Oh god, this meme. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before, but it’s so true.
God, Tor, freaking Tor. Bless it’s heart, really, but it’s practically unusable. At least for me. I was really getting into it, trying to use it as a daily browser, ran with so much less ram than all the others. But it’s practically unusable! All the shitty websites I had to go on daily for School practically didn’t work, and half the websites would always take at least 10-15 minutes to get working because they keep thinking I’m a hacker. Or it’s just region blocked, and I have to spend SO MUCH TIME making new connections in the hopes it doesn’t go to a single blacklisted country. Sometimes even with a phone there to authenticate, it just doesn’t work. So I had Firefox anyway, it was literally what Tor was built off of. And because of how unbelievably inconvenient and annoying Tor (Or more accurately, how shitty the Internet in general has got, I really wouldn’t mind logging in to every website every time, with a phone authentication every so often) was, I ended up just using Firefox and using Tor for dark web stuff. Essentially, what it’s supposed to be used for.
Linux…man, Linux was always one of those things I wanted to get into, but thinking critically, it would be very dumb for me to do. Almost every single thing I do is required by a Windows app. Critical and niche shit, mind you. So essentially, it’d be the Tor situation all over again. I’d be doing effectively everything worthless on Linux while molesting my computer for a VM for windows, which I would be doing on a daily basis for practically as long as I use the computer. So I’m practically stuck being a normie. I try to do everything I can to stop all these companies and shit tracking me and have my machine running faster, like running scripts to debloat windows, but in the end, it doesn’t amount to too much. I’m stuck a normie, no matter how much of a poser I act.
Wine and crossover can probably meet the needs of most of your windows app needs at this point, which realistically aren’t a lot if you look into it, and keep a windows vm / cloud instance handy. Why not try a vm of Linux on your windows machine (or use WSL) to get your toes in the water to see if your assumptions are still correct today?
I tried. I have very peculiar needs, I’m not joking when I say I use shitty old programs from before the millennium AT LEAST EVERY WEEK. Very specific niches that I have found no solutions for on Linux.
Essentially, I need Windows for it’s main selling point. Insane compatibility on software from every field. And until Linux can actually RIVAL windows instead of presenting Fisher price alternatives, I’m forced to stay with the shackles of blasphemy.
I’ve tried it in the past. The actual UI and the general process of doing things was the least of my issues. I’m not loyal to Windows or anything at all, I can easily get used to that.
First of all, if you want to get into Linux, DO IT! It’s truly awesome, I love it. Just get Mint, throw a Windows skin over it and nobody will notice, trust me. Honestly, it’s incredibly rewarding.
When it comes to browsers, I now have the best setup I could think of: LibreWolf. It’s a hardened version of Firefox. It doesn’t use TOR and all websites are accesible. I use Startpage as a search engine. Granted, it can be a bit slow but it gets great results and there is a button that lets you open websites via a Startpage proxy. LibreWolf by default erases all browser data on exit so for logins I use KeePassXC password manager. It has an awesome addon which automatically fills in login fields, it can do TOTP and autofill that, too. It’s pretty great.
Props for even actively thinking about it, that’s always the first step! If you want to switch to Linux I recommend first switching to apps that run on both Linux and Windows. They exist for almost every use case, and you can migrate gradually app by app.
That’s unfortunately simply untrue. You can’t, with a straight face, claim that there is any actual competition to Photoshop, Revit or a myriad of other, non-programming use-cases. It’s easy to use Linux when you’re a developer, it’s almost impossible if you’re an architect. Sure, you can use wine. Good luck, half of photoshop builds are borked. All Revit has garbage rating on wine. You just can’t professionally escape windows if you’re in a wrong profession.
I mean, I’m talking about switching IF there are apps for your workflow on Linux. If not then of course this is not (yet?) an option for you. But that’s exactly why I say switch app by app, so you can figure out if your workflow would actually work. Afaik many people don’t switch because the apps they are used to don’t exist on Linux, not because there are no replacements. And as a side effect, most Linux apps are open source, so even switching to just some of those is still a good thing.
This is sadly just true. At least I as an artist could decide to bite the bullet with Clip Studio and learn Krita instead which is not THAT inferior. But to tell a Photoshop professional to switch to GIMP is simply stupid. If only Affinity ported their crap to Linux…
Hopefully with China moving to openKylin, there may be more adoption for the Linux desktop, and it hopefully maybe will incentivize corporations to port their stuff. But for now, yeah.
Tech paranoid all the way, although not the same type of tech paranoid as Luke Smith. The only good computer is one you have the hardware schematics to (i.e. virtually none of them). Thinkpads are just another brand of overpriced laptop. Besides the occasional steam game, I heavily prefer FOSS only and will flat out refuse almost anything that has drm. My unlocked bootloader android phone is so heavily locked down with privacy stuff that I cause Google to lose money merely by existing.
This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It’s such a shame that there’s no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.
Assuming the schematic is for repairability, not security. Seems unlikely that enthusiasts would have the equipment to non-destructivly identify malicious deviations from spec, introduced by competent actors.
Internet Relay Chat. Super old school, everyone connects to a server with their own clients. I think with modern encryption though it’s one of the more secure ways to chat as long as the server owner is trusted.
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.
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.
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.
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
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
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?
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?
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