I’ve never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.

My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.

OBS worked pretty well for me last time I used it, using the basic package Debian provided.

They should be more neutral in a non-opinion piece. They quote a lot more people saying pro-genocide things than they quote people saying anti-genocide things. They quoted pro-genocide politicians and pro-genocide BBC staff. They did not give the musicians any opportunity to respond to the article.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has inflamed tensions around the world, triggering pro-Palestinian protests in many capitals and on college campuses. Israel and some supporters have described the protests as antisemitic, while critics say Israel uses such descriptions to silence opponents

Let’s consider the two positions mentioned in this paragraph:

1. Israel should stop committing genocide

2. Israel should continue committing genocide, and position 1 is antisemitic

The first position is described as “pro-Palestinian”, as if these protesters support the Palestinian military (Hamas) and want them to win. This is incorrect. These people mostly just want the genocide to end.

The second position is a shitty opinion, but also contains an overt falsehood. It’s an objective fact that it’s false, and that fact should be reported in the story, but it isn’t.

Sure, here are instructions for getting Linux Mint running: https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

These instructions are for creating a USB flash drive that functions as both a live environment or an installer. If you don’t want to install it yet, this allows you to try it out while booting just from the flash drive, without modifying your hard drive at all.

What a shitty article. It’s so heavily biased in favor of genocide.

I feel like the US is more like a Second World country. By “Second World”, I mean the countries that are more aligned to Russia than to NATO. That description now fits the US, unfortunately.

I think people are more pissed off and divided than they have been in a very long time. It’s hard to say how close we are to a civil war, though. There’s been a lot of propaganda for a long time saying “violence is not the answer” (even though sometimes it is), and “violence has no place in our system of government” (even though the government abuses its own monopoly on violence to imprison and kill innocent, peaceful people).

It feels like the media in the US is less reliable than it’s ever been in my lifetime, and would probably suppress as much as possible any information that would support open rebellion.

X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

X11 is complete.

Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).

I haven’t used it in the last several years, but from about 2014-2018 any time I tried to download, it required registration, and any time I tried to register, it just didn’t work. It was some problem with the javascript in their site. Probably related to captcha or something. Yes, I tried multiple computers, multiple browsers, even tried registering on a library’s computer.

Looks like their site is less shit now, but it’s still awful.

Sorry if it wasn’t obvious, I’m using sysvinit.

My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can’t install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.

It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.

I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.

I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.

Mozilla, for example, would sign Firefox’s flatpak with a PGP key that they would disclose on their website. You verify the signature using the RSA algorithm (or any other algorithm for digital signatures. There are a bunch.) Or, you could just trust that your connection wasn’t tampered the first time, then you would have the public key, and it would verify each time that the package came from that same person. Currently, you have to trust every time that your connection isn’t tampered.

Major flatpak providers (Flathub at the very least) would include their PGP public key in the flatpak software repo, and operating system vendors would distribute that key in the flatpak infrastructure for their operating system, which itself is signed by the operating system’s key.

I don’t own this game, but twice I have switched positive reviews to negative for doing this.

Article doesn’t mention my biggest problem with flatpaks, that the packages are not digitally signed. All major Linux distros sign their packages, and flathub should too. I would prefer to see digital signatures from both flathub and the package’s maintainer. I don’t believe flathub has either one currently.

My problem with that theme is that it doesn’t highlight any buttons. I believe all buttons should have borders, especially the ones the titlebar. This helps distinguish a noninteractive label from an interactive clickable button.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

I literally cannot use a program that has AI crap integrated into it, because of data security rules in the contracts I have to follow. If I used Windows 11, I would have to never use Notepad, and find a way to remove Explorer. (Explorer creates the desktop icons and taskbar, so good luck with that.)

Windows 11 doesn’t even have a working file manager or text editor anymore. This is not a serious operating system.

Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I’m really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it’s only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone’s mind with lies, for hardly any cost.

Bezos does not make a billion dollars in a week, unless you count certain short term gains based on random variation of the stock market, in which case he also loses a billion dollars in some weeks.