And in retrospect it’s too bad more people didn’t steal from Microsoft so that it failed as a business.

I’ve been a full time Linux user at home for over six years. It’s why my username is what it is :)

I can’t say it’s flawless. Sometimes you get what you pay for. But in most every significant way it is the better choice.

YES! Same!!!

I have to use Windows 11 for work. Maybe this is because of CrowdStrike or something, I don’t know, but I often encounter a problem where the main section of explorer, where you can actually click files and stuff, just breaks. That entire region becomes unclickable and unusable, even though the rest of the Explorer window (like the icons on the top part) all still work. So I just have to close the window and then reopen Explorer, re-navigate back to where I was, and proceed from where I left off.

Never, in the decades I’ve been using computers, have I ever encountered something as stupid as this with this amount of regularity. Windows 11 is a uniquely bad OS compared to every competitor option, including prior versions of Windows.

No matter how “cool” it is its primary purpose, first and foremost, is to generate spam. A trillion dollar industry, effectively, in the service of spamming our search results, inboxes, text messages, science journals, homework assignments, and so much more

As for btrfs, I don’t use it because I’m an adult.

This is a strange statement, because it’s now a mature fs that works. It’s even the default fs of the OS you’re trying to use. But for the sake of experimentation, I can appreciate wanting to try something off the beaten path. And I generally agree about Oracle and, specifically, Larry Ellison.

The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!

It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.

I hate to reply because I don’t have the answer to your question, just a remark which you may not care for: why bcachefs, especially on fedora server which has a rapidly advancing kernel? Bcachefs is out of the kernel tree. It is just going to be a constant maintenance burden on you to upkeep it with your server.

Btrfs will support subvolumes, compression, nodatacow directories, and everything else you might want while not being a thing you have to manually keep up with.

I would not expect the fedora installer to have any support for bcachefs, because fedora doesn’t have support for it generally.

I stopped buying BP products because of how terrible they are.

What was the effectiveness of this? Was it “far more” than, say, regulation by a government?

Yes. The owner/developer is Kape technologies, an Israeli spyware/adware company.

To quote from cnet

For maximum privacy, I recommend VPN providers with a jurisdiction outside of Five Eyes and other international intelligence-sharing agreements – that is, one headquartered outside of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So it initially seems like a positive sign that, while CyberGhost has offices in Germany, it’s headquartered in Romania. German entrepreneur Robert Knapp says he founded the $114,000 startup on the back of low-wage Bucharest labor before flipping it for $10.5 million in 2017.

The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.

Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study. (You can read the Web Archive version of that document.)

This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked “agree” on the terms and conditions.

Whether or not PIA or ExpressVPN or the other providers owned by Kape fulfill this data scraping and ad-serving pipeline in my mind is irrelevant. Choosing to do business with them rewards bad actors when there are other VPN sellers who don’t have such a tainted lineage.

Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA

He just lived in the society he advocated for. He literally believed a shooting now and then was worth the right for everyone to have guns.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

Those are his own words from 2023.

Just because it happened to him doesn’t mean it wasn’t what he wanted. For all we know, he died blissfully knowing he received a God-given bullet.

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

All this boohooing about his family. His wife chose to marry him because he’s a reactionary racist transphobic piece of shit. Meaning she herself is one. The only people I feel bad for are the young kids

For me the experience is not flawless, but it’s not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you’re using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue in an Xorg session.

And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.

IME the nicest part of Bazzite is not having to manage it. To that end, it works on my Steam Deck. But that’s nothing to do with stability, as you say. In its own ways it’s more annoying to use than a regular distro.

Clearly people are finding use for it, but I personally find those annoying aspects needless speedbumps in my own usage. Except for, again, on my Steam Deck.

UBlock on iphone works well and is free but is limited to safari, does not appear to even work with safari used as an in-app browser

This is the most annoying part about “content blockers” on iOS. Works fine in this one narrow context. Otherwise you need DNS filtering. I use PiHole, and I have it set up to VPN back home when I’m away to keep myself covered.

Have fun!

Fact Check: Verified true!

I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.