and everything works with my hardware. I chose KDE and it runs with Wayland perfectly. it's the best distro I've used since i started with Linux in 1995. So my experience with Arch is excellence so far. pacman is already my favourite package manager.
Oh, preface: congratulations! I don't want to sound like I'm underplaying your achievement. Only: don't be lulled by an easy install: Arch still has more maintenance gotchas þan e.g. Debian. And welcome to þe community. Arch is a great distro, and gets better every year. When you want to up þe challenge, try Artix - it's like Arch was a few years ago.
Arch has good installers þese days. It used to be much more manual, and maybe a lot of þe perception of difficulty comes from þat.
However, Arch does need to be updated more frequently, and lots of little þings can bite you if you don't read all þe warnings up front. Þe more time between updates, þe greater a chance of dependency-related issues. You must pay attention to .pacnew changes - you won't be warned about þem, and services can easily break if you don't stay in top of þem. You must read archnews, because about once a year some major breaking change is rolled out (most recently, firmware packaging changes broke a lot of people's boots) and you need to take action. You must learn to not -Sy <pkg>, but only -Syu or -S - because þe first will often break þings. Þere's just a bunch of little þings þat, e.g., Mint users generally don't have to worry about, or encounter far less frequently.
Wiþ Arch, it's not þe install, but þe maintenance which is more work.
Þat said, it is possible to run Arch like a ~~rolling~~ point release distro, and only update once a year. I do þis on my little home self-hosting LAN servers. But I'm really comfortable wiþ Arch, and Linux, and I have rescue USB sticks; and it's not a disaster if one of þose is down for a couple of days.
Arch has a worse reputation þan it deserves - or maybe Arch users like to imagine þemselves as more leet þan þey are. You want to be leet, run LFS or Gentoo; Arch isn't really þat complex þese days.
Thanks for the comment! I like to write and I'm really scared and angry that everything we write will be used to train AI without our consent. So I kmow that learning to maintain Arch Is a long way but I want to create an enviroment on my machines isolated from big tech. I kmow that everything can be hacked but I want to try at least.
It annoys me how much crap people still give Arch because it did honestly deter me from trying it myself when all this time it was exactly the distro for me. A lot of it is the nature of the rolling releases and pacman just feeling more clean and simple then apt and the inevitable Franken-Debian installs I end up with.
The archinstall script makes installation much easier. After that, choosing all my own apps and having to read the wiki and perform minor configurations on them could be seen as tedious when something like Mint is just more out-of-the-box, but it both helped teach me more about Linux so I have a better understanding of how my own system works when things do rarely go astray and it helps me feel like my system is very personalized and my own. Sometimes I still go, "Wait, why don't I have this very basic thing or why isn't it working?" And I find out it's because I didn't install a necessary package, but then I learn and build
As far as rolling releases, I update daily because I'm a geeky maniac and I have had better stability doing that the past 2 1/2 years than I ever did in Windows. Truly, no lie. Part of that is Microsoft setting a low bar, but also my system is a simpler build. That's not to say there have been no issues whatsoever, but I wonder at the people making these claims how much they've really used Arch.
My point generally being: don't let the opinion of some Linux snobs deter you. Try Arch, it may very well be your thing, too.
I used arch extensively. I still have it in a laptop I switch on from time to time. I stopped running it mostly because it is rolling release. I didn't get many problems, but sometimes you do and sometimes you have to spend an hour figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it. I don't want to wake up in the morning with an important video call set up and be unable to participate because the pipe wire config file has been corrupted during update.
Other than that, arch is a good system. But I'd rather keep it on hardware I know I can be without for a day or two if the case comes up.
Oof, I feel you on the video call thing. I use a semi-complicated setup of switching between (7.1 surround) speakers and headphones, plugged into two separate sound cards, too... And a Zoom recorder connected with USB for sound, and Droidcam for a webcam. So many possible points of failure. I had it all working during COVID, but when I have to video call now, I just install the needed app and use my phone 🙈
Ahaha, yes video call Is always a pain in the butt for some reason. I now run fedora (but still only do major upgrades on a Saturday morning).
I don't know, at work we use Microsoft teams, often I get called into meet, zoom and others. The best working one to me is jitsy, that's not to say it works flawlessly.
I don't know, sometimes they work on Firefox, sometimes they work on Chrome. Sometimes they do not work and I have to use the phone. Sometimes headphones microphone does not work. Sometimes headphones microphone works but audio goes through speaker and not headphones.
I don't know, I gave up attempting to fix all these things. Most of the times it's more than one person in the call and we end up just joining together at the computer that works first. To be fair, my colleagues using windows are not free from these problems.
I think people just dont know how good it is. The apt system with fixed versions is super annoying compared to arch. I have never felt that i need to stay on some old version of software ever. Sure there has been a few times when some version is bugged and then I just stayed on a old version for a few weeks, which is very easy to do with pacman.
If you installed it using the archinstall installation script, I believe you. If you did a manual installation of Arch for the first time, I don't believe you installed the system in 15-20 minutes.
I recommend giving the manual install a whirl... it might take you a couple tries, but it will help with your overall understanding of your system--this will be useful if anything ever goes sideways. It really isn't that hard. What you learn during install (how to read the wiki effectively, partitioning layouts, how to set up a boot loader, what filesystems are available and how they're different, what you need to install for firmware or build tools etc etc) will help demystify the system, and put the power to manage your system in your hands. Also if you ever run into an issue like your /boot or / partition being full and you want to resize your partitions, or your compositor won't launch/is freezing and you need to use a TTY--you'll be better equipped... even if that means you're just a bit better at reading/searching the wiki.
Yes, if you use Arch, a DIY system where the user decides which services to activate and how to configure them. Archinstall decides for you how to partition the disks and which services need to be configured based on the options you choose. In other words, Archinstall offers the same thing as an installer like Calamares, but in a CLI script. However, once the base system is installed, you must manage the security tools, backup, etc., not the distribution developer.
I have arch on a few different systems. A couple of them, I used the script as I wanted to get them up and running quickly. It was very good for that, and I still had options in the script to make many of the choices and set things up manually instead of letting the script decide.
If you use the archinstall script to save time on manual installation, I think that's reasonable as long as you've adapted that script to your needs and decisions about the system. I repeat, archinstall makes its own default configurations in tools that the user must configure in the post-installation, such as security and system recovery. Archinstall does not configure selinux, snapper in grub, etc., and for this you have to partition the disk in a specific way, not as archinstall does by default.
That's essentially what I do. I'm an old user and was running arch before it had archinstall so I'm fully capable of doing a manual install, but I also don't have a particularly unusual computer setup so the script is like 95% fine for what I need. I do a few post-install tweaks but that's pretty much it.
Im almost envious of you.. I did that like 15 years ago and there is so many fun things to run and learn. So many desktop environments, tiling window managers, programming languages, ricing attempts...
I used arch almost all the time, with just a few times trying other distros to see what they are about. But nothing is as good as arch, mostly because of the AUR and its excellent docs.
Now bazzite is the new hot thing so could be fun to try that I guess, but dont want to remove my lovely arch.
Hi, I installed Bazzite on my gaming PC and let me tell you it works so well. Fast and reliable, strong as a bull. You install games, update and just play. Even the games that I borrow from a friend that goes a lot to the gym work using Lutris no problem. Only some games have anti cheat problems, otherwise it's works almost like a console, obviously much better.
Thats great but im not sure its very specific to bazzite. Ive been gaming on arch for many years and all games work, pretty much. 😀
Have you tried to install apps from the arch AUR? Im curious if they follow the system theme and if they are found by the system launcher as ordinary apps. They are running in a container so i wonder if that makes them behave differently. Flatpaks can have the same issues.
I pretty much cant run anything else, i get so frustrated with all the workarounds that are simply not needed on arch. It has native packages for almost anything.
I stopped using arch because you can't change your user name without breaking the entire system for some reason. Probably not an issue if you build yourself but I was using pinephone and steam deck images. I prefer Debian and fedora.
On the steamdeck, people say to not even attempt it because it will break the boot process. On pinephone it stopped the display manager from loading. I did what seemed like the standard steps, I'm a bit of a noob, but I opened a root shell in single user mode, changed the name, chowned my old home directory, renamed it to my new user name, but this broke it. I noticed that in the two arch distros I tried, the original steamOS and the arch for pinephone image, in the gui if you try to change your username it errors out, and I see why. Changing it in a root shell completely broke the system. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'm using mobian (Debian) on the pine phone now which I like much more, and making my own fork of it that is actually really cool, and on my steamdeck and PC in running bazzite, which is fedora and very nice. I'm very happy with it. Neither of these have those issues but these are all pre built images. If you actually build arch from scratch it probably works fine. Debian is by far my favorite though. It's very simple, and sort of designed around the idea of simplicity and uniformity with the standard layout. Which I like. Sort of the windows XP of Linux. Easy to hack and understand.
The pinephone fork of mobian I'm working on, which I will release some day, just has a lot of improvements to make it a bit more complete like,
-more repos, and flatpack, plus rules to always prefer mobian repos when software exists there.
-Some better clocks for the hardware, GPU, CPU, and memory, both higher and lower with a slight undervolt, I'm going to write a script to automate testing this when I release it, so it will auto overclock for the user from a simple gui button. Also with undervolting and changing max clocks based on tempurure.
-Im going to add xfce and a udev rule to make it come up when it's plugged into a moniter, also with a toggle, to use beside phosh, so you have the best of both worlds.
-im going to add better support for low energy modes specific to the pinephone even though the battery life as I have it now is getting much better, also with posh and mobian it's much better then others distros.
-Going to create a script to auto update the modem firmware.
-Add more themes, a gui tool to configure zram and btrfs.
-adding tons of software out of the box, like waydroid, box86, wine, vscodium, and tons of little misc tools that are useful, also a better fileManager, flatpack store, some other stuff.
-if I'm able, I want to write a complex script to strip down the kernel when it's in screen off/suspend modes to save more power, a sort of software scheduler that keeps clocks low and undervolted most of the time, and downclocks the modems CPU when it doesn't need full power. Also toggles the data use intermittently to get additional power savings with apps that check the internet, by only letting them poll for a few seconds once every two minutes or so outside of screen on mode.
-probably some other stuff. I just started on it and it's not ready to be released yet.
Arch is a great DIY system where you have to decide which tools and configurations you want to use, and this is precisely what many people do not understand, leaving the system with significant security and restoration holes.
Unfortunately, the technology of the future demands a high price. On top of the exorbitant energy cost fueling a return to industrial-era levels of pollution, AI is also propped up by a massive global sweatshop operation, where low-wage workers in underdeveloped countries are tasked with doing the hidden intellectual labor that makes the tech useful.
As reported by Agence France-Presse, workers in long-exploited countries like Kenya, Colombia, and India are becoming increasingly outraged over the miserable labor of AI training. For example, as the wire service notes, for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images, a gig known as “data labeling.”
Though the work is often done remotely — thus saving on the overhead costs of leasing an office — data labeling isn’t exactly a cushy laptop job. Workers involved in this industrial operation describe grueling hours, few if any workplace protections, and frequent tasks involving violent or grisly content. In theory, it’s not unlike social media content moderation, another digital practice built on exploitative labor in the developing world.
“You have to spend your whole day looking at dead bodies and crime scenes,” Ephantus Kanyugi, a Kenyan data label, told AFP. “Mental health support was not provided.”
DOWNTOWN — With their city caught in the country’s largest immigration enforcement operation, as many as 250,000 Chicagoans flooded Downtown on Saturday to condemn Donald Trump’s administration as part of the second nationwide No Kings protest.
“We will never surrender!” Illinois governor JB Pritzker said. “Throughout history we have learned that tyranny doesn’t arrive with dramatic proclamations. We learned that it comes wrapped in ‘law and order’ … The reality here in Chicago is this: Black and Brown people are being targeted for the color of their skin. Children are being zip-tied and separated from their families … These people are not abstractions. They pay taxes on their businesses. They work hard — these people are the fabric of our society.”
“They want a rematch of the Civil War,” Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson said to the crowd. “But we are here to stand firm, to stand committed — that we will not bend. We will not cower. The attempt to divide and conquer this nation will not prevail, because when the people are united, justice always prevails.”
Johnson closed out his remarks by calling for a general strike.
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So when you want to post a lemmy post, it asks for a URL, if you provide a URL of, say, youtube or bandcamp an embed will load when you enter the comments section.
Basically I want this
into
And if anyone knows how to block all images in general, except from a few whitelists (lemmy sites, catbox, etc) that would be really helpful.
Yep. Settings > I am an advanced user (All the way at the bottom of the page). On the Filter Lists tab, I checked everything except 'Regions, languages' This lets you 'dial in' what you want on your network and what you don't. After a while of looking at the CNDs, and all the data points in Ublock for a particular site, you start to get a feel for what to block and what not to block.
There are color shades in UBlock that represent different types of blocks and allows. See here: github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki… As you select what to block, you will find that other sites use the same CDNs, etc, so once you have allowed or denied certain 'services' you don't have to do it for all sites.
Yes I can see what you mean, as I can disable individual websites from the UI. :\ This seems like uBlock 101, I should've really read about this. So thank you!
pignio.octt.eu.org/item/105934…
SGGeorwell
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