sovietknuckles

Another reason to not use Manjaro. Just use Endeavour instead.

Endeavour could be useful if it's your first time running an Arch-based distro and you're looking for software/configuration suggestions. Otherwise, Arch Linux is fine by itself and it doesn't have telemetry

Is WiFi calling a decent alternative to VoIP?

I've placed calls using WiFi calling where the person said they could barely understand the words I was saying due to sound distortion. When I called back over VoIP, they said it was crystal-clear.

This is the plot to Golden Wind

Switch to helix

If your school blocks VPN connections, that usually means that they're specifically blocking OpenVPN traffic and/or WireGuard traffic. So if you use a VPN provider that supports OpenConnect (which looks like regular HTTPS traffic over port 443 to your school, there's a good chance that it will not be blocked.

That's what I do when I'm on open Wi-Fi networks that block everything but HTTP or HTTPS traffic. It's not as fast as UDP OpenVPN, let alone WireGuard, but it frees me from the restrictions of whatever Wi-Fi network I'm on.

Automatic updates is what to choose if you want someone else to fix your problems. As long as you don't run into problems introduced by automatic updates, automatic updates should be fine.

They expected to get a marginal number of additional users from vendor lock-in of existing Signal users

Wayland does not work with screen readers like Odilia or Orca. Because Wayland leaves blind users behind, it's a total non-starter.

I know AMD works better on linux in general but I am curious to follow the NVIDIA advancements as they go with the new open source kernel modules and stuff...

How is it open source? In the history of the whole repository, there were 11 merged PRs in 2022 (when the project began), and no merged PRs after, even though lots of PRs have been submitted since then. There has never been an issue-fixing PR merged, and no issues or PRs are submitted by the maintainers of the project.

A maintainer explains their workflow:

Because we will be sharing this code with our proprietary driver, we won't be developing in the open for now. So far, our strategy is to apply proposed changes to our internal code base, merge pull requests on github, and then do one NVIDIA github commit per driver release (and because the internal code base also contains the change, the release-time commit should not revert the merged pull request). It is not a great workflow, but we're trying to navigate the constraints as best we can.

All of their commits are tagged versions, none of which tell you in words what they did or what changed. As the maintainer says, they still do their actual development internally, and the GitHub repository does not contain that incremental work. Because the commits are releases only, there are only 66 commits on the main branch from May 2022 to the latest commit/release 2 weeks ago.

So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia's kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can't pay them to default to their search engine.

Yahoo was Firefox's default search engine between 2014 and 2017. It would have lasted longer, but Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo prompted Mozilla to terminate it. They can sign a deal with another search engine if the deal with Google falls through. In China, Baidu is the default search engine, and in Russia, Yandex is.

Certainly Google will be more careful after this ruling, but nothing will actually go into effect at least for several years, if it ever does, because Google is appealing.

That's a large chunk of their funding.

That's true. When Mozilla resumed their search deal with Google in 2017, Google provided 91% of their revenue. But the percent of Mozilla's revenue derived from Google has decreased every year since then, most recently at 81% as of 2022.

IMO there's nothing about Arch, or any other distro, that makes it worth using, beyond whatever goals you have. If Arch helps you accomplish that goals, great. If not, pick a different distro that does.

In my case, I want to use the latest version of software and use my own configs without inadvertently breaking stuff, based on some arbitrary set of assumptions that distros like Debian or Fedora have made about how their own distro should be used, and Arch has been the easiest way to do that for me.

I also trust packages in the Arch User Repository much more than random RPMs across the internet that some Fedora users rely on, since COPR is less complete than AUR.