European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.
Last year, French privacy-focused search engine Qwant struck a joint venture with German non-profit search engine Ecosia, to develop a European search index. Called European Search Perspective (EUSP), the JV now aims to serve around 50% of French queries and 33% of German queries by the end of the year.
Qwant said it is using the new index to power some of its features, like AI summaries for search, and Ecosia has plans to add some AI features soon to its platform, too.
EUSP is also in talks with companies to spur the adoption of its index for enabling search within apps. Notably, it is targeting chatbots, presenting Staan as a cheaper alternative to Google and Bing.
“If you’re using ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot, they all do knowledge grounding with web search […] our index can power deep research and AI summary features. Google and Bing’s solutions are also pricey, and our index can offer power search features at a tenth of the cost,” Christian Kroll, CEO of Ecosia, told TechCrunch.
EUSP, like Proton, is pushing to develop a European tech stack that doesn’t rely on technology from the U.S. or China.
“The timing could not be more urgent. The outcome of the 2024 U.S. election has reminded European policymakers and innovators just how exposed Europe remains when it comes to core digital infrastructure. Much of Europe’s search, cloud, and AI layers are built on American Big Tech stacks, putting entire sectors – from journalism to climate tech – at the mercy of political or commercial agendas,” the companies said in a statement.
Kroll added that through this index, combined with European privacy laws, EUSP can offer a more privacy-friendly search solution as compared to its U.S. counterparts.
European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, that aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.
Apple has made headlines in recent weeks for touting its commitment to privacy and human rights, rolling out tools to limit surveillance and spyware. But behind the corporate messaging lies a much darker reality.
The company has quietly brought in dozens of veterans from Unit 8200, Israel’s shadowy military intelligence unit known for blackmail, mass surveillance, and targeted killings.
Many of these hires took place as Israel escalated its war on Gaza, and as CEO Tim Cook publicly expressed support for Israel while disciplining employees for pro-Palestinian expressions. Apple’s deepening ties to Israel’s most controversial intelligence raise uncomfortable questions, not only about the company’s political loyalties, but also about how it handles vast troves of personal user data.
A MintPress News investigation has identified dozens of Unit 8200 operatives now working at Apple. The company’s hiring spree coincides with growing scrutiny of its ties to the Israeli government, including its policy of matching employee donations to groups such as Friends of the IDF and the Jewish National Fund, both of which play a role in the displacement of the Palestinian people. The intense pro-Israel bias at the corporation has led many former and current employees to speak out.
This investigation is part of a series examining the close collaboration between Unit 8200 and Western tech and media companies. Previous investigations examined the links between Unit 8200 and social media giants like TikTok, Facebook and Google, and how former Unit 8200 spies are now responsible for writing much of America’s news about Israel/Palestine, holding top jobs at outlets like CNN and Axios.
If you're talking about online multiplayer games, they're server sided so no. Though, for some games, there are people who will sell you battle pass codes for cheaper because they buy them in countries with a weak currency, it all depends on the game.
Confused by all the compiler options? I just broke down the must-know settings in tsconfig.json tailored specifically for modern ESM-based projects.
What you’ll get inside: • How to extend base configs for strictest type safety • Tips on include/exclude globs to control your source files • Setting rootDir and outDir for clean builds • Source maps for seamless debugging • Declaration files for publishing libraries • Choosing the perfect target and module system (ES2024, NodeNext, and more) • Strictness flags that catch subtle bugs early • Tricks for JSON imports, unknown file extensions, and external tool compatibility • Ready-to-use example configs for apps and libraries Say goodbye to confusing tsconfig setups and hello to confident builds in 2025.
His 1000 sq.ft. circular house could be put together by a couple of people in less than 2 days, weighed under 3 tons (lots of aluminum), self-cooling. It was supported by a single mast, and portable. 80 years ago, the 'kit' cost $6500, delivered.
It is an attempt at legitimizing it to prevent diplomatic action against it.
Israel is past the point where its allies have had elections and, generally, has either had people elected who maintained the status quo or allowed Israel to do more than the previous administration. Israel can now eat Gaza in diplomatic peace.
I feel like MX Linux has been at or near the top of Distrowatch forever, but I literally never hear it mentioned elsewhere on the web. Is it just people literally asking this question for them selves, clicking on it and bumping it up? Has anyone tried MX to see if it lives up?
I asked because I saw a video talking about Catchy and Edeavour, and had them near the top which I don't think of as super old, so it seemed like somehow newer ones here moving up the list.
I used MX Linux all of 2024 because I had previously installed antiX on an old netbook and I really liked the tools it came with that meant I didn't have to touch the console too much, and MX Linux is a sister project based on antiX sharing the same custom utilities. And I have no clue why it rose to the top of distrowatch, but once it was there it stayed there because people click the top distros on the list in the sidebar, which in turn gives it clicks making it stay on top. I do still believe it's a good starter distro, it's just that once you get a bit more comfortable with linux the old Debian packages become more and more annoying.
MX has become my go-to for low-power, outdated computers.
It runs on a toaster. It installs on 64-bit systems with 32-bit EFI. The base install supports touchscreens. It fits on a 16GB SSD with room to spare. 2GB RAM is plenty. It has an active development community.
If your computer is less 5 years old, there are better options. But if you're trying to keep a Chromebook out of the junk yard, MX is a good choice.
Why? What makes it good for þat? Is it because þe kernel is trim?
I ask, because MX isn't þe base for any leading LXC "mini" containers, AFAIK. Alpine was þe top choice for a long time, alþough þere are competitors for minimum-sized containers. And while containers aren't fully bootable images, and more is needed, probably þe biggest addition is þe kernel. If you stay away from systemd, you can add dinit, metalog, and crond for a smidge over 1 mibibyte (750Kib, 47Kib, and 230Kib respectively, vs systemd's 36MiB).
So I'm wondering: what makes MX so good for old computers?
Oh, now come on… 5 years is hardly where a system becomes “old.” It’s 2025 right now. Using a system made in 2020 hardly differs at all from one made yesterday. I’d say a cutoff for considering slim distros would be more like ten years ago. I’ve got some systems that are older than that even and they blaze. Only a few things really put that kind of thing to the test: games and heavy graphics editing. Am I wrong?
Indeed! It depends what you’re doing on it. Because there’s a wealth of computer activities that have not increased in actual power demand in decades. Sure they keep making software more bloated to keep the need up, but if you throw an efficient distro on a machine and only need it for basic office type things like office suites, email etc. and even basic graphics editing, you can use a 25 year old machine and do just fine. It will run, and it will do the job well, and you’re never going to feel like it’s slow. Maybe not as glitzy as newer ones, but that is where you’re already beyond need and into want.
The only things that are tricky are internet connections with anything using web protocols, due to certificate tech etc. and that can be handled by using a still-maintained browser such as a Firefox fork, and email can be done via software like Thunderbird, which doesn’t have to render the bloated front-ends of many email providers.
The issue ends up being a hardware limitation. I can't quite recall the specific issue but there was some sort of encoding thing on the CPU that prevented me from using most apps without severe performance issues. Of course browsing and so on was fine. I ended up using it as a server for some time (20 Years old at this point) and the energy costs were bad enough that I decided to put it to rest. Its now part of my own little museum of old ass computers that I let guests use for mostly for viewing pdfs and boardgame rules. I tell my family to ship me their old laptops and stuff I got like 15 of them at this point, and I have in fact used all 15 of them simultaneously when I invite a lot of nerds over. Most of them are running Fedora Atomic, a couple are running MX Linux, Alpine, and Damn Small Linux. I intend on going through the small distros at some point and do a comparison
Distrowatch popularity is a pointless metric. IIRC they measure clicks on their own site as popularity. That means that people that just want to check out that distro near the top that they never heard of actually ensure that it stays near the top.
I am using Linux since the 90s, used Ubuntu a lot at one time, then started using MX linux, 16.1 iirc was my first install. Then I continue to use it, I have always like Xfce (coming from mwm and such), and no systemd, no snap, no flatpak etc. MX is very stable, use the latest package in .deb format. I am using it for almost 10 years now, 24/7, I am using it as my work PC too.
There was a pretty good indication that Manjaro was click-botting it a few years back, then Mint, and now MX. While I actually like Manjaro, that team is totally not above having done such a thing. And pretty much as soon as the rumors about that started, it mysteriously started dropping in the ranking...
Why? For a long time, DW was considered a source of distro recommendation and popularity. With these "attacks", it's become a community joke and not considered much of a real indication.
I cannot understand why anyone would be so childish. It’s not even as though money is involved; it’s some kind of juvenile popularity contest by people who clearly don’t believe their work speaks for itself, and clearly don’t take pride in their product.
Manjaro defaults to a defective dock that is riddled with bugs if you customize it. I broke it dozens of times just by making some minor modifications in the preferences. It also slows down a little gradually. That’s only minor but the dock thing really irked me. Really? Can’t just get the dock settings finished so the thing completely works? Anyway, that was a few years ago and I haven’t touched it since.
Apparently my experiance has been the outlier here but I've seen a ton of MX talk in the last year. Even to the point of it being somewhat commonly recommended alongside mint for beginners but on older hardware
I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.
That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it's not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn't count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.
Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe
But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.
I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)
If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs...I'd wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that's not possible (I don't think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services
As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.
It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.
When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven't heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.
Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don't have that.
Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn't ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don't want to be tracked.
On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.
Oh for sure, but at least Alexa's rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.
I hadn't even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that's clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I'm sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can't have that.
and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there
As you have said they are REALLY popular in russia, and that alone makes a great ammount of people, specially since they still support i386 and older architectures with full support, thats why ALT linux is also really popular.
I tried MX a few times on different machines maybe a few weeks/months apart. Every time I did because of it being up there at the top and I was like “What am I not seeing?” It’s a decent distro, yeah, but some of the customization is distracting to be honest. I can say it’s good but the top? For what… more than a year or two even, it’s been in the top few.
I installed MX on an old Acer tablet/laptop Hybrid. It's one of the few that would run due to its 32bit bootloader but 64bit system. It works fine, but I wasn't blown away either.
I’ve found two distros I enjoy on really old stuff: Bodhi and Q4. They run fairly well and for the footprint, they’re pretty feature-rich. I love the Moshka desktop on Bodhi.
Distrowatch ranking is just the distros that are more commonly searched on the site. The FAQ says "The page Hit Ranking represents hits per day by unique visitors". It's just an attempt to see what's more popular among visitors.
Yeah, maybe there is a feedback loop where people will click on the top one just to see why it is on top, and in doing so they give the clicks necessary to remain on the top.
First, as MX is catered mostly for a bit aged computers, it is likely the demographics of users are a bit more aged that other distros like CachyOS (which by the way, it is now in the crest of a wave, signaling Distrowatch ranking is not correlated with market share.)
Also, the fact that many of us are pondering about MX's high ranking, we are also clinking on it more that we would on Ubuntu or Mint so feeding the impressions count.
Similarly, when a post like this is brought up, a bunch of use go to Distrowatch and click on it to see info about MX.
Also a regional popularity must be at place... distrowatch probably is more prevalent is certain countries that MX is favored. I don't see many in Asia using MX for instance, so western distrowatch distorts its global popularity. For instance if 3 users in the US use Mint and 3 MX but in China, that they barely go to distrowatch, 3 use Mint and 0 MX, distrowach would rank globally MX and Mint as same while in reality, Mint is clearly in top globally.
Of course, it is also likely MX developers have a bit of incentive of clicking on Distrowatch for their baby... I don't find it particularly too bad since many developers are doing far worse things... Using bots and dozens of different IPs would trespass the ethical boundaries for me though! MX is not the only ones that could potentially be doing this... it is not possible that Arch or Kubuntu are raked way bellow Q4OS, Lite, or Bluestar for instance. I see some artifacts among top famed distros too. It reminds me of the VW diesel scandal... VW was cheeting, but all other car makers were manipulating in one way or another their emissions too, it is just that US found it convenient to go for the foreign low hanging fruit.
Best thing is for us to stop reading those rankings as anything more than distros that trend up and down and that is it. I categorize all distros we all hear about, from MX to Cachy, from Nobara to deepin all as equally competitive and the difference just catered to the needs of different users. The more unwarranted credit we give to these rankings, the more incentive we are given to manipulations.
Distrowatch lists MX origin as "Greece, USA", but likely have developers from both the US and the EU mainly.
I would not consider MX a branch of antiX. Some developers are also working on antiX so they likely share the same ideology (mainly anti-capitalism), but while antiX is explicitly affirming so, MX, instead, keeps a neutral political tone on its portal and its communications on everything non-linux related.
I had used MX and it is a well-rounded distro, totally recommended in in a computer older than a decade, you don't like systemd, like Debian but dislike anything Ubuntu or if you like any of the specific tools they ship with MX with. Also, knowing the ideology of some of their developers, if you despise big-brother, this distro should be less likely to be compromised than, lets say Fedora or Nobara.
I've been wondering the same for a couple of years now. I tried it once, and it's garbage. I never hear about it in forums, YouTube, Mastodon, Lemmy or any other place, but they are always top 10. WTF? 🤣
I use MX since years. I did distrohopping before, started by Manjaro then Mint, NixOS, MX, Alpine... One day Archlabs, my distro at the time, was closed, I had to switch quickly and MX was an obvious choice because I can have a nice Xfce setup out of the box and it was the most reliable of all distro I tried without being a fork of a fork like Mint. One day I asked about a package update on the forum, and a maintainer quickly answered me that it shouldnt be a problem and the package was added in some test repo. MX is not a scam, I dont know why this distro dont make noise on the classic linux places, maybe because Mint took the place of the easy beginner distro ? Or also the average MX prefer to use its computer to do stuff, than talking about his OS on the internet 😆
MX is a nice distro. However, it is also true that it is just Debian with XFCE, KDE, or Fluxbox on top.
Your comment about not “being a fork of a fork” is ironic. MX Linux is a fork of AntiX which is a fork of Debian.
This is a not a criticism of MX. I love EndeavourOS and it is just Arch with a different installer and some sensible defaults. But I can also understand why some people look at MX and wonder why they don’t just install Debian with XFCE directly.
MX is a new name for Mepis. Part of MX and AntiX contributors are the same persons. MX got kernel compiled by AntiX, that particularily suits old hardware. Also the Xfce setup is more modern comparing to the default provided by Debian.
ByJAMES GENN AUGUST 8, 2025 04:40 Updated: AUGUST 8, 2025 06:01
"The security cabinet approved the prime minister's proposal to defeat Hamas. The IDF will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones," Axios's Barak Ravid later cited the Prime Minister's Office as saying.
The statement did not use the term "occupation," rather using the term "takeover," due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
The Security Cabinet also adopted five principles for ending the war, namely disarming Hamas, returning all hostages, both living and murdered, demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, Israel maintaining security control over the Gaza Strip, and the existence of civilian government that is not controlled by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
Cabinet votes to approve Netanyahu's Gaza occupation plan | The Jerusalem Post
ByJAMES GENN AUGUST 8, 2025 04:40 Updated: AUGUST 8, 2025 06:01
"The security cabinet approved the prime minister's proposal to defeat Hamas. The IDF will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones," Axios's Barak Ravid later cited the Prime Minister's Office as saying.
The statement did not use the term "occupation," rather using the term "takeover," due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
The Security Cabinet also adopted five principles for ending the war, namely disarming Hamas, returning all hostages, both living and murdered, demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, Israel maintaining security control over the Gaza Strip, and the existence of civilian government that is not controlled by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
ByJAMES GENN AUGUST 8, 2025 04:40 Updated: AUGUST 8, 2025 06:01
"The security cabinet approved the prime minister's proposal to defeat Hamas. The IDF will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones," Axios's Barak Ravid later cited the Prime Minister's Office as saying.
The statement did not use the term "occupation," rather using the term "takeover," due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
The Security Cabinet also adopted five principles for ending the war, namely disarming Hamas, returning all hostages, both living and murdered, demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, Israel maintaining security control over the Gaza Strip, and the existence of civilian government that is not controlled by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
Cabinet votes to approve Netanyahu's Gaza occupation plan | The Jerusalem Post
ByJAMES GENN AUGUST 8, 2025 04:40 Updated: AUGUST 8, 2025 06:01
"The security cabinet approved the prime minister's proposal to defeat Hamas. The IDF will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones," Axios's Barak Ravid later cited the Prime Minister's Office as saying.
The statement did not use the term "occupation," rather using the term "takeover," due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
The Security Cabinet also adopted five principles for ending the war, namely disarming Hamas, returning all hostages, both living and murdered, demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, Israel maintaining security control over the Gaza Strip, and the existence of civilian government that is not controlled by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
ByJAMES GENN AUGUST 8, 2025 04:40 Updated: AUGUST 8, 2025 06:01
"The security cabinet approved the prime minister's proposal to defeat Hamas. The IDF will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones," Axios's Barak Ravid later cited the Prime Minister's Office as saying.
The statement did not use the term "occupation," rather using the term "takeover," due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
The Security Cabinet also adopted five principles for ending the war, namely disarming Hamas, returning all hostages, both living and murdered, demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, Israel maintaining security control over the Gaza Strip, and the existence of civilian government that is not controlled by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
The statement did not use the term “occupation,” rather using the term “takeover,” due to legal ramifications for the civilian population in the enclave, Ynet reported.
Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don't get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
The first one is a major slog, and the next two aren't significantly easier to get through. I thought the ideas were fascinating and the overall story was pretty good. But the characters are all completely flat and uninteresting. I had a tough time remembering who was who, but it really didn't affect the story at all.
Additionally the writing was not great and, especially in the second and third book, very sexist. It was worth it to read once, but I definitely won't be reading it again. My spouse keeps asking if I'll watch the show, but I'm on the fence. I heard they condensed the characters to a more streamlined cast, which would be a good start. But I still doubt I'll watch it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Leaks reveal Netanyahu deliberately imposed starvation in Gaza to 'force Hamas surrender'
Published date: 7 August 2025 11:52 BST
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israel…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Leaks reveal Netanyahu deliberately imposed starvation in Gaza to 'force Hamas surrender'
Published date: 7 August 2025 11:52 BST
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israel…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israel…
The Hague -> unequivocal guilty vote -> solitary confinement, gruel and grindcore music blasted in the face intermittently when those eyes start dibbing off to sleep
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
If the war cabinet was actually surprised Hamas was reasonable then they're just as brainwashed as their idiot population
to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
I genuinely don't know why the Hannibal directive is even a thing; whether Hamas does or doesn't have hostages, it wouldn't stop or limit Israel's genocidal actions.
The Hague -> unequivocal guilty vote -> solitary confinement, gruel, and grindcore music blasted in the face intermittently when those eyes start dibbing off to sleep
It was Israel itself which put Hamas in Gaza, supporting these with weapons and money, justifying this way the war against Palestina since more than half a century. Israel has free hand to do whatever they want, while there is the support by our good US boys and the UN is a mere Fake to calm the people, making believe that with this something will be done with their small talks
Fifty years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it controls these areas through repression, institutionalized discrimination, and systematic abuses of the Palestinian population’s rights.
Many Israeli leaders and academics have publicly agreed with this observation. For example, the former director of religious affairs in Israel, Avner Cohen, said that Israel pushed Hamas into taking action against Fatah and the PA. Back in 2001, Yasser Arafat described Hamas as a “creation of Israel” in an interview. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, some of Israel’s recent steps have, inadvertently, assisted Hamas.
Netanyahu believed Hamas helped keep Palestinians divided between areas controlled by the PA and Hamas, stopping the creation of a Palestinian state. To maintain a fragile truce and ensure Hamas remained focused on the government, he supposedly allowed Qatar’s money to enter Gaza via Israeli crossings.
We don't need leaks to know that. Just look at the Israelis deliberately stopping aid and food trucks going into Gaza. It's not just Bibi. Most of the Israelis seem very okay with this, and some even participate into blocking food and aid. So, no surprise there.
EDIT: Oh and let's not forget the Israelis that are organizing BBQs on the side of the border. I'm sure it's all a misunderstanding.
Seems needs to just ask the question, what does Hamas surrendering actually look like to netenyahu? How exactly does he even propose they seek surrender at the current time.
Yeah like I said what does surrender actually look like?
They don't really acknowledge them as legitimate so there's that. They also fund Hamas to keep it going. They kill their leadership leading up to negotiations then violate deals and cry about "having" to break them. They're actively fighting and it occupying I think all but one of their neighbors.
The vast majority of known hostages killed lately are all due to Israel directly. They say they know the location and then end up killing everyone in and around it and go OMG they killed that hostage!
So legit, they want terrorists to surrender to save civilians they also say the same terrorists are using as human shields. Oh and I forgot literally everyone is Hamas, doctors, cops, teachers, children, babies, buildings, cars, infrastructure,.... Fuckin food....
No, no this has to be fake. I specifically remember this gentleman saying he wasn't starving people at all. You really think someone would just, go around telling lies like that?
Netanyahu is a bitch ass terrorist. He will go down in history as our generation’s hitler. People who invent the Time Machine will go try to kill him before they go back to the 40’s.
I think you mean LiveUSB, but it depends on the game. If it's a large game, it's going to install and run from USB, so it's not going to perform well. Small games that fit in memory will be fine.
If you want to specifically take steps to make this work better, get an external SSD and turn the Live Image that way. It's still not going to perform well with large games, but multitudes better than from USB.
Unless you have a specific game to try, you'd get better info from ProtonDB, or comments online to find out what the general feeling about performance is going to be.
Live images have the image, and free space. Anything you install while they're on uses that free space, and when you turn them off, they still have an untouched OS partition. The space you used to install things gets wiped, essentially.
But you CAN use that space, Linux works as it normally would, just on a USB. Steam could even download a cloud save and upload after you've played, as long as you don't restart the computer.
Yes, though depending on the media you are running the OS and game from, the performance could be worse than you would expect from an install on the main system media. For example, when I was testing moving over, I had Arch installed on a USB device and had some issues with I/O bandwidth. But, I also had a folder on my main storage drive to run Steam games from and this performed OK. It was formatted NTFS; so, there were some other oddities. But, it worked just fine and managed to convince me that I'd do OK under Linux. Took the plunge and I've been happy with the decision ever since.
Performance will likely be really bad running on a live ISO since you are going to likely be bottlenecked by read/write speeds of the usb you have plugged in. I wouldn’t use it to test performance of games.
In a live environment I was not able too install too much - it always ran out of space, but I am not even sure what space it used, maybe a RAM disk?
So if Steam even fits with all of it's dependencies, you may be able to try out a tiny game, definitely not 150GB Forza Horizon 5.
There are ways to make it work by using persistent storage, but it's a hassle, at this point it would be easier to buy a 25$ 500GB ssd and install Linux on it.
by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica Aug. 7, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT
[fascinating article]
Reporting Highlights
Covert Ops: Commandos that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, recruited from Iran and neighboring nations destroyed Iranian air defenses in the first hours of a June attack.
Intelligence Gathering: Israeli operatives identified the bedrooms in which Iranian nuclear scientists were sleeping, enabling precise airstrikes.
Cyber Deception: Israel sent a fake message that summoned senior Iranian military leaders to a phantom meeting in a bunker that was then bombed by Israeli jets.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Their Country From Within
by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica Aug. 7, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT
[fascinating article]
Reporting Highlights
Covert Ops: Commandos that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, recruited from Iran and neighboring nations destroyed Iranian air defenses in the first hours of a June attack.
Intelligence Gathering: Israeli operatives identified the bedrooms in which Iranian nuclear scientists were sleeping, enabling precise airstrikes.
Cyber Deception: Israel sent a fake message that summoned senior Iranian military leaders to a phantom meeting in a bunker that was then bombed by Israeli jets.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Operations in the decadeslong secret war between Iran and Israel have shifted fundamentally in recent years, moving from being the exclusive work of Mossad field agents to Iranian dissident insiders and others from neighboring countries.
by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica Aug. 7, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT
[fascinating article]
Reporting Highlights
Covert Ops: Commandos that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, recruited from Iran and neighboring nations destroyed Iranian air defenses in the first hours of a June attack.
Intelligence Gathering: Israeli operatives identified the bedrooms in which Iranian nuclear scientists were sleeping, enabling precise airstrikes.
Cyber Deception: Israel sent a fake message that summoned senior Iranian military leaders to a phantom meeting in a bunker that was then bombed by Israeli jets.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Operations in the decadeslong secret war between Iran and Israel have shifted fundamentally in recent years, moving from being the exclusive work of Mossad field agents to Iranian dissident insiders and others from neighboring countries.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva harshly criticized U.S. President Donald Trump following the implementation of a 50% tariff on Brazilian exports. #Lula called Trump “authoritarian” with “anti-civilizational” behavior and accused him of creating “problems where there were none.”
"A president must not humiliate himself before another president. I respect everyone and demand respect in return,” Lula told Reuters, rejecting the idea of a phone call with Trump. “He doesn’t want to talk, and I have no intention of doing so.”
Jeremy Loffredo, reporting for Drop Site News, was granted access to Dahiyeh to report on the aftermath of the attack just hours after the bombs fell. The targeted sites consisted of residential buildings, local businesses, and community infrastructure. While the Israeli military claimed it struck drone production factories operated by Hezbollah, no evidence was provided to substantiate the allegations neither before nor after the strikes. Local officials and residents strongly denied the presence of any military installations.
Jeremy Loffredo, reporting for Drop Site News, was granted access to Dahiyeh to report on the aftermath of the attack just hours after the bombs fell. The targeted sites consisted of residential buildings, local businesses, and community infrastructure. While the Israeli military claimed it struck drone production factories operated by Hezbollah, no evidence was provided to substantiate the allegations neither before nor after the strikes. Local officials and residents strongly denied the presence of any military installations.
Jeremy Loffredo, reporting for Drop Site News, was granted access to Dahiyeh to report on the aftermath of the attack just hours after the bombs fell. The targeted sites consisted of residential buildings, local businesses, and community infrastructure. While the Israeli military claimed it struck drone production factories operated by Hezbollah, no evidence was provided to substantiate the allegations neither before nor after the strikes. Local officials and residents strongly denied the presence of any military installations.
Jeremy Loffredo, reporting for Drop Site News, was granted access to Dahiyeh to report on the aftermath of the attack just hours after the bombs fell. The targeted sites consisted of residential buildings, local businesses, and community infrastructure. While the Israeli military claimed it struck drone production factories operated by Hezbollah, no evidence was provided to substantiate the allegations neither before nor after the strikes. Local officials and residents strongly denied the presence of any military installations.
Jeremy Loffredo, reporting for Drop Site News, was granted access to Dahiyeh to report on the aftermath of the attack just hours after the bombs fell. The targeted sites consisted of residential buildings, local businesses, and community infrastructure. While the Israeli military claimed it struck drone production factories operated by Hezbollah, no evidence was provided to substantiate the allegations neither before nor after the strikes. Local officials and residents strongly denied the presence of any military installations.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
'Blatant Attempt to Bust Our Unions': Trump Admin Moves to Gut Labor Protections at VA | Common Dreams
Julia Conley Aug 07, 2025
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
'Blatant Attempt to Bust Our Unions': Trump Admin Moves to Gut Labor Protections at VA | Common Dreams
Julia Conley Aug 07, 2025
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
'Blatant Attempt to Bust Our Unions': Trump Admin Moves to Gut Labor Protections at VA | Common Dreams
Julia Conley Aug 07, 2025
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins notified the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions that he was implementing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which required the termination of collective bargaining agreements for agencies whose missions are related to national security.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva harshly criticized U.S. President Donald Trump following the implementation of a 50% tariff on Brazilian exports. Lula called Trump “authoritarian” with “anti-civilizational” behavior and accused him of creating “problems where there were none.”
“A president must not humiliate himself before another president. I respect everyone and demand respect in return,” Lula told Reuters, rejecting the idea of a phone call with Trump. “He doesn’t want to talk, and I have no intention of doing so.”
Lula slams Trump over Brazil tariffs, accuses Bolsonaro of betrayal
Thursday, August 7th 2025 - 10:33 UTC
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva harshly criticized U.S. President Donald Trump following the implementation of a 50% tariff on Brazilian exports. Lula called Trump “authoritarian” with “anti-civilizational” behavior and accused him of creating “problems where there were none.”
“A president must not humiliate himself before another president. I respect everyone and demand respect in return,” Lula told Reuters, rejecting the idea of a phone call with Trump. “He doesn’t want to talk, and I have no intention of doing so.”
i know that some games arent compitable and been to the site that shows which game is and which is not, and i also know most mods dont work on linux version which is a boomer (skyrim and rimworld mostly)?
so for gamers, why did you change to linux being a mostly a gamer?
Pretty good unless your game doesnt enable anticheat support for Linux like the battlefield games or fortnite for example. Performance per game is either on par or better than Windows. Game support can be checked on protondb.com/
Seems like most mods work fine on Linux, but I'm sure it depends on the game. For games with built-in mod managers like Baldur's Gate 3, it all just works. For games with manual mods that involve replacing or editing game files, they should generally work since you're running the same game files to begin with.
I haven't had any big compatibility problems recently, though again, I'm sure it depends on that game. Proton (built into Steam) works very very well nowadays.
Just a few years ago I found the experience frustrating. It seemed like everything had something wrong with it, even if it wasn't big. Lots of games had glitchy input, whether using a controller or keyboard/mouse. But somewhere down the line it totally flipped, and everything I play runs great now. I still have a bootable Windows 10 system, but I haven't actually booted it in...two years, maybe?
yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, mods for the windows binary sometimes don't work on the linux binary but it'll work just fine on the windows binary running through wine
I play Skyrim SE on Linux (Via Steam) and currently have about 30 mods on it, and it runs fine. I have run Oblivion Remastered (no mods) and have experienced occasional crashes, but it is at least playable.
Aside from some occasional glitches with SteamVR, it's been several years since I encountered a game which didn't run as good if not better on linux than on windows, and I don't think I've ever had a linux-specific issue with mods. My understanding is that anti-cheat software compatibility can still be an issue for some people, but I haven't run into that yet.
For me, switching to linux was a no-brainer; I prefer it in every way.
The Venn diagram of games I want to play and games that won't run on Linux is two disjoined circles. My buddy really likes Helldivers, but that didn't play nice because of the invasive anti-cheat. That has been the only one.
Helldivers 1 and 2 are platinum and gold rated on ProtonDB with recent reports on both confirming they work well.
For a more recent report:
I'm literally playing Helldivers 2 right now, on Wayland with HDR, and an Nvidia graphics card.
I just assume games work now and rarely need to check protondb. All of the games with kernel Anticheat are just as scummy as Microsoft with their microtransactions and FOMO systems intended to manipulate their players... so, I don't care to play them anyway.
Honestly, we've been eating pretty good fam. See protondb.com/ for game compatibility on Linux.
The only remaining pain points are (see the provided links for databases on what does and doesn't work): - Anti-cheat; areweanticheatyet.com/ - VR; db.vronlinux.org/
VR on linux actually works just fine from my experience. I've never had a game not work. The big issue is just headset support. The HTC Vive and Valve Index are the only headsets with official drivers, since they were made by Valve. Standalone headsets, like the Quest for example, also work using ALVR. Anything else doesn't really work. There are open source drivers but they're not complete enough to be useable unless something majorly changed there since I last checked.
I can play all of my games (well, the ones my 10 year old craptop can handle). The only issue I have is that vulkan shaders can take a minute to cache for some games.
It works pretty well. I don't currently play any pc games with anti-cheat, so most games work well without having to do anything special outside of running them in Wine or some other application and there are some games that actually work noticeably better on Linux than Windows. Some games have required some additional setup but it's pretty rare for games to just not work at all. Something I find kind of funny though, is that most of the games I haven't been able to get working on Linux aren't working on Windows either.
I should also mention that I don't really use mods for games. I have used mods for the Linux version of SRB2 but the game is designed to be easily modable, so it makes sense that the mods would just work.
I've swapped to linux mostly due to aging hardware and low disposable income. I'm still running A PC that was lower MID a decade ago.
So far its a blast, nothing short of shotty anticheat gets in my way. ProtonDB is a great resource. Wine and the proton layers basically give you parity (and in some cases better performance than windows).
As far as I know, all Rimworld mods will work with Linux. You can either subscribe to them on the Steam Workshop (and enable them from the mod menu in-game) or download them manually and put them in the mods folder in the installation directory. I've played with modlists that had more than 100 mods in them and never had a Linux related issue.
To answer your other question, I dual booted Linux for a while, mainly because of privacy concerns, but switched to Linux full time around the time Windows 10 came out. The thing that gave me the final push was Windows 10 on my new laptop telling me it couldn't open a zipped folder and I would need to pay for that feature! There was also a backup copy of W10 on a second drive that I didn't know about which automatically overwrote Linux when I tried to install it.
Every distro I listed is awesome in it's own ways. Arch is great, but you will break it.
Arch is for people that want to learn Linux enough to fix it and/or tailor it down to the last package, if you want something that just works no matter what, it's not for you.
However, if you have a second PC and your activities are not critically important and you have lots of free time, it's great to learn how Linux works.
Having 2 drives also works fine. Just don't dual boot on the same drive, as that will eventually result in being unable to boot.
Gaming on Linux is flourishing. Achievable migration for most games. Biggest niche asterisk from my perspective is VR. Already a technical pain in the ass to get working reliably/efficiently on Windows. Throw Linux into the mix and expect to have a hell of a time configuring and troubleshooting.
I have found WiVRn to be a delight to use on Linux with my Quest headset. Works with many other wireless headsets, too. Very little issues with it playing Windows VR games on Linux.
Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven't had many if any games that don't run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).
Mods certainly do work - I've modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they're often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.
The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it's just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.
Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.
I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven't used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I'm tempted to wipe it as I don't use it.
The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That's not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That's a problem you can't get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn't working on Linux.
I have bazzite on a gaming only HTPC and it's a gazillion times easier to use than having windows boot into big picture mode. It's just so much better, I rarely have to keep a mouse around with me now for when I want/need to change system settings.
The only reason I kept Windows on my PC was to play League with a friend occasionally. So at some point I removed Windows completely to free disk space and I told my friend he could install Dota 2 if he wants to keep playing with me 😁
I’m joining the linux cult. I’m switching my main gaming pc this week. I’m sick of seeing news of Microsoft aiding in atrocities and destroying game studios.
The only game I have not been able to get work has been pubg. Everything else has been great and run fine once proton was up and running. I am using bazzite 41 as my current distro.
I uninstalled Windows few years ago even though I play the latest AAAs and indies games, including in VR, that's how good Linux for gamers.
You can check my post history but basically once you have your hardware well supported (basically the right drivers) and rely on a good system to evaluate compatibility (e.g. ProtonDB) then you won't get any surprise.
I suggest though that you try it yourself, e.g setup a Linux distribution of your chosing, a game you already own and... see if it feels good. If it does not, feel free to ask around and people will be happy to help if you provide a clear problem with your documented attempts to fix it, at least you can count on me.
So... finally why did I change? Well beside the "it actually works" it is also a lot more coherent with my own WorldView and my skillset. I'm a professional developer, WebXR prototypist to be more specific, so having an OS that does not put arbitrary (well, mostly about control for profit) limits on what I can or can not do is simply better. I can play for fun AND I can tinker with the same OS. I don't have to reboot if I just happen to have an idea that I want to try, I can just do it right here and there.
TL;DR: it works and it's better, giving me all the freedom I need to be creative and not feel constrained.
PS: also not giving more money to multibillionaires from Microsoft does feel nice.
Games mostly work. If they have a native Linux version they work (and more games have a native Linux version than you may expect). For Windows-only games, there's a compatibility layer called Proton (which is a gaming-focused fork of a more general compatibility layer called Wine) that lets you run Windows executables on Linux. IME most Windows games run flawlessly with Proton. You can check games on protondb.com/ to see how well they run on Proton.
Rimworld has a native Linux version, and I've not had any problems with Rimworld mods from Steam workshop on Linux. Never tried modding Skyrim so can't say on that.
The native version of rimworld has a bug where your FPS get nuked if you use the mouse to move the screen around, but there is a mod thay fixes that issue lol. I have had no other issues with rimworld on linux.
I've never experienced that tbh but I use WASD, occasionally mouse scrolling as in when the screen moves when your cursor is near the edge of the screen. Unless you mean that kind of mouse scrolling causes the bug, in which case it doesn't seem to happen for me. Glad there's a fix though
Its has been great: Most of the games I already played worked on Linux. Some you might have more fps. Some less Some Games (e.g, Gmod) use Proton instead of the Native build. Some games (e.g, Tf2) you can only Use Native which uses DXVK. For Gmod cause its very outdated(Chromium is outdated,OGL only,lower fps) Had to quit Roblox and Fortnite to remove windows + those games sucked anyways and roblox just platform decision I also Like how Directx 9 and 11 are Vulkan underneath the hood results in more fps. And you can also Translate OGL calls into Vulkan via Zink. (Also via Nvidia it works) Modding is also Similar how you do it on Windows(except maybe for some special windows only mods) The only things I hate is VKD3D-PROTON sucks on Nvidia. And that some games require launch options(which is fine for me,But not fine for people who want No tinkering).
Pop!_OS was a lifesaver when I was learning Linux. You can just look up Ubuntu related questions for tech support, the graphics drivers are preconfigured, and the interface is easy to use.
I'm on CachyOS with KDE now, but I highly recommend Pop! for a first-timer not looking to tinker.
Also, with ProtonTricks you can still mod stuff. It's not perfect, but there's a version of Mod Organizer 2 for Linux ;P
Bazzite looks good for beginners, I like cachyos as a beginner but im a tinkerer, using gnome reminds me of cydia, I like cachyos because unlimited options, never feel like I can't install something, it's prob on the aur or whatever.
if cachyos pacman for cachyosrepo paru for aur At first I was confused on packages being missing
grab flatpak support and use flathub for some things
appimages are nice with gear lever (updates/menu)
can easily grab snapd support if you want to cover more areas
debtap to make debs usable on arch
I had always been turned away from linux because of the many formats deb, snap, etc. and being confused about support. But now I know I can get support for most things just installing whats needed from their website. (seems easiest with arch, least instructions)
BTW, while that made me comfortable when I swapped, knowing I can have whatever. I only needed to add flatpak support, and grab gearlever, everything else is unnecessary and available on the aur or as an appimage typically.
I switched full time to Linux last year and primarily use my computer for gaming. It's been great. I play games through steam so YMMV with other systems. I haven't had any issues playing a variety of games such as Factorio (built for Linux), GTFO, Horizon: Forbidden West, PEAK, Ready or Not, Plate Up... It's been rare for me to have an issue. I remember an issue trying to play Plate Up via steam remote play.
I play PlateUp with a friend, we started on remote play while I wasnt sure if I liked the game. It had issues where if the window lost focus, I'd crash and the entire game session was lost. Anyway, I bought the game and have never had any issues since. Its super fun!
It's ok, not great but just ok. I mostly recommend people to keep a one drive for linux and one for windows exclusively for gaming. That way you can also keep any propietary software you need on your windows drive without compromising your linux drive.
I switched to Linux a few weeks ago after being a windows user. Windows is pretty much all I've known and grew up on it. I made the switch after my partner had been using it for a long time. We are both gamers and play things like palworld, sims 4, dark souls, etc. I've found that most games run fine even though they say that it's not Linux supported. My PC runs faster and responds faster than I'm used to than it was on windows.
I've never played Rimworld, so I don't know the modding situation on it.
I attempted to mod Skyrim, and as far as I can tell, it's not that the mods don't work, it's that the primary mod manager Nexus is currently using (Vortex) is kind of a pain in the ass to set up on Linux. They are currently working on a new mod manager that should be natively compatible and should resolve that issue.
But for every other game I've ever modded on Linux it works exactly the same as it does on Windows.
Truthfully, outside of the handful of games that don't want me playing them because of my OS, 90% of my games work exactly the same, if not better. The remaining 10% might require a little tinkering to get running, or have some weird hiccup (having to run it in Proton instead of native because for some reason they're "different versions" thus menaing I can only play with friends on Windows in the Proton version), but I honestly couldn't be happier.
It feels like I'm playing on my computer again, not Microsoft's computer.
I dual boot Windows and EndeavourOS. I've got a range of games running great on Linux, performance does take a hit in most cases but as long as you have good hardware and aren't chasing ultimate FPS numbers, it is usually acceptable.
I wish I could make the full switch but music recording just isn't a good experience on Linux. High latency, lack of audio device configuration, and a limited range of instruments and effects (VST files), all means a Mac or Windows are the only options.
90% of games can be played on Linux, though some of them actually happened to require some sort of tweaks to get them working. That said, the experience my producer and I have had for about 5 years (August 20th I think will be 5 years) was nothing short of wondrous.
I've only had problems with Stellaris mods, i guess they use some windows only libraries? Ah and Elite Dangerous mods. Games like Starbound work even better on Linux though
Pretty good. Some games have issues on Linux, especially some that don't have native controls for DualShock 4 controllers and not using Steam Input. Even the ones that do sometimes dont work without Steam Input on (which shows XBOX buttons).
I've only had actual crashes with Forza Horizon 4 and 5 on Linux. Everything else works fine.
Distro is Arch Linux (BTW).
As to why I swapped, I get better performance on Linux than on Windows.
Built.myself a new.gaming desktop and decided to dive into thw deep end by installing linux. Been working quite well, so far. Almost all the games i play do not use any anti-cheat, so i don't feel that i'm missing out on anything. The only game which does not work that well is Roadcraft. I'll just wait until it is patched to run better. I have lots of games in my backlog to play anyway.
If you just want to play the game, then gaming works surprisingly well on Linux. Very well.
I have the same game on Steam running on 2 separate computers, Fedora and Win 11. On the Fedora one, everything is just rock solid. Heck, even when I am rendering some very intensive 3D stuff on another workspace for work and use 50% of the RAM, the game is still running. On the Win 11 laptop, random issues happen where my cursor dissapears and the entire desktop freezes.
OTOH, if you need the gaming accessories to work properly then I'm not sure, could be a 50/50. For eg, if your laptop has some proprietary sound card, then Linux might not be able to take advantage of that. On Windows, these should work OOTB.
My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won't "just enable Secure Boot and run Windows" to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I've never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.
Palantir, an emerging tech company that was founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with support from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is a central player in the fight between the old guard and the up and coming weapons firms of Silicon Valley.
“The company’s transformation from an awkward Silicon Valley upstart trying to make it as a government contractor has also emboldened it. Some of its recent and prospective deals toe the lines of what even some of the company’s current and former employees consider a violation of ethical applications of AI and moral uses of software by the government—and Palantir is unapologetic.”
“Unapologetic” may be an understatement. At the height of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, in January 2024, Palantir president and CEO Alex Karp held the company’s board meeting in Tel Aviv to show solidarity with the Israeli war effort and to goad other pro-Israel business executives to openly support that country’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which many independent experts – including independent human rights groups based in Israel – have described as a genocide.
Palantir also has extraordinary influence inside the Trump team, beginning with vice president J.D. Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir’s Peter Thiel before joining the administration. And former Palantir employees are hard at work inside a variety of executive branch agencies. At least a half dozen former company employees worked inside the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, making recommendations for deep cuts in a variety of federal agencies. And a senior counselor at Palantir has close ties to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Palantir is aggressively pursuing business with Saudi Arabia, a move that the Journal article describes as “a departure from the company’s stated focus on Western democratic values and freedom of speech.”
The emerging military tech firms and the venture capital firms that invest in them see themselves as more than just business people. They believe that they are a special breed of human being, the “new patriots” who are willing to take risks to restore America’s position in a place of global dominance, so far ahead of China that Beijing will never catch up, or so Karp and others have said.
Palantir is on a roll, experiencing record growth through government contracting. But its activities have raised ethical concerns from former employees and the larger public.
Discover Hidden Gems: Open-Source Software You Should Know About
We all love open-source software, but there are so many amazing projects out there that often go unnoticed. Let's change that! Share your favorite open-source software that you think more people should know about. Here’s how you can contribute:
Single Option Per Comment: Mention one open-source software per comment to be able to easily find the most popular software.
No Duplicates: Avoid duplicating software that has already been mentioned to ensure a wide variety of options.
Upvote What You Love: If you see a software that you also appreciate, upvote it to help others discover it more easily.
Check out last year's post for more inspiration: Last Year's Post
Let's create a comprehensive list of open-source software that everyone should know about!
I advise you to post any recommendations to the original post, I was just sharing it here so others can find it! I also wanna see those recs myself so that's the motive for posting this 😅
What open-source software would you like more people to know about?
Please answer with a single option per comment without duplicating and upvote the topics you've seen active. That way we can also find out the most popular software.
I advise you to post any recommendations to the original post, I was just sharing it here so others can find it! I also wanna see those recs myself so that's the motive for posting this 😅
Okay, just curious, does anyone else have a bug preventing them from using Openkeychain? Whenever I try to confirm a key, it simply gets stuck at the "My Key:" selection drop-down. There's a 8 year old GitHub issue that was started and it never got solved...
And like, there's no alternatives for this app are there? It seems Thunderbird defaults to them.
EDIT: I've been trying to create a keypair from Open keychain and simply export the pair to my laptop to use it there but any key it generates is unable to be imported by both gpg and Thunderbird. It seems I'm not the only one having this issue, meanwhile the project seems to be no longer maintained. What do I do? Give up on using Thunderbird on mobile?
I used deltachat and sent an auto crypt setup message, and k-9 handed it off to open keychain just fine. k9 is being merged with Thunderbird Mobile so this should work fine... for mobile. but man was it a hassle getting the keys to my desktop
LibreWolf is what FireFox was supposed to be: no VPN ads, no telemetry, no AI, uBlockOrigin built in. It's literally the latest FF release, but with the crap ripped out and decent privacy installed.
Ironfox is pretty great for privacy, and tries to not break things, but they do have some configs you really have to dig for and already know about if something breaks.
I had the displeasure of finding out that the loopback and localhost was listed as a blocked domain for extensions, which is why an extension of mine couldn't connect to an app running on my phone. It was hard to find help for my issue, and I had to get lucky to find a solution for it (literally one person has my issue). Honesty, this extension gets broken every few months due to IronFox configs, due to JavaScript, WASM, SCP, or now this... I almost gave up on IronFox and went to Fennec 😅
They went too far in pursuing their foolish dogma and castrated a decent browser to the point where you don't want to work with it at all. For example, they removed the interface element that allows you to save passwords, even though the password manager is still there.
Do you even read the bullshit you linked? That's three lines of selfish nonsense telling me what's best for me. But if I missed something, I would love to hear from you how to enable password saving the old good firefox way.
I honestly wonder if the OP in that thread is in good faith or has some other problem screwing up his config. No, neither FF nor LW randomly change settings on you; you have some process, somewhere, that is either corrupting the sqlite db or straight up changing the config.
Anyway, if you literally did a web search
how to enable mozilla sync in librewolf
you would get the correct answer, which works for 99.99% of people 99.99% of the time:
To enable Mozilla Sync in LibreWolf, go to the about:config page and set the option "identity.fxaccounts.enabled" to true. After that, you should be able to log in to your Firefox account and use the sync features.
I don't understand why you're trying to steer the conversation toward mozilla sync for the second time, ignoring the original saving password problem. If I needed mozilla sync, I would use it. But I don't need it. I don't want it.
So that you don't make any assumptions, I'll just show you what the folks at librewolf have patched out in their struggle against suitable UI:
There is no way I know to have it back into the browser except to find and revert the patches and compile librewolf yourself.
Honestly, soft forks of either Firefox or Chrome by a small team are a stop-gap hack and not anything truly effective at fixing the issues because they are entirely dependent on the large teams developing the upstream browsers. As hard as they work, they simply don't have the in-house expertise to develop the browser, and can even make mistakes when ripping things out. It's certainly a trade-off for better privacy now, but with other risks.
Some of the more clean-slate browsers out there seem more interesting, even if they lack features, because the developers can actually make design decisions and develop codebase expertise.
But it's based on a browser that's not made to be secure, but instead to have the most features and comply to all these standards. So removing them will make it a bit more secure, but it will never be good. The best browsers are the ones that aren't made to support javascript and all these other standards. A private browser would be something like w3m or links. Ideally, it wouldn't be HTML but gemini's gemtext or just markdown.
Picocrypt, which is an encryption tool for files and folders. It's a 3MB application that utilizes XChaCha20 as its encryption algorithm. It isn't developed anymore, but it's well worth it regardless.
Neigsendoig, my producer, just started using it, learning how it works.
I'm curious, I've never had the chance to really use Signal much, and I've never used an XMPP client before. What made you dislike Signal and use XMPP instead? I wish I could convince my iMessage loving mom to jump to anything else.
I had no issue with signal (except phone number verification) but according to my family members signal uses a lot of ram and battery. Non of them have Google play services. XMPP doesn't use that much resources and it's simple, no unnecessary bloat.
Maybe Signal drains battery when it can't use Google Play Services for notifications and falls back to keeping a connection alive to Signal servers instead?
Im running grapheneos with molly foss (signal fork). I tried both notification deamons, Websocket and Selfhosted UnifiedPush. Both dont drain my battery at all.
I haven't ever found a better open source keyboard or voice type than futo. It really is that good. With so many languages. I'm unsure why some of them got downvoted but oh well. I'm sure there's a ton more to add that are privacy focused open source apps but those were off my head.
Unfortunately those tools are not open source, they are under some source-available proprietary license. That may be why they (rightfully) get downvoted.
You can use them if you like of course, but they should not be advertised as open source.
A fork of Signal for Android with proprietary Google binary blobs removed. Uses OpenStreetMap for maps and a websocket server connection, instead of Google Maps and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
It's not letting me register. When I have my VPN turned off it can't conbect to servers, and when I have it turned on I get swamped with recaptchas and the veriification code doesn't send
Portmaster is a free and open-source application that puts you back in charge over all your computer's network connections. Increase your privacy and security. Get peace of mind.
Do you find Portmaster to be viable? I've seen it around and read a couple brief articles about it. I've just never found anyone who uses it. I use MalwareBytes Firewall Control from Binsoft (Alexandru Dicu - binisoft.org/). It's fairly bare bones but it does the trick. I'm always looking for something better. I do have the whole network behind a standalone pFsense box. I just needed something local on the machine to silence chatty programs and services.
Windows Firewall Control is a powerful tool which extends the functionality of Windows Firewall by adding outbound notifications and many other features.
Portmaster is the most powerful GUI firewall out there.
The learning curve is steep and it is not a good fit for the filthy casual.
It has very good block lists... Too good.
For example, if you want to play a vidiya game esp online it will likely block half the connections so you need to go in manually unblock what's needed.
Ain't no normie ever gonna figure that out lol so I stopped telling people to get it.
We were all 'normies', to use your vernacular, at one point or another. Could it possibly be more complicated than building an Altair with less than supportive instruction manuals of the time?
Yes, the filters are deadly eeficient, you can block global all tracking from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ms, but than you need to set what you will block exactly, if you block eg,Google globaly, forget to be capable to access any of its services, including YouTube. Globally I blocked only Facebook, because I don't use any of the Zuckerbot services and clicking on a Facebook link or any of it's other services or AIs, I see only this (and in change it's pixel or any other tracker or logger, embedded in any website, my middle finger)
Anyway, Portmaster is not so difficult in its settings or the learning curve, well, at least not for someone with minimal basic nocions, I found it pretty intuitive, way more complicated is to set up Pi-Hole, which is certainly nothing for noobs. Portmaster is installing as is and maybe selecting the DNS server you want use from the list, because it has good default settings which guarantee a reasonable privacy. Everything you block is easy restaurable if the result isn't what you want. No problems to recommend, because it's save to use and relativ easy to handle, even for newbies
All true but vast majority of people will never be bothered to be blocking/unblocking per connection, at best they will do per app and even that is a very small minority.
As said, Portmaster by default already has a good setting, a newbe don't have to do nothing to improve a lot his privacy, more than download, installing (run on boot) and forget about it. Grandmother safe.
Malwarebyte may be also valid, better than nothing, but Malwarebyte is proprietary soft, not OpenSource like Portmaster, which also include DNS crypt and custimizable dynamic filters, Optional also an SPN service (paid), something like an VPN on steroids, which permits multilevel tunneling, individual for every app.
Thing is, I already have a standalone, whole network, pFsense firewall in place. I already run DNSCrypt as well as PIA VPN, & Tailscale on my servers. I run Windows Firewall Control on my Windows PC, which was bought out by MalwareBytes, for a couple things I like to have precise control of but only at certain times as needed. I really was just interested in someone's personal perspective. I do have Portmaster bookmarked, as I'm not one to dismiss useful software off hand. Never know when I might just have a use case for it.
Multi-Level Tunneling Sounds interesting. Is that like choosing which layer you want to use in the OSI stack? I'd be all in if Portmaster could generate network noise for obfuscation. That's what I'm trying to educate myself on currently.
Portmaster works from the OS, because this way you can selective allow or block the traffic of every app and even from the OS itself, which with Pi Hole, needed for router level isn't possible, there you can only monitor the global traffic.
Home of the DNSCrypt project, a protocol to improve DNS security. Download DNSCrypt clients, the DNSCrypt server proxy, and read the specifications here.
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
Coworker is a funny word. It’s often misread, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose. And while I love a good double entendre, in my editorial role as a professional clarifier I feel it is wo…
Surrey for the tangent, that might be my favourite comic of all time. I think it's an incredibly valuable lesson menu pepper still and always will need to learn at some point in their lives
Sorry for the tangent, that might be my favourite comic of all time. I think it's an incredibly valuable lesson many people still and always will need to learn at some point in their lives
Florisboard. Android keyboard, doesn't have spell checking yet but I've been using it for years, you might not need autocorrect as much as you think! (Note for Samsung users: Samsung Keyboard keeps adding items to its clipboard history whether it's default or not. Clipboard history is also accessible through Edge Panels. Your passwords might end up and sit there for a long time... you can use adb to disable com.samsung.android.app.clipboardedge and com.samsung.clipboardsaveservice.)
Just to post an alternative (correct me if there is something wrong with the app) but I have been using Futo keyboard for a week now and I've been pleayed. Clipboard disabled by default, drag typing, local autocorrect that you can load any dictionary (as a file), can use local text or voice ML model that you have to download yourself (their site has a browser), customizable quick actions, smart key hitbox enlarging (increases key hitbox according to how likely it is to come next). It is free, but asks for a support of about 9€.
FUTO Keyboard is a modern, privacy-focused keyboard that runs fully offline. Enjoy swipe typing, autocorrect, predictive text, and more—no internet connection required.
After losing a suit that took seven years to resolve, Fintiv is trying to sue Apple again, and is again alleging the company built Apple Pay using stolen mobile wallet technology.
july 2025, arch linux is most popular, what would you recommend?
Mora
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