elagost

If anyone actually watched the talk Guido addresses Android at about 2 minutes in, and why it's not a actually what Linux users want.

They're what I have access to (for free; I don't buy this stuff), and what I grew up with. I used Pentium IIs and Pentium 4s (and some PowerPC Macs) in my early days. Exploring the limitations of older software or trying to cram newer software on to these machines is fun.

I don't get nostalgic feelings from a C64 or Apple 2 or TRS-80 because I've never even seen one IRL before. For my leisure time I want to play with something I'm mostly familiar with, because that's relaxing. I would jump at the chance to score a free Amiga or other hardware older than I've ever used, but just haven't had any presented to me.

This is a fantastic project. I've played around recently with late-90s/early-00s PCs, and have used Plop 5 on CD to boot off the USB disks. If you use older hardware, keep a copy on CD - booting off USB is much faster than CD!

Either that or CD. I used this to install an OS from USB on a PC from 1998 that has a USB port but can't boot from it.

Trisquel is based on Ubuntu like other operating systems (Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, etc.) but they do something unique - they rebuild the Ubuntu packages from source, instead of just including the Ubuntu repos in their software sources.

Trisquel is quite a usable distro for laptops that are 3-4 years old if you have an appropriate wireless card - Atheros 9xxx series cards tend to work well as the ath9k driver is FOSS. That's really the only blocker most people encounter. Why run this over Debian Stable (without adding "non-free" sources) I couldn't tell you. Debian tends to be more up to date than Trisquel since it's usually based on the previous Ubuntu LTS.

It's important to understand that you can't go by major version numbers in most fixed-release, long term support Linux Operating Systems, like RHEL, Debian, or Ubuntu. There is often deeper investigation needed.

https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-backporting-and-how-does...

Use an alternative DNS server, Firefox/Brave/Ungoogled Chromium, uBlock Origin, and disable JavaScript everywhere you can possibly help it. As far as reclaiming some privacy from routine surveillance, this is probably better advice than "Pay Unknown Company X $9/mo to maybe be slightly better than your ISP in terms of privacy".

Ok. Use a proxy, or set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS? Then you also have a VPS - you can host your own website there, use it to download stuff and rsync it back to your local machine, deploy nextcloud, etc., all for less than the cost of ExpressVPN. And bonus points, you can use unlimited devices.

Argument is the spice of life! An argument doesn't have to be angry. But nonetheless I appreciate your earnest kindness.

It's less of an issue when every site you connect to uses https, and every app you use employs ssl/tls for its connections. That is common practice these days. Getting man-in-the-middle'd on airport Wi-Fi is less feasible these days than it was 10 years ago. The attacker would have to also install a certificate on the user's device. I welcome corrections if I'm wrong.

VPNs aren't obligated to tell you the truth. They don't have to have good security or even honor what they say on the front page. People trust marketing, not actual policy or actions - just look at Apple. Still waiting on "HMA" VPN to go out of business because they handed over users to the FBI. They're still around and claim No Logs just like everyone else, just like ProtonMail did until this month.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/priva... https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/hma-vpn-user-arreste... https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_con...

Diversification. Theoretically most of the nodes are owned by different people, and every connection will randomize your node list route between them, making it difficult to track, unless most of the nodes were owned by one organization. With VPNs, all of your connections are through servers owned by one company, identified by an account ID.

Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users.

I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless.

And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Then either do without (because, come on, nobody's gonna die if they can't watch reality TV), buy it on disc, or pirate it? Netflix is blocking IP ranges so hard that residential space is getting caught in the blast radius. It's a cat and mouse game that you'll only win by refusing to play. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-tar...

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook.

If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN, you're probably wrong.

Why do we even give these companies the time of day?

(Small clarification - Most people who want VPNs should use a proxy instead. It fits the use case better. Those still exist and don't route ALL of your device's traffic over the tunnel.)

Consistency. All the Google hardware forever has allowed easy factory unlocking without a fuss, easy ways to restore to standard OS images without jumping through hoops, and are widely available. Plus they allow re-locking the booloader and the phone equivalent of enrolling your own custom secure boot keys. They also provide firmware updates for a long time so you can get platform/hardware patches too. CalyxOS does provide these in their images.

The 3a/4a are cheap and have headphone jacks and good cameras. What's not to love? Until they change their policy on unlocking bootloaders and installing custom OSs they're great devices. I still have a Nexus 5 that runs PostmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch, and if it completely breaks I can always use ADB/Fastboot to flash the Android 6 images that are still on Google's website. Don't even have to log in to get them.

dvgrab is awesome! I used it quite a bit recently, transferring old tapes on to more reliable media. Sometimes it the tape had an error and I had to rewind a bit and restart capture, but it mostly just worked.

Be warned, it does produce pretty large raw files, though, so after import, I ran ffmpeg to convert them all to mp4 files. No visible loss in quality, and about 90% size reduction.

The sound quality (via Sony MDR-7506) is comparable to an iPod. Detailed and clear. It can get very loud and drive much nicer headphones than mine. It loads and plays FLACs and other large files much faster than the iPod can because the iPod is 20 years old and doesn't have the horsepower.

The software, honestly, is not nearly as bad as "alibaba junk". It is just fine. The iPod's software is more thought-out and consistent. The Fiio software is much more user friendly than Rockbox though. It responds well and hardly ever crashes. It has all the settings you'd expect and then some. It will be annoying if you expect perfection, but it never skips tracks on its own, the buttons always do what you want, settings aren't reset on you. The M5 is more fiddly than the M3K but I usually use the M5 anyway. I'm willing to tolerate the less-than-perfect software.

I'm not in sales. I'm a devops/sysadmin person. And I didn't mean to do a sales pitch, sorry.

The downsides all wind up being worth it to me because I'm starting from the premise of "I want my smartphone as far away from me as often as possible". It allows me to decouple the primary reason I'd carry my smartphone, and carry something less unwanted instead. I'm guessing you can figure out the reasons; feeds, notifications, alerts, an operating system built for annoyance/addiction that is not Free Software, etc.

Really, though, I encourage you to try it out. Think about how much more time you had to think while walking your dog or something 20 years ago.

I own one of these. Using it is the physical manifestation of delayed gratification and I love it.

- Getting new music or Podcasts requires plugging it in to a real computer, transferring files, and updating the media library. It takes a while.

- Without a touchscreen you can't "scrub" through files and must fast-forward with the buttons. Fast-forwarding to your place in a 90-minute podcast takes a while.

- If you plug it in while in the middle of a podcast, or reboot it, it will lose your place many times. It has a setting to not do this but it is unreliable.

- Due to the above two points I really got in the habit of ensuring I had enough time to listen to a full show in one shot, and that made me subscribe to less podcasts. This is a plus.

- You cannot view show notes for a podcast or click on links in those notes. You must sit down at a PC to do this.

- This device helped me to not take my phone with me everywhere. That's a plus.

- It doesn't "fast charge" or anything. The battery indicator is imprecise so sometimes it will shut off while you're using it. The battery lasts forever so that's OK.

You have to want to use something like this. It is better for you brain than a smartphone. I encourage everyone to try it. It is high quality, built well, and inexpensive, so very much worth a shot. If you want a bluetooth and USB-C version, the Fiio M5 is also good.

In Tor browser I want every request bundled and bounced through Tor. It is a special exception. Non-special-case software should respect my OS and network's DNS settings. Simple as that. I shouldn't have to fiddle with network settings in each application to get it to behave the way I want. Seems fine that it's there, if people want to turn it on, but it should not be on by default.

This is really well written and researched but confuses me. Do most people not do this - make choices based on values (and constantly re-evaluate those choices in the face of new information)?

When I decide to use software, move to a new location, purchase cereal at the grocery store, buy music, and a variety of other daily activities, these are choices I make based on my values. Many times I end up picking something that I find slightly less convenient or usable because it aligns with my values better, and I'm unwilling to compromise my ethical stance for a little bit of convenience.

It seems unrealistic to me that people would choose otherwise, given enough information.

System76 also sells laptops with a Linux OS, Coreboot BIOS, and a "disabled" Intel Management Engine. (There's no true way to disable it, but any dangerous parts are removed, rendering it useless)

System76 is not a newcomer, though - they've got 15 years of history. I've bought from them and found the experience to be superb.

A lot of people focusing on the fact that it's kind of a toy, but isn't that the point? I have a GameShell (gameboy-shaped Linux computer also made by Clockworkpi) and the best part about it is the vibrant and active community that continues to hack on OS images and programs (and of course games!) to this day. I don't use it every day, but it's very high quality, was super fun to build, and has only gotten better with time.

I trust these people to make a great device that works well, gets support, is fully open source, and is super fun to play with.

I'm aware that smartphones can do the all-in-one sync/download/play dance for podcasts. However, smartphones are basically tracking devices riddled with spyware, and I don't want one around me when I'm not on call.

Plus they're far too bulky, features change constantly, they throw ads at you when you're just trying to play music, and they don't have headphone jacks. They suck at audio playback. I have a few <$100 MP3 players that sound better than any smartphone ever, have a bunch of physical buttons, can connect to any pair of headphones I've had for the past 15 years, are extensible with a microSD card, can charge on a standardized connector, won't interrupt me with dings or calls while I'm listening, etc.

The benefits go on and on. It forces me to be deliberate about my actions - when I decide "I'm going to listen to stuff now", that's all it can do, and I won't get sucked into the multitude of features a smartphone offers. I get to make decisions about what I'm doing, not the designers of the smartphone. I get that they're interesting, neat devices. But they're overall the wrong choice for most things - you wouldn't replace your whole tool shed with a Leatherman.

I use newsboat (cli program) to manage and download podcasts, which I sync to a Fiio M3k. it's solid, beautiful, and sturdy. Not using a smartphone for podcasts has been incredible for me, personally.

I feel you. Very much in the same boat. I do miss a lot of the fun things I did on/with Windows, but with all the malware that's baked into Windows 10 (and prior versions too - they just weren't as heavily scrutinized it seemed) it's just a non-starter for me. Creeps me out too much.

A Microsoft Linux would also be DOA for me, given that I wouldn't trust it to not be the same as their current offering - jam-packed full of privacy-violating spyware, riddled with secret security holes, and getting worse as the days go by. At least with Debian and Fedora, I know what to expect, and I could have an influence on what happens there.

Cynicism aside, I do believe that Microsoft's Linux would be a great choice for consumers. Background upgrades with fast reboots is my number one selling point of Ubuntu to regular users.

The main difference I see is that smartphones are built as playthings, stuffed with features that encourage addiction, but a real desktop operating system is built as a tool to help you work, and gives you all the access and power you need.

I see clear lines between things like smartphones and tablets, desktop operating systems, game consoles, and kindles. There's many different types of screens. I'm comfortable handing a non-networked laptop to my kid for her to play with, but wouldn't hand her a tablet or game console.

This is not recommended. It's a specific tool for a specific purpose. I seem to recall a while back that it even had some default security options disabled on the system to allow for all the crazy stuff it does. It's not meant to be a replacement for a Linux Mint or Ubuntu desktop system.

Run it on a second laptop, on a USB stick, or in a virtual machine (that you cede access to the networking hardware).

As someone who used to do this myself, I don't quite understand why people still go through all the effort to run macOS. In the past I've built Hackintoshes on desktops and laptops, and it was fun to accomplish (audio through HDMI was especially tricky!), but in the end it was slower, less stable, and not nearly as useful as running Linux on the same hardware. I run Linux on everything these days.

What's the draw? Better off buying a mac if you want the "Apple Experience" anyway. If you don't, I don't imagine why you'd want anything to do with this.

The way I got started with Linux, even in the early 2000s, was blowing away the Windows install on my laptop and installing Ubuntu. Out of the box everything worked (but the laptop was ancient and didn't have wifi, so that didn't have the opportunity to break) and besides the weird problems with alsa and xorg that were endemic to those days, I had no issues.

A few months ago I tried to install FreeBSD on a spare 5+yr old laptop. FreeBSD doesn't show boot messages (display goes all wonky) and it can't detect half the hardware (network, disks, others). Seems like it's a decade or two behind hardware support on Linux.

Is there a vendor that sells good FreeBSD desktop-enabled systems, i.e. system76 for Linux? I'm now at a point that I'm more than willing to jump into using a BSD desktop, I just want something that works. Alternatively, is there a FreeBSD-based OS that is Ubuntu-like - includes a bunch of drivers and gives me a decent desktop out of the box?

(also, as an aside, the fact that the bus factor of FreeBSD's wifi stack seems like it's 1 reminds me of libinput on Linux.)

I'm no web dev, so feel free to improve upon it. Think I got the proportions right though.

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