BaumGeist

Kid's online safety doesn't requite massive online censorship and surveillance...

It's just that the alternative is active parenting, and that's unrealistic or infeasible for the average wage slave

If I'm going to have a lot of icons on the desktop, I'd want one of the visually uncomplicated ones (top right, bottom left). Otherwise, if it's just for eye-candy and what I have to see everytime my windows are minimized, I'd either go for mid-left or bottom-right. I fall into the latter category, but y'all in the former may consider that when casting your vote

For the four groups enumerated in the article, this still is not important. It may affect them in ways they are unaware of, but you will not be able to change their minds using technical arguments at this point if they have not already been convinced by the wealth of information and support that is readily available.

They hated her for she spoke the truth. We (DIY people) hate to acknowledge that not everyone sees value in investing as much time and energy into perfecting their workspaces as the nerds have, and would rather have their tools Just Work(tm) so they can get to work on the projects they do care about. I say this as someone who still gets frustrated and argumentative when my friends say they prefer spyware-ridden OSes that remove control from the end-user because they don't require end-user micro-management to maintain and work.

X vs Wayland might as well be Grub vs rEFInd or systemd vs SysVinit to most end-users: it matters from a technical perspective, but most people just want something that will allow them to go about their business without sinking hours into getting the "correct" option to work. And it's important to remember that we all fall on either side of this divide with some aspects of our life, even if it's not computer-related. How often do we agonize over finding the "correct" pipe wrench when our sink is leaking, despite what the plumbing nerds would criticize you for using? Do you sink hours into picking the right books on conflict resolution when you argue with your spouse, or do you post on AITA and hope they give good advice? Do you agonize over having all the right utensils and ingredients so you can eke out the most subtle flavors from your cooking, or do you use the pan that you got at the local superstore?

I was hoping someone would comment telling me they already read that story! Thanks, gonna read it asap!

there is no such thing as a zero-trust society (although I now want to write that scifi story and tease that idea out). As such, the cost of living in a society will always be some amount of infringement of privacy beyond complete anonymity. Even you were comfortable giving your address and name to 4 other parties (under the presumption that only they would use that information), and even then how many individuals within those organizations have access to that information?

Thus privacy cannot be thought of as an all-or-nothing battle. Privacy is a compromise between total anonymity (un-people) and convenience (you can't get public utilities to your house if they don't know where you live). The fact is that we have the level of privacy we do right now because of a lot of resistance and hard work. If it wasn't for all the survivalists and conspiracy theorists and paranoid software devs and whistleblowers and tech journos and anti-authoritarian content creators and anti-surveillance artists and even ordinary joes like me who just want to use online services withouth the digital equivalent of the weird kid in class who stood over your shoulder and watched everything you did (x1000), things could and would be much worse.

If you must think of it as a war, consider it to be analogous to state-vs-collective wars of history: our "opponents" are organizations that are constrained by their hierarchical nature to certain unspoken rules of engagement, and we are a guerilla collective bound only by our shared value(s). Think the Texas Revolution, Vietnam, African National Congress, Zapatistas, IRA, Black Panthers or pretty much anything the Romans did with northern European Barbarians. I won't sit here and lie to you that the devastation that happened to these peoples and their homelands was "winning," but I can tell you that the dominators certainly didn't get their way either.

This is a myth that's been addressed by the project. For starters, there are no disclosures about the amount of nodes owned by the Government/NSA/CIA/etc. You're probably thinking how the project, in 2012, received 80% of its funding from the US Gov source.

You may make the argument of "follow the money", or you could also make the argument that this type of tech this widely distributed benefits the government too (field agents for some agencies allegedly use Tor, as do foreign defectors) and compromising the network would lead to a potential vector to compromise their interests.

It's also worth noting that Tor uses 3 hops (entry, relay, and exit nodes) and you can check the location/IP of your current route at any time to ensure geographic diversity. An actor would have to own all 3 to know what you were visiting and trace the traffic back to you.

As someone once said: "The Technical Merits of Wayland Are Mostly Irrelevant"

Curious kids, tinkerers and business customers are all other options. Someone might have an app that spams connections to annoy neighbors, someone might be testing their new program/script they wrote, someone might have malware that replicates via bluetooth connections, and yes, someone might be trying to hack into every nearby bluetooth devices. Update your network hardware (modem/routers/wifi APs), don't accept unknown connections, and you should be as safe as can be expected (unless you're sysadmin levels of proficient). If the annoyance gets to be too much, just disable bluetooth when you're not using it (or make it undiscoverable so your devices can stay connected)

Great article, have a few issues with it though:

1. Google docs are free (as in beer) and collaborative and just about as good, and Minihard's web interface also works. This still doesn't account for all use cases, bur that should be about 80% of people who think they can't live with LibreOffice.

2. KeepassXC is cute, but not modern because of it's lack of cross-device sync. I use Bitwarden and it works great. Having options is great. I get their frustration with flatpaks self-contained package formats have only ever given me headaches. Also flatpak isn't a feature that windows does either.

3. I have no clue what their problem is with virtualization, but I've used virtualbox, vmm, and just the CLI for qemu, and I've never had the issues of cumbersome installation or a virtualization disabled error

4. Speaking of virtualization, I've run old software and games with wine all the time. I'm sure there's some performance hit, but it's pretty negligible unless you're one of those people that meticulously tracks performance metrics instead of just relying on feel (cough "5-15% performance hit in games boohoo cough)

5. *some developers and sysadmins. I know people who act as counterexamples and use linux personally and professionally

Windows licenses are cheap and you get things working out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’ll be productive from day zero... It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
You can buy a second hand computer with a decent 8th generation CPU for around 200 € and that includes a valid Windows license. All computers selling on retail stores already include a Windows license, students can get them for free etc.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand all the previous examples go out the door. All of the aforementioned "benefits" of windows cost money. Adobe is all SaaS, MS office is SaaS, AutoCAD is SaaS, windows itself is arguably SaaS, that hypervisor that isn't jank is SaaS; those annoying janky hardware solutions that have drivers only for windows charge for those drivers and the bespoke UI programs that control the hardware, the securitybrisks of running XP for the aforementioned costs money, those sysadmin and developer solutions cost money (usually also on a subscription). If you want the well-documented and supported software that brings the streamlined experience that fanboys prattle on about, you don't go with freeware; windows freeware sucks just as hard in the UX sense while also being proprietary and spying on you/designed only to upsell you to paid. And don't make me get into the monetary worth of all the data the above programs and windows itself harvests. This rose-tinted windows experience isn't "cheap" unless you're in the global top 10-20%, the rest of us make do with freeware that sucks harder than linux. I'm one of the few who are lucky enough to be able to save 25% of my monthly income and some dick behind their keyboard is trying to convince me to throw 2 months worth of that away every year on software that doesn't do the job better, just more conveniently.

Not to mention the spying! What is this? Stockholm syndrome? Battered user syndrome? Blink 3 times if Windows hits you!

As far as I can tell, most of the actual arguments that hold weight boil down to "For desktops, Windows is superior for businesses and jobs" and that's not a failure of linux. That's fine by me if it isn't profitable, that's not the point of FOSS. In fact that misses the point entirely.

That's funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that info was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn't find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives... and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.

Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.

I think I'll give it another try and report back

If that's true, I urge you to submit your findings to the relevant bug bounty program of whichever browser and at least get paid for all the hard work you've been doing