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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Anything that runs the Android version that came with it will gather data on you and short of permanently disabling the data connection, you will not be able to escape it. Google gives back door access to everything it wants, constantly sends encrypted data packets to its servers that only they know what they contain and doesn’t give you the ability to stop any of it.

    If you have a Pixel phone installing GrapheneOS is incredibly easy. It gives you full control over what the apps installed on it are allowed to do on your phone, including Google’s if you wish to install them (unlike on other phones where the privacy options are grayed out for them and permanently enabled). Mind you, you will lose some functionality if you block everything. But you are empowered to decide which apps you trust to do what on your own phone and disable what you don’t need.

    If you have something else than a Pixel, LineageOS is an option, however the installation process might be more complicated.

    Mind you, with the FOSS alternatives you will sometimes experience some jank or advanced features that don’t work. But it is a tiny price to pay to know you’re not giving your data away. It has gotten far better in the last few years as well, at least from my experience with GrapheneOS



  • I tried Fedora KDE spin first but it didn’t work out for me. IDK if it was my hardware configuration it didn’t like but the first time I booted it, it spammed me with crash reports. I poked around it for a few minutes, not being able to go far without things crashing again and again. I installed the updates and rebooted it hoping it would fix it but it got much worse after that. I couldn’t do anything else as it immediately crashed at startup. I couldn’t be bothered to look any further into it and switched to OpenSUSE which has been rock solid for months and still going. I’m running Plasma 6.1 with Wayland on it with no issues as well and I know Plasma 6.2 is coming soon. It uses pipewire as default as well. To be honest, IDK what Fedora would do better for my uses, except maybe for a faster package manager.

    I’m certain that my Fedora experience isn’t typical but for me at least it was a disaster.




  • I didn’t wait. I did it earlier this year and haven’t booted from my Windows 10 drive since then. My entry drug was Linux Mint. But I quickly switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after because I wanted something that ran the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment (I prefer how it looks and handles multiple displays). It isn’t that hard to learn the basics you need to use Linux, as long as you use a decently stable distro that you won’t need to troubleshoot at every update. In my limited experience, you only need more in depth knowledge when you try messing around with more “cutting edge” and less “stable” distros and are installing experimental features.

    I can’t believe that Microsoft is expecting everyone to get rid of their computer to switch to 11 once the support for 10 expires next year. I even revived an 15 year old laptop that only had 4Gb or RAM by installing Mint on it (and switching its HDD with an SSD I had kicking around). It’s fast and perfectly usable for everything but modern games now




  • As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

    Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

    I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

    After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

    I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

    Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

    Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.


  • If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.

    AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.




  • I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

    Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

    On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.