As a PHP developer

I’m so, so sorry.

No.

Everything said in that article makes me very happy to have switched to Firefox.

Google can dress this up all they want, but a happy byproduct of this (for them) is that they can now purposefully ignore rules/filtering for their own sites, such as youtube, since it puts the real control of such filtering with the browser (and the company who created it) instead of the extension. Yes there is a trust concern with extensions. And yes, there is a performance hit with extensions vetting each network call. But that’s the price we, as the user, should continue to have the power to choose to pay, but Google is forcing us to go their way.

Thanks Mozilla, for providing user choice.

Not really. I used to be. But being nice has screwed me so much in my life because of being taken advantage of and not being respected that I have no interest in being nice to others anymore, at least by default. I am polite when meeting a new person, but I am skeptical of them until they prove they are worth me being truly nice to them. All I ask of people is some level of reciprocation when they’re able to reciprocate (even a “thank you” is usually enough for me) – but that very rarely happens.

I didn’t find it bragging or preachy, btw.

Right now, because I’ve basically said good-bye to Windows, I am wanting a distro that caters to gaming. Nobara, Bazzite (though I’m not yet a fan of the “atomic” style distros), and Garuda all seem to deal with this relatively well. Garuda feels more baked than the others at the moment, but Nobara is by the same person who has created and maintained the proton-ge and wine-ge builds (goes by GloriousEggroll) – so once it is upgraded to Fedora 40 base, I may consider switching, but haven’t fully decided.

I have run Garuda Hyprland and Garuda KDE Dragonized. I loved them both, but I have settled on Garuda KDE Dragonized because it has everything set up out of the box for gaming and I’m more accustomed to that kind of desktop environment. Hyprland was interesting and I enjoyed it mostly, but there were some things that I couldn’t easily get past (mainly, I like to minimize/hide windows, and Hyprland’s method of that is to just shove the window to another desktop, or quit the app, or hope it has a system tray icon for it and can “minimize” to that).

If I didn’t care about gaming, I’d probably go with either Manjaro (Arch based, but uses its own repos to slow down the rolling release of Arch by about month or so), or Ubuntu, just to guarantee a higher degree of stability (Arch can sometimes break things, but it’s not that often, in my experience).

While I know the community and NVIDIA are working to get explicit sync pushed out which will help a lot of the NVIDIA woes running on Wayland, about six weeks ago I decided to not wait anymore on that and went and bought an AMD 7800XT video card to run instead of NVIDIA. Wayland, and gaming, honestly feel much smoother to me now (and I don’t have to mess around with video drivers anymore). The only quirk about Wayland has to do with global mouse key shortcuts (namely, I use a mouse button for Push-To-Talk in Discord and had to set up a quirky solution).

I’m eager for KDE Plasma 6.1 because it’ll have built-in RDP server support which will allow me to remote in easier using an RDP client from my Mac work laptop (I don’t really care for VNC [too slow], Rustbox [too buggy for me], or many of the other remote desktop solutions out there).

That’s awesome! I began my journey while at college in 1999. But I never once fully committed to the Linux desktop on my personal PC until now with all this CoPilot Recall nonsense. I would always have Windows in my back pocket, just in case.

Not anymore. I’m done with Microsoft and certainly done with Adobe (not that I did much with their software). I’m able to play all the games I want in Garuda (KDE Dragonized) and have had no issues beyond minor tweaking.

I agree. The problem is there are too many people who make excuses for switching which wouldn’t exist if they just actually switched. Saying the alternatives suck compared to Adobe products…well if everyone stopped using Adobe products today and all switched to the various other software out there that does run on Linux, I guarantee you within a year, they would be all on par with the Adobe products because they would finally have the financial backing necessary to accomplish that goal.

Adobe still exists simply because they are a behemoth due to existing for 40 years. People have choice, even professionals, even businesses.

https://media.tenor.com/F1rRSJX60B8AAAAM/roy-kent-whistle.gif

Difference is that you can chew the food, it’s much more natural. You can’t, or aren’t supposed to, chew the pill (especially if it’s a capsule). There is a psychological component, for sure.

Shocker.

We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit

We do? Aside from the “I use Arch, btw” memes, I must not have got that memo :) And, uhh…I use Arch, btw.

Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you’ve opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.

So much this. I’m glad I dumped Windows and this just guarantees that I’ll never return.

It’s not at all unfair when instead of thanking people for their answers, they’re rewording what they have said to ask in a different way just to try to act like their hypothesis is right.

Playing Devil’s Advocate is one thing, taking the time to try to effectively say that people should think Lincoln was authoritarian because he removed a legal “right” is another.

The STAMP act was legal, and our ancestors rebellled and got a country out of it (among other things). Law does not make right. And that’s what the OP doesn’t understand. He’s using semantics to try to make up something that simply isn’t true.

Edit: And technically Lincoln didn’t change the law, the 13th Amendment did. Lincoln simply created a proclamation that slaves in most areas (note that it wasn’t all slaves everywhere in the states, deals were struck to omit some areas from the proclamation) are to be considered free because it was a way to help win the Civil War. It was both morally right, and a strategic move. If that is to be considered authoritarian, then every single executive order that presidents make should also be considered authoritarian. But again, it’s simply not true in our system of government (however plagued by dysfunction it is these days).

That’s true, thank you.

Some other possible unencrypted services people use today… email over non-SSL (which still does exist). Bittorrent. Non-SSL NNTP, which is also still supported. And DNS.

Of course much of that has options of securing, but the point is that a VPN shifts the trust of them not being secure over to an entity that may be more trustworthy.

And sometimes that becomes the path of least resistance for people.

I use a VPN for access to my house (inbound), but also to prevent my ISP from ever snooping on anything for certain services (inbound and outbound) — content, headers, metadata of any kind. I trust Mullvad right now much more than I trust my ISP.

Not everyone’s use case is the same. But that doesn’t mean it is somehow invalid as some posts here have alluded to. Though, I do agree with some posts here that the commercialization of VPNs is playing on people’s possibly-unfounded fear (NordVPN and the like, putting ads seemingly everywhere acting like everyone is watching).

The simple fact you use terms like “libtard” proves the abundance of undereducation you have received. Enjoy living with such idiocy. Bye.

Your replies all make a very big assumption that the only connections being made, by people who are advocating VPNs, are over https (or possibly ssh) and thus VPN isn’t necessary. There exists more services than that some of which aren’t end-to-end encrypted (many messaging apps, for example).

Also, I agree that at the end of the day, a user is trusting someone not to snoop. But given that ISPs have been proven to snoop (for various reasons), I personally will put my trust in a VPN provider that I have researched and one that has shown a considerable resilience against outside forces. Mullvad comes to mind here.

Yes, a VPN is probably overkill if all the user is doing is using a web browser, nowadays. But it is useful beyond just setting up a tunnel for access.

If you ever decide to self-host and not use a managed provider, take this advice: install it on an SSD (fastest possible you can).

I fit many of those bills :)

You asked for an example, he gave you one. Then you try to discredit it with a red herring illogical argument.

You should take your temporary ban and reflect on what is truly important in your life. Because you clearly need some help.

while making such weak arguments

Perhaps…

Idiot.

…

Some people don’t like to read, and/or don’t like truth and facts spoken/written to them. So they take offense to logic and reason, which is what you had in your answer.