Yeah this tracks, I don’t understand why people recommend Debian so much, especially to new users. Distros that update more regularly like Mint or Fedora (for non nvidia users) are much better options.

Removing 3rd party kernel access will probably also make cheating harder. Kernel anticheat is necessary largely in part due to cheat software using exploits in the 3rd party extension system to get kernel privileges itself and evade user mode anticheat.

Image display is an important feature for me. If konsole supported it, I’d just use that. If I’m on a gnome system I’ll pretty much always change the terminal because gnome terminal has a lot of issues with font rendering that I find annoying

I used to prefer Gnome before the KDE 6 update due to the rough edges in KDE. After KDE 6 came out I’ve tried it again, and it’s incredible. The team has spent a lot of time on polish for this major release and it allows KDE’s suite of more fully featured applications to shine. GNOME apps like gedit, nautilus, and gnome terminal tend to provide the minimum level of functionality, whereas KDE’s applications feel like they’re trying to work for power users. Kate goes as far as supporting the LSP for code autocompletion. KDE’s desktop is much more customizable as well, so you don’t really need extensions to get the functionality you’d be looking for in GNOME, stuff like the application launcher are built in. KDE connect is a really useful application you can install on your phone to get file transfers and notification sharing, among other things, between your phone and computer while connect to the same local network. Performance wise they seem pretty equal, even on older hardware, but KDE might have a bit of an edge in terms of RAM usage, YMMV depending on how you customize the desktop. The one thing I miss about GNOME is their “start menu” experience, I haven’t found a way to replicate that in KDE, but I haven’t looked very hard either. Overall I wouldn’t hesitate recommending KDE, plasma 6 makes me actually feel like the Linux desktop is ready for mainstream.

Phone numbers are no longer required iirc

You can’t e2e the to and from headers in an email. that’s a problem with the protocol, not with proton. I’d assume the subject line falls into a similar bucket, because mailservers probably want to use it to filter spam

The fediverse could pose a threat to the market dominance of the Facebook platform and instagram, as there are applications that aim to be direct competitors (frendica, plemora, pixelfed) already in the fediverse. If the fediverse grows, there will be no reason for people to stay on Meta’s platforms without them reducing advertisement and increasing user privacy, which is obviously not something they want to do.

Snaps suck, but I haven’t found flatpaks to be much better. I’ve also found Ubuntu to be really unstable recently fwiw. It’s really annoying how hard they’re pushing snaps, to the point it’s basically impossible to get away from them. I’d recommend Fedora or Endeavor instead. I’ve run Endeavor for years now without a hitch, but many of my machines are on NixOS now.

I had no idea this was the case, in a sane legal system this should be an open and shut antitrust case.

Hopefully articles like this get more companies contributing to steamos/proton

Are there any companies making discrete laptop graphics that don’t have proprietary drivers? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an AMD powered laptop unless it used an APU. I shudder to think of what proprietary Linux drivers from a company less resourced than Nvidia are like.

Because until you spend many hours getting used to it, it’s annoying as hell. I’m a longtime bash user, but if I have to do anything in PowerShell, it sucks. Bash is even less friendly to novice/casual users due to tools like awk and sed being totally obtuse. When you’re unfamiliar with the workflow, not being to see everything you’re able to do at a glance is pretty frustrating.

Mullvad (and every other decent VPN) supports WireGuard and OpenVPN configurations that will be supported on any distro through the network settings without the need for additional software. It’s also pretty likely the mullvad client will be in the software center of whatever distro you’re using

NFS is generally the way network storage appliances are accessed on Linux. If you’re using a computer you know you’re going to be accessing files on in the long term it’s generally the way to go since it’s a simple, robust, high performance protocol that’s used by pros and amateurs alike. SSHFS is an abuse of the ssh protocol that allows you to mount a directory on any computer you can get an ssh connection to. You can think of it like VSCode remote editing, but it’ll work with any editor or other program.

You should be able to set up NFS with write caching, etc that will allow it to be more similar in performance to a local filesystem. Note that you may not want write caching specifically if you’re going to suddenly disconnect your laptop from the network without unmounting the share first. Your actual performance might not be the same, especially for large transfers, due to the throughput of your network and connection quality. In my general experience sshfs is kind of slow especially when accessing many different small files, and NFS is usually much faster.

If you’re on Linux I’d recommend using btrfs, or bcachefs with snapshots. It’s basically like time machine on MacOS. That way if you accidentally delete something you can still recover it.

Yeah, for this reason I would pretty much never encourage exceptions in Python over some other form of error handling. It’s so frustrating when called code throws some random exceptions that are completely undocumented. This is one of the few things Java got (sort of) right

Isn’t a huge part of the point of copy left licences that an author can’t change the license without rewriting the code entirely?

A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn’t a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let’s say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it’s sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn’t work when you were out of the house.

I wonder if the Gnome team’s cavalier aditude towards agreed upon standards is related to Redhat’s influence 🤔 It’s totally possible the devs are just high on their own fumes due to being the default for so long.

Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn’t as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It’s a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.