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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2020

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  • Ubuntu is a fine “nice to meet you” distro – the criticisms I’ve gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues – thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.

    Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.

    Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.

    Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.

    Oh also, PPA’s, avoid those, they’re not stock and don’t be surprised if your OS doesn’t boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.

    YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.

    Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.

    I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.

    YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.

    One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different “feels”, its hard to be more specific.

    Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.


  • I thought signing up for Signal required a phone number and phone app – and all phones have IMEI besides many other nightmare anti-features.

    For the normies it’s fine but tbh I’m not sure it’s as advertised.

    What ever happened to that odd old app called tox?

    Honestly I could see a version of DeltaChat + GPG make some gains in popularity but I would argue the email relay servers and spam lists are rigged for max surveillance.

    Are we at the point where tech from 20 years ago may be the way lmao.

    XMPP, IRC, ICQ /s

    Matrix is probably the best bet but some of their apps and clients seem like dogshit. And I am saying that as someone who uses them daily. And the whole “server” thing is a PITA, or it used to be at least.

    I guess we’ll just have to use carrier pidgin and cypherto encrypt the cat gifs /s
















  • The Web Browser is the new TeleVision.

    There is too much financial power to corrupt for us to win this fight.

    The way out is to ditch HTTPS, HTML & CSS and create a new spec that is purposely limited in its scope suchas Gopher or Gemini (although I might argue Gemini is slightly too narrow as I think it would need Images, Audio & Video and maybe Input Forms depending on scope)

    HTTP & HTML must die. It had a good run, it’s time for a new Hyper v2 world outside the mainstream downtown doofus hangouts of social media & Advertising impersonating Internet Things like search, social & email.

    We need a new web browser without all the legacy garbage & complexities. Without the DRM corruption shoehorned by Amazon, Disney, Netflix & Google.

    And it needs to be limited by design to just what is needed so financial interests can’t corrupt & screw it up.


  • This is called Controlled Opposition.

    The Oil Companies do the same thing – fund the leaders of anti-oil activists in countries where they are not #1 and use them as a proxy to target and harm their competitors.

    Profit. Rinse & repeat.

    Mafia tactics. The oil companies let government money and investors innovate in the solar industry and pay all the upfront costs. Then did a controlled collapsed and bought the companies IP up in bankruptcy for pennies to the dollar. And now that the oil companies own the Patents & IP it’s totally okay for you to morally buy their products.

    The bottom line is that The House Always Wins and what matters is who is allowed to collect the money for the grift. Territory of who is allowed to buy & sell on what streets.



  • Is it me or is source forge just the mark of dead things.

    I always avoid that place. It feels like where you go to get broken stuff.

    They’re gonna take me out back and shoot me for saying it but Launchpad too. Like I’m glad it works for you but it feels like when Debian had a website in 2015 that looked like 1997. How are we going to attract new talent when the rift between the average developers and the old guard widens over time. All the git VCS modernization supercharged development. Like bugzilla was “fine”, but " fine" was the problem in a world of better when you couldn’t even upload a > 250kb jpeg and other legacy hold us back stuff.