smb

maybe try to find a linux user group near where you live. if there is one, usually you get help there, but its usually kinda different sort of help, you don't get "the solution" to get your personal whishes come true ready prepared in bite-sized piezes for easy consumption but just the help by advices or suggestions that those there can give you or directly would try out.

open source is about sharing knowledge and todays mainstream OS distributions are way more complicated than long ago so the learning curve to adjust things in ways the distribution didn't prepare (which is often a lot) might be high but always worth a try at least for the learning.

for a lightweight desktop environment that is somehow similar to the old windows98, i'ld say give XFCE a try. i think on debian/ubuntu trying out could be as easy as installing the xfce (or xfce4?) package (or maybe an xfce4-desktop-environment paclage) i don't remember the exact package name but there is one meta package that depends on all needed stuff, i did it like 4 years ago.. when installed you could try it by logging in and (your distro should have a login manager that allows this, or you'ld have to change that too) choosing xfce as desktop environment at login time, thus if you don't like it, logout again and login with the other again.

i am using xfce because it is clean, lightweight, it does its job, does not invent new unneeded features every few month (like it felt when i used kde long ago) and is adjustable enough for me. i removed the lower task bar and put the open windows components into the bar above adjustedbthat a bit, thats basically what i changed and i think it is quite similar to what win98 was (but thats not the reason for me to have it that way)

also, it is possible to change the window manager (that handles how windows are placed), the desktop manager (like task bar, application menu, maybe widges, logout buttons) and of course also one could change x.org to wayland and back without changing the other components. the login window could come from gnome project but after login one could use a complete different projects toolset.

"can" does not mean that every distro makes that an easy task. also mixing things will likely end in a fuller disk for lots of "needed" components that are maybe mostly unused. (i think i once used gnome but installed kde only for their printing dialog *lol)

when using the big distributions it is likely that no 3rd party downloads are needed to try other window managers or desktop environments, maybe search for such keywords in aptitude , apt search, or such. but new fancy stuff also often first comes from unknown 3rd party websites (or git*.com which is the same security risk as 3rd party websites) before it gets into main repositories after years (or maybe even never)

Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. […] and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

maybe "TwisterOS" tries to invent air movement by software? it might be a random unrelated incident and the fan is simply broken, it might also be that it enabled some fan control and the fan would start if you only heat up the system enough which might not happen with a lightweight distro and the maybe not cpu consuming programs you use (?). "stress" is a program that could artificially create such cpu consumption for testing (but with a broken fan it might be not a good idea to actively and unnecesarily heat up the cpu, but also cpus usually have failsafe shutdown mechanisms so they dont overheat but that might be like a sudden power down so maybe expect unsaved work to just vanish) another test could be to just give the fan another power source and see what happens, and put abother fan that works in place to see if that changes something

You can use

also there is:

./configure && make && make install

just to mention ;-)

First contact was on the here-named eta-carinae system, we did a holiday tour there long ago and heared about earth from a scientist that rescued a human instead of just studying and thus could not leave him there with his memories about him. the human was talking about star trek, its similarities and real differences all the time. he already spoke fluently in standard Sjesh/sound w/o any interfaces so we listened directly to his true mind. he even had a very worn out tng tshirt in his personal memory items box. i mean he really had used his memory items before! that made us curious and the rest is history. However he is now back here, as we managed to arrange his behavioral training to hide his experiences well, he passed all the tests and got his transport back, but with his biologic cells clock reset to his 20th to compensate the decades he lost out there a little bit. it is possible he could become an ambassador for earth one day, but it looks unlikely that he would want that given the circumstances here, a task he always compares with the mytholigical boulder of Sisyphus (that really never existed physically) whenever he is asked about his opportunity.

just kidding, first contact with TNG was in school, other kids talked about the first episode. i could not watch it at home and also had other problems to fix at that time so i missed a lot of the start of it :-/

however i am trying to train myself for writing in general as i have ideas for a longer story (but not within the trek universe) and as the above text came to my mind i just wrote it and hope you don't find it too misplaced here or badly written.. however any feedback is welcome.

ads with install buttons always are traps. and traps are always bad (except snmp traps, those are good but unreliable)

same way ads at download pages stating "proceed to download" are traps.

also ads at search result pages stating " 1 2 3 4 .. next" are traps too.

for the "sponsored" note: there is no boundary here that makes it really clear for what that 'sponsored' is meant for. without any boundary it could be for something above it, below it, on the side or maybe even something that opens when you click on "sponsored" itself (seen it this way once). it could be for an ad that just failed to load (noticed the free space above that "sponsored" text? maybe the ad loads a bit later just to shift the real contents down so you "accidently" click on the ad that loads intentionally late for this very accident to be likely to happen?) if you use adblockers - which you should do for security reasons anyway - then you'll see "sponsored" or "advertising" often even without the ad it was meant for after full load of the page. so a single "sponsored" without a clear boundary showing what would be that sponsored content, does not state anything to be an ad, it is purely meaningless and the lack of such boundary always is intentional to distract the user from what he wanted and trap him somehow.

a clear thumbs-down for 'zoho assist' from me here just for paying for (or trying out for free or such) such an advertising type.

And in most cases ads simply beeing ads are traps too. by the very concept of ads.

around 80 % of all things i actually still wanted after i bought them were recommendations by people i met in person. 15 % are things recommended by real persons i met on the internet. around 5% are things i bought without it beeing recommded by anyone (not even an ad) things i still wanted after i bought it due to an ad are nearly not existant. ok, i have stopped viewing television in 1997, have a sticker at my postbox that forbids to throw ads in (works where i live), use dns entries to remove most ads in my network, use browsers/extension that remove most crapjunkwastelitterrubbishads and skip webpages that still show too many ads or too offensive cookieterrorbanners. i use google search only sometimes for comparison of results, but near to zero for actual searching. i feel safe to say i am not that much distracted by ads. (however open source projects and authors do get money from me on a monthly basis, where i want to support them, either direct lly sent from my bank account or indirect).

for me personally an ad just saying "you might like this" drives me away from that product, if it needs or wants an ad, i don't want it, even more so the more it states how difficult and horrible my life would be without the product or how easy it'll be with it, go away ad-needing products, get recommended personally by those who actually use it, not by those who want to sell it. period. there is no better ad than true recommendation and its also free, no marketing monkey needs to get payed for bs, only an actually good product is needed... and there we go what types of products actually need ads...

once in my life i discovered a product that i first explicitly not bought for a decade because of the awful ad for it, but bought it another decade later by an absentminded accident and found it to be a good product despite its awful ad. then they increased packaging/reduced the product within to cover up a price increase in trade of more waste production, so i abandoned that product again and found something cheaper more eco friendly instead, yes, the cheaper one is really not as good, but i feel better with it and especially less betrayed by the vendor, so the eco one is the better one alltogether. and also i think its better to buy products where you don't see ads for cause this behaviour could actually fix this advertising storm in the long run, so in this way its the better choice to buy products that don't have ads for it.

again:

An ad with an install button is always a trap, even more so when the real install follows a single misclick on it. il'd say it would be quite fair to downvote/zerostars an app for how foulish-sneaky it was positioned in the search results if it is shown like an actual result with a f'ing install button. as its advertising type is always also part of the brand and the product itself. maybe make a sports out of that, klick the clickbait install buttons only to downvote the app for beeing intrusive and deinstall it again without even starting the app once, just to train advertisers to do it right instead of wrong next time. maybe. but for security reasons better don't do that (at least not with a device with sensitive data on it)

please do not blame users to fall for ads. advertising industry now had centuries to learn to trap users and literally thousands or millions of marketing guys, designers, psycologists, neurologists or whatever only to learn and establish new abusive ways to distract and trap users. but a user only has his own lifespan to counteract that and learn to avoid those manipulations, and he also has to do other important stuff in his life too.

please don't blame users for beeing humans. blame the industry where they are intentionally abusive, inhumane and/or counterproductive.

maybe there was a mixup of individual datapoints and individual persons.

lets see if that could fit.

as far as i read things in this thread, the whole security is based on exactly these datapoints: Full Name, Date of Birth and SSN (three datapoints) plus username and password for 3 sites (six datapoints) makes 3+6= 9 datapoints per person.

2.9 billion (us) should be 2.900.000.000 (correct me if i'm wrong, but where i live one "billion" is actually "1.000.000.000.000" thus a "bit" more)

divided by 9 those 2.9billion would be ~ 320 million.

on wikipedia they say the us had 331 million people in 2020...

that would fit like an ass on a bucket! lol just to mention that.

have a nice day!

What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.

its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only "managing" the site by doing actually nothing)

maybe these could be alternatives:

• patreon
• ~~flattr~~
• micropayment in general
• donations (somafm runs on donations)
• link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
• communities, like FSF, local groups
• some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
• maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/ Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen

maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.

so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.

if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we're at it, offering an ad-free "membership" for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.

there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service...

there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and "donation" thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls.. really ? lol*

if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)

saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)

unfuckingbelievable

if you want that without the "un" prefix, then youtube is maybe just the wrong platform for you.

and i strongly believe that youtube "wants" to force more usage of peertube, vimeo and others by enshitting yt every day a bit more. and they really work hard for that.

yeah! you beat me to it 👍

guess this instance is lost, lets restart the matrix!

https://youtu.be/rNdpvNH1yi8?si=GPLbzrNxnwKNCfHm

its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like "that product is good", but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn't have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories

unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥

with a microscope

if it was at least a scanning tunneling one, then yes, good job 👍 🤪

well there is plenty of what is possible to try. but unless one had looked at the real cause i'ld suspect one of apples hardware backdoors to cause the crashes like if the backdoor doesn't work, crash the kernel, so we never loose control over the sheeapple thing. or more realistic if you want:

First maybe just crappy hardware:

There is a reason why i suspect apple's hardware, cause my shitty macbook at work should(!) go to something like hibernate, sleep, or its spyveillance-only mode when closing the lid, and it should also lock the screen when doing so, the actual results seem pure randomly choosen, sometimes the sleep mode survives the weekend with lots of accu left, sometimes its completely depleted and i even have to charge it for a while before it has enough power to show the charging logo. for security reasons i have to manually lock my screen, verify it and then close the lid, which is pure annoy. this could just be buggy hardware, a sensor so broken that reading its inputs directly could crash any OS that assumes i.e. no division by zero, pointers to nonexisting ram or whatever, and maybe apple just knows what faulty measurements mean what (but cannot make that stable too, only no crash occurs)

secondly with a hardware backdoor:

https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2023_kaspersky-discloses-iphone-hardware-feature-vital-in-operation-triangulation-case

"The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions."

which is that (some/all?) iphones have at least one memory page where one only has to accidently or intentionally write something into it, that could trigger the backdoor feature to let you choose which memory address to overwrite with what bytes, bypassing every(!) security mechanism in hardware AND of course those made of software too. that is how i understood documentation and presentations about it. now apple said they "fixed" it in software, from what i remember that fix was just a "os preventing apps from writing to that memory backdoor page" thus not a fix but only a mitigation, while "fix" is more a lie than only misleading words to just pretend it wasn't permanent and unfixable. let us assume that linux does not include hardware backdoor mitigations for apple devices AND that apple placed the very same backdoor memory page into macbooks as well but maybe at (an)other physical address(es). now the code that runs on closing the lid "might" just reside at or write to the very same memory page on every boot for a given exact same kernel, which might be a memory page that acts the same or similar like that iphone hardware backdoor, overwriting some other memory page depending on what is actually written to the backdoor page which immediately crashes the kernel. if that's whats happening there, t2linux is not broken, but macbooks are just insecure costly (loss of money, time, security, trust, work performance, patents, stability, a.s.o. ...) waste.

how to find out? (maybe)

• get the kernel code.
• deactivate every driver not needed to boot and run the lidclose stuff like i.e. the sensor, compile the kernel anew and try booting from it.

changin the kernel a lot by removing everything(!) not needed should in theory/hopefully also change the pages that would be affected when closing the lid. same effect: likely no backdoor. no effect: maybe something you deactivated, maybe yet another backdoor discovery.

it might also be solveable by sth like acpi settings or such, probably switchable from kernel boot cmdline , maybe change settings for hibernate / suspend to ram (does apple hardware even support such? i mean without the buggy behaviour i experience?)l