• 19 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • I think that’s a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I’m aware that many users think that, but it’s not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won’t use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn’t need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is “nerds”/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn’t for the average computer user. There’s a lot of foss that isn’t user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there’s software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.






  • Not “everything”, and I wouldn’t say there’s any distro that lets you “control everything”. e.g. look at Alpine Linux, which uses musl, busybox, and OpenRC, whereas Arch uses glibc, GNU coreutils, and systemd. These three choices are “locked in” for Alpine and Arch—you can’t change them. And it’s unlikely for any distro to let you choose all these things because that creates a lot of maintenance work for the distro maintainers.

    I suppose Linux From Scratch lets you “control everything”, but I wouldn’t call it a distro (there’s nothing distributed except a book!), and hardly anyone daily drives it.


  • I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

    To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.


  • By hand. I don’t have a dishwasher. The place I rent didn’t come with one, and I don’t have the space for my own (plus no money). I think I’ve only ever met one person with a dishwasher, although I suppose I wouldn’t know if someone has one unless I either go to their house or they bring it up. I don’t see the issue with doing dishes by hand, and I pay a flat rate for water so water usage is not a concern to me.





  • Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you’re using e.g. raw Wireguard you won’t be able to use their obfuscation function.

    Btw technically they can’t really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/“privacy” VPNs. They couldn’t really tell if you’re e.g. using your friend’s PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it’s a residential IP. Unless they’re looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it’d piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.





  • I think the average user wouldn’t care, Linux just attracts nerds. And I think it’s totally fine and even good that people care how their computer works—it shows that users care about their software working for them, rather than just wanting to go along with whatever is given to them. I think a lot of the positions people take about these things are very silly, but I’d still prefer someone to have a silly opinion about X11/Wayland or pid 1 than to not have an opinion at all. It’s nice that users are being actively involved in deciding what they want their system to be; it’s a nice change from the average user who’s like “well microsoft is screenshotting my screen every 5 seconds and feeding it into copilot now, guess I’m going along with that”.


  • My point is that raids are for the purpose of gathering evidence. The way it usually works is that the state decides they want to criminalise you for something so they search your place for anything they can use to incriminate you—not vice versa, ie they dont already have enough evidence to incriminate you when they plan the raid.

    I don’t know about a majority of people, but with the rise of the far-right across many countries I think it is a significant number of people who are at risk of this, and I think it’s rather short-sighted to assume only a small number of “cool people” are affected (thank you though). Like I am a nobody, I’m not famous, and there are lots of political organisers and militants like me you’ve never heard of being targeted for their political activities. You don’t need to be a Snowden to have some degree of state interest in you, and most state repression (raids, incarceration, arrests, etc) is relatively cheap to dish out willy-nilly.