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First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).

I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.

About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.

I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).

20xx

That is stage 1.

This is stage 2.

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Some people like to rag onto Canonicals bad decisions. These include:

1. Putting ads in the terminal
2. Use of Affiliate links in the DE
3. The forceful use of Snap
4. The proprietary Snap infrastructure
5. The feeling of being abandoned, in favour of the server market (lack of desktop innovation)
6. Lens search, that allows company (eg: Amazon) tracking.
7. Anti-privacy settings enabled, by default.

If anything, they’re worse.

1. Brave is an advertising company, that blocks everyone, but them. Forcing over people and companies into their system.
2. They’re heavily in the blockchain ecosystem, with their own worthless crypto.
3. They take from open source projects (uBlock, Chromium, etc), but threaten legal action when someone forks them.
4. They install bloat/spyware on your Windows system (later claimed it was a mistake).
5. Brave, and its CEO is right-wing, lobbying against things like same-sex marriage.

I could go on.

I think we are constantly progressing in that field. One issue for latency was that controllers used to contact your device, and then the server. Now they can connect directly to the server. Things will improve, like it or not.

For right now, I think the biggest hurdle is with ISPs.

1. Data caps can be quite common, in many countries. Essentially creating a huge limit on how much you can (if at all) play.
2. Most people’s router, and access point hardware needs upgrading. A lot of the stock router AIOs from ISPs are really bad. Creating a bottleneck before the data even reaches the servers.

Another hurdle I can see is companies profit sharing. Everyone wants a large cut, so I’d expect multiple streaming options… and many failures, like what we’re seeing on the movies/series streaming model… just with games it’ll be soooo much worse.

Games that just come out could be an issue regardless of distro. Sometimes Wine/Proton needs to fix a few things… no distro is going to help, in that regard. I suppose a more regularly updated distro COULD help with getting updates faster… but it’s usually nothing you cannot already solve with Pop. ProtonUp-QT is a great tool to help get you the latest Proton versions, including the Eggroll fork. It’s available as a Flatpak, so it’ll work on most modern distros (including Pop).

If you must switch to a more regularly updated distro, you have a couple of options. Nobara (based on Fedora) will give you a nice middle ground between your current setup and Arch. Speaking of which, Arch is a great distribution, with fantastic documentation. That being said, it IS NOT new user friendly. It WILL break, and you WILL need to look stuff up. You’re on the literal bleeding edge, of Linux. The Arch forums can also be quite toxic, in comparison to what’s available on both Pop/Ubuntu and Nobara/Fedora. If neither is appealing to you, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s very up to date, but I often find it more stable than Arch.

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine

The only thing that comes to mind is PeerTube. I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen it suggested a few times in the privacy community.

What she didn’t see is me whispering in her mothers ear “I run Arch, by the way”. Then giving her a quick wink.

On desktop, Librewolf (Firefox) and Brave. Sometimes I need a Chromoum browser (thanks Google), and Brave is one of the better options.

On iOS, it doesn’t really matter. Though, I went with Brave. Ad blocking and background media playback is great.

On Android I use Mull, which is a hardened Firefox, with goals similar to Librewolf. Again, Brave as a backup.

Sentimentality, images of long dead family members.

Monetarily, my Steam account.

I’m in the UK, and prices keep rising. As of right now I can expect to pay around £120, for two people, over a week. This week was £143. For those in the US, that’s a little over $180. Pre pandemic, and actually leaving the EU, groceries was half that price.

It’s a great option, but it’s debatable whether or not it’s privacy improving. On one hand it’s your domain. You don’t need to worry about moving email services, and as you control it, you can have as many addresses as you want. One for each service, catch all, and so on. On the other hand it’s YOUR domain. Only you have access to it. It’s quite easy to filter out the first part, before the @ sign, and identify exactly who you are. It’s a unique data point, tied to you. It’s arguably as bad as handing out a phone number.

Depending on your threat model, consider printing them out. You’ll have a physical copy of your keys, not tied to any electrical good. Even if they get stolen, they’re not usable, due to them not knowing your password.

Alternatively keep a digital pdf, or txt document with them inisdie. Save that document on a a USB drive or SD card. You could save it on your phone, but it’s best to keep your backup codes away from your normal 2FA codes.

That is generally really annoying, when on desktop. Consider looking for an Android/iOS app. The app will keep track of your account, and you won’t really have that issue anymore. I use Thunder, and find it a decent experience on both platforms.

Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.

Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“

When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.

Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.

There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.

Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.

Inside: Vomit + insects (cockroaches, I think). Software: The weebiest weeb setup (images, boot sounds, etc) to ever exist.