Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
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jfc they think they’re living inside the conspiracy theories.
Yeah, the government and corporations would never spy on us. What a ridiculous idea!
Said a person in denial lol
Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It’s maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
You should be using OpenKylin or something like that.
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it’s common even for ‘experienced’ folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn’t play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it’s perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don’t give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don’t want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how “experienced” I get, that’s always going to be the case. Maybe I’m just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I think it’s overblown for the most part. Yes, the OS should just work… but it does, for 99% of users, on windows, and linux, and probably macos, which I haven’t used so can’t speak on.
The ones who blow up their systems are either techies who like futzing with stuff, or are using a ‘bad’ distro for their needs. If you’re switching over granny, you set her up with a long term stable kernel, a vanilla distro, and a browser. The few other stories are when people switch from windows and want something specialized to be the same. Those will need a customized solution, but it’s not much different than windows when something breaks. Whoever is playing IT gets to poke at a stupid amount of settings, registry edits, or esoteric drivers/dependencies.
I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out
It really isn’t, though
as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
Not gonna bother with the rest of your comment if the start is that weak, tbh
It really isn’t, though
Really? Being sure that your system is essentially unbreakable isn’t valuable to beginners? I can’t see how. It has massively helped the beginners I have given it to feel safe in tinkering with their system.
It was important to me, one day my arch just decided to not boot anymore, so, i switched to nixos.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
I explained in my comment why cinnamon is a terrible choice for beginners, if you had read it you’d know, why even bother replying to a comment you won’t read with such a lazy response?
“Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.”
There’s so many reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:
- Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
- Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
- Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.
I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv… it’s much more common than you think.
In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.
As an XFCE user, I dislike the reputation that xfce is only useful for low end old hardware. It’s a fully complete desktop just like cinnamon, kde, or gnome. lxqt however, I would not wish on my worst enemy.
As an XFCE user, I dislike the reputation that xfce is only useful for low end old hardware.
We’re talking about specifically for beginners, it’s not nearly as good for beginners as KDE is. You like xfce because you’re used to it and it works for you, but KDE supports a vastly wider variety of usecases, for example, try having two-screen setup with one screen having a 4k display at 144hz, and the other a 1080p screen at 60hz
This will be impossible to get working properly on xfce. There’s not even a warning, it’ll just act very strangely without explaining itself.
there’s also the same issues with security that cinnamon have. XFCE does work, but there’s no reason to recommend it to someone who doesn’t already use/like it over KDE.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I’m on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What’s garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn’t seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their “customisation” of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell
That’s part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is… not super appealing. Ubuntu server that’s just CLI/headless though, that’s pretty tits, imho.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
Ubuntu server is okay, but I’ve come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don’t want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it’s doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like… competing standards happens. It’s part of life and always will be.
FOSS has no country lines.
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It’s a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop’s components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the “USA bad, so product bad” rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
It’s not “USA bad, so product bad”, it’s the concern that the US government can do a lot more to US based projects and you probably wont know untill it’s too late.
The code is open though, I don’t check it since I am an idiot but I assume pros would spot irregularities.
Do you have a specific vector of attack here in mind?
I guess most methods of attack on a FOSS projects are independent of the country of origin. But, I could still see them being forced to do things they don’t want in the US, without being able to tell anyone. Hopefully if that ever happened it wouldn’t be too hard to detect, but you never know.
People find vulnerabilities and malware even in closed source projects. Us regime is as malicious as it is incompetent. They trust anyone who can throw a sig heil and prompt a LLM to completely dismantle and rebuild major infrastructure.
That’s really not the case, there’s no proprietary parts to inject this into, and pop is one of the most heavily watched distros for a reason.
The minimal things they add to their particular distro are essentially just theming, and it’d be really obvious if they injected something malicious into it.
It would also NOT be too late because they’re a stable distro and have regular releases, it’d have to be a completely last minute unexpected change for that to be the case.
They can still sanction your country and then you can’t get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It’s just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
Try out CachyOS
I want to get into Linux and I need a new laptop. I’m happy to go secondhand but I actually want a half decent thing that can play some games, not the cheapest box I can put Linux on and use fake word.
Am I best off just buying a new windows laptop than I can dual boot? Or any other suggestions?
Windows is US$ 139.00. So I figured if I buy a laptop without windows it will be 139 less but I guess manufacturers get windows for like $20 so there are no saving anyway.
Yes, at least Lenovo Linux laptops are 140$ cheaper.
Take a look at Framework, or System76 for Linux first hardware.
Thank you. I didnt know about lenovo so that’s good to know.
System76 seems especially out of my price range. I haven’t bought a computer for 12 years, can’t believe laptop’s cost more now (even accounting for inflation) than they did back then. It’s unbelievable. Might have to work out if I want a good one to last a long time (which is risky) or to get a cheaper one and expect to replace earlier.
By thank you that is helpful.
If you want to buy second-hand, make sure to take a look at linux-hardware.org to see if Linux supports all drivers.
Generally, every laptop will work, with the exception of fingerprint sensors, webcams, or Bluetooth.
i would recommand also tuxedo computer, they based in Germany, their laptops offer various keyboards layout, and if you need cheaper option, refurbished pro laptops are a good options, look for informatic broker : they buy by lots from enterprises and the quality is overall good, maybe the battery will be a bit less consistant.
There are a lot of options if you’re experienced with Linux and know how to get things to work/are willing to do research. However, if you are new, then you should definitely play it safe to avoid frustration.
My current laptop is an Asus PX13, which is an awesome value and probably the most powerful machine you can buy at its size. Unfortunately, Asus does not support Linux on its laptops at all, and any support that exists comes from volunteers. I’m very happy with my current setup, but there are some rough edges that come from the lack of official support.
Lenovo recently started shipping laptops with Linux at a discount. But its probably better to buy a laptop from a Linux seller so that you know the hardware compatibility is being maintained.
YOU CAN’T DENY THE WAVEEEEE
I’m been using linux mint for over a year now, and it is legit liberating.
Does that mean that fedora is not recommended?
Fedora is an international collaborative effort but Red Hat is the main sponsor and it is US based. We will have to be careful and observe
And the new leader (whatever the fuck it’s called) is going to be a Red Hat employee. It’s why I left Fedora despite liking it quite a lot. That’s way too close to IBM for my liking
What do you recommend thats as complete as Fedora out of the box ? I used to be on Arch but it was time consuming to tune everything up and Fedora was the bullseye between the flexibility of Arch and a complete solution without much tinkering needed.
I was in the same spot not too long ago. I would probably recommend CachyOS or Endeavour. They’re Arch-based but a lot of the preconfiguration has been done (e.g., you will have a browser, and printer support, out of the box. Try using Ventoy and just throwing some ISOs on it, makes it really easy to try different distros
Do, or do not, there is no try.
Distrosea would just like to interject for a moment.
I don’t try, I do. Wanna try me?
I mean…if you’re offering
username checks out
Why not both?
std::vector ulUtil {"GNU", "Alpine", "BusyBox", "Toybox"}; int currentUtil = 0; do { try { OS(ulUtil[currentUtil], "Linux").use(); } catch (USER::Bored & err) { continue; } } while ((currentUtil < ulUtil.size()) || (findMoreUtil(ulUtil)));Except there is… live environments
I’ve done OSINT research and that alone converted me into a privacy advocate. Seeing how Alphabet, Meta, and MS have allowed creep to get training data… Whew. It’s breathtaking and complicated beyond the ability to explain in 114 characters.
Y’all, we are cooked. Currently. Present tense. If you aren’t freaked out already, you’re missing about 85% of reality.
Yeah OSINT existing is proof that no backdoor is secure, not even mentioning what you can buy from data brokers, something authorities wouldn’t need warrants for.
Well, to be fair it’s also proof that people do not value privacy, and that the means by which actual privacy can be obtained are few and narrow.
It also really drives home the fact that our systems of IDs, licensure, taxes, property purchase, etc. are designed for an analog 20th century world. We need new systems based on modern technology, bit not in a way that simply contracts out to the very companies that put us here.
They’ll be forced to care when their freedom’s inevitably on the line (in the states)
I didn’t care before ai as i was nobody and scams were easy to detect.
Now ai is running those scams and people are trying to use ai to target nobodies like me. All the while ai is stealing my creation and data that companies used to pay you, all while using it to generate money without compensating me.
US corporate “leadership” has a rapists mentality. Consent is not needed. They will do the crime either way. and daddy sam let’s them get away with it.
Why not Haiku 🙃?
A) what does this have to do with the post and B) im fairly sure the Israelis are committing as much or more atrocities if not more than before the election
“Nunclear Brickmanship” interesting way to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine
You don’t know what either of those words mean, do you.
There is only country that regularly gets on teevee with nuclear threats and it ain’t the US
!agedlikemilk
wtf does this have to do with facebook, and why are us party politics from months ago relevant for this post?
Point out in the image file where this is relevant to the topic in the OP, please.
If your posting a message that has any importance at all, at least pretend to try to fix your before sending it.
“try, Linux”
“working closing”
I mean come on.
There’s more but you get the point.
“try to fix your before sending it.” uh huh
Also “if your”
Lmao
This isn’t meeting the level of importance for me.
Yore
Was considering migrating from Fedora and getting a MacBook, but this is making me reconsider.
(Also this won’t really help you because Linux is a mainstream system with big corporate input. Backdoors hidden in plain sight are a thing.
This will make you feel better though, Windows sucks.)
Protests crack down on the internet has been going on for quite some time, don’t just blame it on trump but on the whole government and its infrastructure.
And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
It’s much harder for the government and bad actors to hide backdoors in open source software than making a deal with a private company
For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.
That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.
You mean with the USA Intel or AMD CPUs?
Think that it doesn’t matter what you use as OS as the microchip inside the CPU chip can read anything it wants
I’ll just make my own cpu with a breadboard and a few wires!
Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.
I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.
It wont protect there.
Also, I remember articles back then mentioning 5G Towers could create a dystopia because every company could easily put a 5G chip into the product and secretly track you regardless of Wifi.
Not my case (ARM) and maybe is time to give some love to RISC-V.
Unsure if qualcom has some backdoor too.
One should be have been assuming since Windows 7 and automated online updates that the Microsoft key used to sign OS updates is in the hands of at least the NSA (and hence probably the Israeli equivalent) and they can push whatever they want to your computer as an OS update, bypassing all protections.
In fact the same applies to Linux updates of certain distros - if they’re maintained by a company based in the US they can be forced by FISA courts to provide the signing keys to the US Government.
More in general, just go read about FISA courts and their secret court orders - companies based in the US or hosting things in the US can be secretly forced to just “give the keys of the Realm” to parts of the US Government.
Since things like the Patriot act one should be treating companies based in the US as just as untrustworthy as companies based in China.
(By the way, some other supposed Democratic countries have similar or worse systems - for example the equivalent of FISA courts in the UK have things like secret court sessions were the side which is not the State is not authorized to have a legal representation, see most of the evidence or even know the decision of the court).
Have people already forgot most of what came out in the Snowden Revelations?!
Would stuff like Fedora be in danger, in this case? I couldn’t find if Red Hat was US based
In theory yes since they’re essentially sponsored by RedHat. (RedHat is owned by IBM)
Which is funny because the Snowden leaks actually showed the NSA likes using Fedora for their fancy spy tech lol.
I guess a good alternative would be OpenSUSE.
Yep… Snowden, Charles Maning, Assange and an older whistleblower who died recently but I forgot his name… They also forgot what Cambridge Analytica was about. They just need to throw some bread and games at us and we go one living as nothing ever happend.
Chelsea* Manning
But, yeah, most people just do not care if they are spied on because they don’t think it will be used for anything besides advertising. Trump is going to wake a lot of people up to the immense power we’ve handed over to our tech overlords.
Yeah, sorry it seems I offende the LGBTQ community by typing it wrong… What ever ! As I said above, I really don’t care what you like or your sexual orientation.
However, I find it quite profound that this get out of jail card is used as good faith while it was just another piece of their game… People who think it was a personal choice are either blinded by the journalistic manipulation or LGBTQ partisans (again nothing against any community, gay, lesbian,queer,straight,hetero what ever !).
We are fooled again and again and again by the same lies over and over again… 🤔😮💨
Dude what are you even talking about? You literally sounds schizophrenic
Chelsea Manning
Fuck is wrong with you
Sorry I got It wrong on purpose… Would you ever accept to change your sex to get out of jail? I mean… Dafuck is wrong in our system ?!
But hang on a minute… THAT’S NOT an anti LGBTQ what ever thing I don’t care what you like or your sexual orientation… I just don’t give a fuck !
However, they must have laughed their asses off when he/she was proposed this get out of jail card…
What ever !
They just need to throw some bread and games at us and we go one living as nothing ever happend.
I mean, there’s not a whole lot of alternative. It seems like the only two “valid” avenues of resistance are retreating from society into a hermetically sealed bubble and starting a podcast.
Haha, yeah It seems so…
Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !
How to grow a garden, How to hunt, How to build a small wooden house, how to make fire and then rebuild the technology but only the needed ones.
If we grew things and dug together the rare ores to make solar panels together, build small wind turbines, waterwheels as a community hands by hands… We would probably profit more and enjoy ourselves way more than ever…
Regardless we prefer being held hostage by our own limitations and technology constraints… Not blaming anyone here except myself, It’s just a sad though we could all live happy in a more green state without this mass nonsense technology…
But hey… What’s better than living for ourselves and hard earned money? Huh? Our day to day routine on Netflix, YouTube, Lemmy, twitter Facebook… 7-16 day to day job we all hate thinking we are going to enjoy life when we are old and retired? Emotionally dead gifts bought on Amazon, eBay, temu…
Without saying… Life sucks ! And If you enjoy this kind of life, What can I say… :/ I either envy you for being a brainless sheep or hate you like I hate myself for not burning down this system all together !
Pick your poison !
/Rant off
Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !
That requires large plots of arable land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley
The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. The growing high-tech industry in the 1960s transformed the area from farmland to densely populated cities, and it became referred to as the Silicon Valley.
But we paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.
There’s no unfucking that chicken. We are living in a world that is substantially less arable than it was a century ago. We do not have an Eden to go back to.
When facebook was all over removing anti-vaxx posts and “misinformation” that later turned out to be very close to the truth that guy was okay with “working close with the regime”, now he suddenly isn’t. I wonder…
