Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
It feels like there needs to be a category in between conservative and paranoid. I’m probably 90% of the way over to tech paranoid but using Tor Browser and Tails is a little much.
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
For some reason, the best word to describe it in my mind is “fun”. Just fun to learn and play with, fun to install, fun to configure and customize, and fun to daily drive. Definitely not fun when a random package update breaks your system (looking at you grub), but that hardly ever happens anymore provided you don’t enable the testing repo.
Also pacman is the fastest package manager I’ve ever used.
Apt is very quick as well (with the nala frontend), no complaints there. I’ve been running Arch for the past 5 years and recently switched to Debian Stable. The “grub event” was certainly notable, but otherwise I don’t think Arch is really that unstable or gimmicky. Arch itself is a very solid and dependable platform - the reason I decided to move is because I really don’t need the bleeding edge packages from other projects anymore. With Flatpaks and all the rest of the /home-based package managers that are around now, I can keep a stable base system and install a couple bleeding edge packages that I want, instead of being forced to run my entire system as bleeding edge (do my printer drivers really need to make me bleed?).
Overall, I’d say the Arch experience is as high quality as the Debian experience, they just target different usecases. Neither of them is better, it’s just up to the user how bloody they want their system to be.
I just lost a raid 0 array for what seems like no reason, all I even had to do was reformat and both drives are working again. It’s fortunate I only use them for my steam library.
That being said I have an Ubuntu machine that’s been running 4 drives in RAID 5 for like 5 years so… Your mileage may vary?
Somehow mkinitcpio broke my initramfs the other day when I installed the latest microcode updates. Took me like an hour to debug the issue and boot from the fallback 😑. That’s the first time I’ve had an issue like that though. I’ve been using arch for a few years now.
Also the middle should be called Tech Centrist or Tech Social Democrat, daring to use the projects from philosophical minorities is not conservative at all.
Not extreme is rather moderate. Conservative estimate means there’s a tendency to not change what was estimated in the past. Moderate would mean that a small change would be accepted.
Conservatives are always trying to make themselves seem “cool and different” like the middle guy in the meme. Being anticonsumerist, pro-privacy and pro individual liberty is far from actual conservative policy goals but they obviously have to pretend otherwise.
Also one of the only people I’ve seen who routinely attempts to ensure people don’t insult each other (like you have) on the mailing lists he frequents, so he gets another point in my book.
Mmm, people only get so many bites at the “vociferously defending pedorasty’” apple before you’re written off in my eyes. He is far beyond that point, even after decades of having to listen to people make appeals to authority.
Did you actually read the what he wrote, or did you read what others wrote about him?
Consider the fact that he promotes an ideology that is extremely dangerous to various powerful people; it would be naive to assume none have tried to weaken his message by presenting him in various ways.
As to his latest controversy, if you actually read what he wrote, and understand that he chooses his words very carefully, you will see that he did not say anything controversial at all.
Signal used to be an SMS (text message) client in addition to its secure IM protocol. If both people were using Signal, it would use the secure protocol, otherwise it would fallback to a text message. They removed the text messaging feature from Signal and now it’s a lot harder to convince normies to use it.
Previously: Hey replace your texting app with Signal, if two people use Signal you’ll be upgraded automatically.
Now: Hey use Signal, no one you know is on it and you’ll need to remember who uses SMS and who uses Signal.
Yeah that really made it hard to convince normies to use it. Have you found a similar replacement that does e2e privacy if both using the software and sms/rcs as a backup if not?
Yep. It’s possible to just pick your hardware, software, and other devices according to your needs. It always bums me out to see people limit themselves by stratifying along ideological lines.
Sometimes it’s enough that it’s fun to go on the computer, y’know?
Internet Relay Chat. Its one of the oldest internet protocols. You have an IRC server that hosts streams of conversations, and clients who connect to the server and post forth streams of conversation, and then the server just beams out all the conversations to everyone. When you join a room you don’t generally get to see history, so its very much an ephemeral chat room protocol. Its super stable and super easy as an administrator to set up
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
And he mostly talks about phones anyway… hardly relevant to the avg pc enthusiast as he only covers macbooks and not their competition, which is silly.
He’s the kind of guy that looks at a Fairphone and says “if you compare this to a Pixel, the Pixel is faster”, talks about how important repairability and sustainability is, vows to mention it in future phone reviews and then proceeds to never mention it ever again but instead keeps on saying how great the new iPhone is.
Where does Element/Matrix fit in here? It doesn’t really seem like Paranoid like XMPP since people have been using it pretty regularly now, not just paranoid people.
If you want to disable Intel Management Engine, the always-on backdoor built into every Intel CPU and/or want as much software as possible on your machine to be FOSS
Not that I know of, AMD is also soon going to make their own FOSS bios with OpenSIL so they’re generally the better option if you’re a privacy/libre software junkie.
As far as I know, OpenSIL stands for Open Silicon Initialization Library, and handles only the hardware initialisation part of the boot process. It may still require loading binary blobs like the Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is AMD’s version of Intel Management Engine
PSP is not the same thing as IME. Not even close. PSP doesn’t even have network access, much less remote computer control like the IME. Still proprietary, but if OpenSIL allows you to turn it off then we might actually be able to run a fully 100% libre modern desktop computer which is honestly pretty awesome.
Things like these and the overall general improvements to linux on a daily basis get me excited for a time when I could buy a Framework laptop with coreboot running linux without issues. Also no backdoors for big brother.
Coreboot doesn’t disable the IME by the way. It just gets rid of some of it’s functionality blobs and sends a signal to it telling it to please disable itself. No one knows if that signal actually works. Only Intel themselves can actually fully remove it from a processor, like they did with the processors they sold to the NSA.
Okay I did some research and I was wrong. There is no confirmation Intel specifically removed the IME from NSA’s PCs. It’s just that some reverse engineers found a flag that supposedly disables it, and their theory is that it was meant for the NSA.
I believe this is the switch System76 and Purism turn off, but as I said, since the blob is still there, we can’t be sure that switch actually works or if it’s just a trap.
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