#and so linux gets another user~~

[sl33py-g4m3r]

excited to be using linux on my big screen computer~~

a cool thing I've noticed is that linux I think takes up significantly less space than windows ever did. and I'm just running the cinnamon desktop~~!!

out of the 256 gb of space on the initial OS drive, I've got 217 gb left. windows I forgot how much it left me with tho...

Linux mint is nice so far~~ especially the second hard drive being password protected to mount; rather than being accessible to anyone using the computer.

installed vlc as a media player and now idk what other applications I'd need.

or if I even have enough space currently to try to get steam games working. as the terabyte hard drive is cluttered with anime and music I've saved. and where all of my data is stored separate from the os.

one thing I lost tho that I had forgotten about was my progress in cookie clicker, as I was playing through that, and i don't remember when my last backup was or how much I've lost. By the time I realized I hadn't backed it up, the install was already in progress and it was far too late.

I like cinnamon so far~~ the keyboard shortcuts to reveal all the different desktops,, even found zoom features that are really useful. I thought you had to pinch or push your fingers apart while pushing the hotkey toggle like you do on iphones to zoom in on pictures and stuff, but no. just slide your fingers from the top of the touchpad to the bottom to zoom in, and reverse to go back to small.

I never used zoom on windows; much to my detriment, lol. bad vision is bad. I'm saying it again even tho it might not be relevant here, I'm legally blind. left eye bad vision, right eye none whatsoever. I never liked on board zoom on windows and i'm not sure why... this is nice.

I'm still excited cause I've always wanted to run linux on my big screened gaming pc, but it would never boot. come to find out I was installing grub in the wrong place... needed it on dev/sda1 instead of dev/sda itself. I guess because 1 is the first part of the disk?

hopefully much less spywarey than windows~~ and more secure. I've always assumed that linux/unix/bsd were more secure than windows in general.

funny enough when I first found these types of operating systems as a teenager a long time ago, I jumped into the deep end and immediately tried FreeBSD first. then backed off and stuck with fedora, opensuse for a bit, then to the more user friendly stuff like ubuntu, and linux mint. then many years later I stopped liking what whomever makes ubuntu was doing, and switched to mint, but they still used ubuntu's base, so now I use debian based stuff.

there's my entire fore into linux from being a teenager to now, lol. also very fanboyish high school report on how linux/unix was better than windows. before I even started using linux proper. ahhhh the cringe.

sucks a bunch of corporate stuff doesn't work with linux; cause I'm always seeing like the eye doctors operating systems being windows, and I'm always like "why don't you use linux?" the reason is they want their technology and stuff to work. like it won't on linux?

positive experience and a positive rant~~~ still going to tag it as rant anyway tho~~

[thewolfofthestars]

I finally got a new laptop! Yay! My geriatric 8-year-old can finally be sent to the retirement home (aka gathering dust in the closet because what if I need it later). And now I can run programs and perform tasks without it taking a dog's age! :D

But I did notice something in getting everything set up.

I've been a staunch Linux lad since I was very little--one of the few things my father and I actually agree on. And the new laptop came pre-installed with Windows 11, as most new non-Macs do, so I decided to partition a bit of the drive for it rather than wiping it completely, just in case I need Windows compatibility for school or work stuff, even if I spend the majority of my time in Ubuntu. (I had wanted to do that with my old machine, actually, but something went horrendously wrong in the process and it took two days to fix and my laptop briefly did not have a functioning OS on it at all lol.)

Now, I find Windows... unpleasant to use. And obviously part of that is just that I'm not familiar with it--the last time I had Windows on a personal computer was when I was 6 years old, and that thing ran Windows 2000 with a genuine CRT monitor and it was not connected to the internet and I spent my time playing King's Quest and MS Paint. I don't know where things are anymore, and the UX seems pretty uninterested in telling me.

Another issue is, of course, how bloated with ads and spyware it's become in recent iterations. I see where people are coming from when they decide to stick with Windows 7 or Vista or some other older version, even if I disagree with them for security and malware reasons--"person on previous version of Windows" is by far the largest and juiciest target for all manner of bad actors online.

But I think a really big core part of the problem is this: modern Windows is speaking a different language than I am. And the language it's speaking is that of phones, not of computers.

I only spent enough time on Windows to get it set up and strip away all the permissions I possibly could, and in that time I could tell: the default user Microsoft is designing this system for is people who are more familiar with Android and Apple than they are with a desktop computer. They made me log in with my email, rather than creating a device-specific profile. When I created my password they didn't even call it a password, they called it a "Hello Windows PIN". The format of the Settings page UI is nigh-identical to the one on my phone, right down to the list of access permissions siloed away by app (and yes, everything is called an app--no programs, no functions, no systems, no app*lications*, nothing else). I had to check a specific box to be able to look through my entire computer's file system, for crying out loud, rather than just browsing my Pictures and Downloads!

Hey, Windows! My laptop! Is not! A phone! And I don't want it to be! This is a computer OS for people who hate computers and I. HATE IT!

[abbiistabbii]

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.

[jettsecret]

So, I make all of my devices look like old windows operating systems, usually Win7 cuz I'm a big fan of Aero Glass. I've got my Win11 laptop looking like XP, My Linux Dual Boot on pink Win7, My Linux Tablet on Blue Win7, and now my Win 11 desktop on pink Win7.

Here's how I do it.

For windows 10/11 there are a few ways. WindowBlinds 11 (WB11) is a good resource for this, but it's a paid program. Which kinda sucks. If you can't afford it you can find my sympathies in a button on my neocities. In an unrelated note, there's a github user named Discriminating who does some pretty cool windows styling programs. WB11 is how I style my two windows devices. The aero glass styling is done through WindowBlinds and also Start11, another Stardock program. The style I used for that is Aero 11 (set to blush :3) For the XP system (and older if you want it) I use RetroBar to style the taskbar and OpenShell to style the start menu. The WB11 style I use is eXperience11, but there are others as well. Of course, for MSN/Windows Live Messenger I use Escargot but if you're more into AIM or Yahoo! Messenger then you can check out their companion project Nina. You'll of course have to fiddle around with settings but eventually you'll get it looking good. If you want to go crazy with customization there is also Customizer God, however I've had no success getting it to work on Windows 11.

Linux is the easiest to configure to make look retro. Specifically you want to use some kind of KDE Plasma version of Linux. I use Kubuntu. Basically all you have to do for these is dig around in the app store for themes relating to "aero" "aero glass" and "windows 7" and apply them until you're happy. I don't really have any specific suggestions for that but it's very easy to do if you install Kubuntu or any KDE Plasma Linux. Basically you can find anything and everything you need in it.

There's one other thing I've not yet been able to set up but it's on my radar for my campus computer: ReactOS. I'll make another post when I'm able to try it out but if you're curious go nuts, install it in a virtual box or on a usb or directly over your main drive. God is your oyster.

One last thing, Space Cadet Pinball still runs perfectly on Windows 11

Edit: Suggested by @tetrachromacy4 (thx~!!!) GadgetPack offers a windows 7 sidebar. It is listed as 7/8/10 compatible so it will likely work on windows 11 but I have not yet tested it.

[vvatchword]

As you may recall, I got the Linux Mint distro for my old netbook, which has 250 GB HDD, 2 GB of RAM, and the Intel Atom N455 (1.66 GHz). This netbook has always been cheap and terrible but I find myself repeatedly needing to access a Not-Phone for various purposes in very strange places and hey, the money's been spent, I can just use this thing, right?

Anyway, Linux Mint has been a terrible idea. 2 GB of RAM is on its low end and DAMN do I feel it. The internet hurts. Word processing hurts. Manuskript hurts. Obviously, this means I chose the wrong distro.

But looking at other low-end distros is terrifying. They're for more advanced users and my Linux know-how is shit. xfce and LxQT expect me to know what I'm doing. I need to get this fixed up in a few days and what if it doesn't work for what I need?

My goal is to use spreadsheets and word processors, Manuskript, and the internet. I'm going to install some further add-ons to Firefox to disable scripts etc. I don't think my Internet experience will ever be stellar, but I would like to access pages within you know. a minute or two.

Another possibility is that I could buy a laptop before Our Wise White Leader uberfucks our collective shit. If I do that I'll have to act fast. Like today fast. Shit is selling like hotcakes for exactly the reasons you can imagine.

At one point I looked up the Macbook Pro, which frankly is one of the best products for graphic design, and it's like. what was I THINKING. I am unemployed. Where am I gonna get money like that

I thought about trying to crowdfund but that just seems... idk. It feels like a want and not a need. It's just that I keep having to leave my desktops behind so often, which has never historically been a problem until literally the last two years. Why does this KEEP HAPPENING. Should I lean into it and just admit I'm homeless

Do you guys have any opinions

should I just throw myself into a pit of lions perhaps

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[hillbillyoracle]

Your Phone isn't Evil

There is way way too much focus on devices when it comes to tech wellness.

I get why. For non-technically trained people, doing anything beyond using a device in the most stock way can be intimidating - and companies pay a lot of money to make you think it's bad to do so.

But consuming more ultimately redirects our efforts away from the people who create and profit off of these issues, encourages wasteful conspicuous consumption, and adds yet another paywall to mental and physical well being.

I really think that a lot of the people buying dumbphones and flip phones in an attempt to use theirs less would be better served by simply making privacy a central tenet of how they manage their phones and stop using streaming in favor of local files which fosters better curation.

If you want to help your community, one of the things we need most now are people willing to watch tutorials and figure out how to do things like install custom OS on phones, jailbreak ereaders, make copies of DVDs and Blurays, setting up home servers, and switching a laptop to a Linux OS. These things aren't that difficult objectively but they are more time consuming than some people in our communities can manage right now.

And while we have some folks who've been carrying the torch for a long time, we need more people reviewing and recommending DRM-free books, music you can actually buy and own from places like Bandcamp, and talking about what FOSS (free and open source software) they love using.

You cannot downgrade your way to better relationship with tech alone. You also don't have to at all if you don't want to. The shifts we need are in user control. We don't get their by just picking up other devices we don't control.

[ms-demeanor]

got a question I was hoping you could answer!

why do all apps have to go through an app store? why doesn't anywhere have their app downloadable from the internet or something?

was wondering this because lots of issues with apps seem to stem from having to comply with app store guidelines and whatnot. So why not avoid that problem and make the app available off the appstore? And if part of it is because they're easier to find in the appstore, why not do both? why not also offer the download on a website or something?

there's gotta be some reason why there's afaik no one who offers a download for their app without the appstore right?

There are absolutely other ways to get apps, and the one that springs immediately to mind is the F-Droid App Repository.

Sideloading is the process of loading an app that doesn't come from your phone's OS-approved app store. It's really easy on Android (basically just a couple of clicks) but requires jailbreaking on an iphone.

The reason more USERS don't sideload apps is risk: app stores put apps through at least nominal security checks to ensure that they aren't hosting malware. If you get an app from the app store that is malware, you can report it and it will get taken down, but nobody is forcing some random developer who developed his own app to remove it from his site if it installs malware on your phone unless you get law enforcement involved.

The reason more developers don't go outside of the app store or don't WANT to go outside of the app store is money. The number of users who are going to sideload apps is *tiny* compared to the number of users who will go through the app store; that makes a HUGE difference in terms of income, so most developers try to keep it app-store friendly. Like, if tumblr were to say "fuck the app store" and just release their own app that you could download from the sidebar a few things would happen:

Downloads would drop to a fraction of their prior numbers instantly

iOS users would largely be locked out of using tumblr unless they fuck with their phones in a way that violates Apple's TOS and could get them booted out of their iOS ecosystem if they piss off the wrong people.

Ad revenue would collapse because not a lot of advertisers want to work with companies that are app-store unfriendly

They'd be kicked off of the main app marketplaces

So most people who develop apps don't want to put the time and effort and money into developing an app that people might not pay for that then also can't carry ads.

Which leads into another issue: the kind of people who generally make and use sideloaded app aren't the kind of people who generally like profit-driven models. Indie apps are often slow to update and have minimal support because you're usually dealing with a tiny team of creators with a userbase of people who can almost certainly name ten flavors of Linux and are thus expected to troubleshoot and solve their own problems.

If this is the kind of thing you want to try, have at it. I'd recommend sticking to apps from the F-Droid Repository linked up above and being judicious about what you install. If you're using apple and would have to jailbreak your phone to get a non-approved app on it, I'd recommend switching to another type of phone.

(For the record, you also aren't limited to android or ios as the operating system of your phone; there are linux-based OSs out there and weird mutations of android and such - I am not really a phone person so I can't tell you much about them, but they are out there!)

[amalgamasreal]

On Personal InfoSec

Been awhile since I've had one of these posts but I figure with all that's going on in the world it's time to make another one of these posts and get some stuff out there for people. A lot of the information I'm going to go over you can find here:

So if you'd like to just click the link and ignore the rest of the post that's fine, I strongly recommend checking out the Privacy Guides.

Browsers:

There's a number to go with but for this post going forward I'm going to recommend Firefox. I know that the Privacy Guides lists Brave and Safari as possible options but Brave is Chrome based now and Safari has ties to Apple. Mullvad is also an option but that's for your more experienced users so I'll leave that up to them to work out.

Browser Extensions:

uBlock Origin: content blocker that blocks ads, trackers, and fingerprinting scripts. Notable for being the only ad blocker that still works on Youtube.

Privacy Badger: Content blocker that specifically blocks trackers and fingerprinting scripts. This one will catch things that uBlock doesn't catch but does not work for ads.

Facebook Container: "but I don't have facebook" you might say. Doesn't matter, Meta/Facebook still has trackers out there in EVERYTHING and this containerizes them off away from everything else.

Bitwarden: Password vaulting software, don't trust the password saving features of your browsers, this has multiple layers of security to prevent your passwords from being stolen.

ClearURLs: Allows you to copy and paste URL's without any trackers attached to them.

VPN:

Note: VPN software doesn't make you anonymous, no matter what your favorite youtuber tells you, but it does make it harder for your data to be tracked and it makes it less open for whatever network you're presently connected to.

Mozilla VPN: If you get the annual subscription it's ~$60/year and it comes with an extension that you can install into Firefox.

Proton VPN: Has easily the most amount of countries serviced, can take cash payments, and does offer port forwarding.

Email Provider:

Note: By now you've probably realized that Gmail, Outlook, and basically all of the major "free" e-mail service providers are scraping your e-mail data to use for ad data. There are more secure services that can get you away from that but if you'd like the same storage levels you have on Gmail/Outlook.com you'll need to pay.

Proton Mail: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and fairly easy to setup and use. Offers a free option up to 1gb

Tuta: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, been around a very long time, and offers a free option up to 1gb.

Email Client:

Thunderbird if you're on Windows or Linux

Apple Mail if you're on macOS

Cloud Storage:

Proton Drive: Encrypted cloud storage from the same people as Proton Mail.

Tresorit: Encrypted cloud storage owned by the national postal service of Switzerland. Received MULTIPLE awards for their security stats.

Peergos: decentralized and open-source, allows for you to set up your own cloud storage, but will require a certain level of expertise.

Microsoft Office Replacements:

LibreOffice: free and open-source, updates regularly, and has the majority of the same functions as base level Microsoft Office.

OnlyOffice: cloud-based, free, and open source.

Chat Clients:

Note: As you've heard SMS and even WhatsApp and some other popular chat clients are basically open season right now. These are a couple of options to replace those.

Signal: Provides IM and calling securely and encrypted, has multiple layers of data hardening to prevent intrusion and exfil of data.

Molly (Android OS only): Alternative client to Signal. Routes communications through the TOR Network.

Briar: Encrypted IM client that connects to other clients through the TOR Network, can also chat via wifi or bluetooth.

Now for the last bit, I know that the majority of people are on Windows or macOS, but if you can get on Linux I would strongly recommend it. pop_OS, Ubuntu, and Mint are super easy distros to use and install. They all have very easy to follow instructions on how to install them on your PC and if you'd like to just test them out all you need is a thumb drive to boot off of to run in demo mode.

If you game through Steam their Proton emulator in compatibility mode works wonders, I'm presently playing a major studio game that released in 2024 with no Linux support on it and once I got my drivers installed it's looked great. There are some learning curves to get around, but the benefit of the Linux community is that there's always people out there willing to help.

I hope some of this information helps you and look out for yourself, it's starting to look scarier than normal out there.

[puppygirlgirldick]

hi. since i have something that could very generously be called a platform, your local dumb horny dog is here with another unfortunate public service announcement for people currently living under the legal jurisdiction of the united states of america:

this would be a good time to start investigating privacy and data security tools (and, as ever, to not panic and/or doompost because those are not useful things to do). such things include:

using (more) secure messaging apps over sms for private correspondence such signal.

using (more) private email services rather than gmail such as protonmail

password protect your shit. this is just basic data security but like. please. password protect your shit. use strong passwords and/or passphrases. don't reuse passwords. use a password manager (i recommend bitwarden).

building off the previous one, encrypt your shit if you're able to. for pc users there are plenty of open source options, such as veracrypt, and probably native os stuff too.

like. y'all are gonna roll your eyes, and i get it, but: stop using windows and try out linux. seriously. windows 11 is a fucking privacy nightmare and it's only getting worse as microsoft pushes their ai shit which is planned to have access to everything you do on it.

tumblr can't do nested lists, consider this a sub-point: mint linux is designed to be incredibly familiar to people coming from windows and is very user friendly. a huge amount of windows software can run on linux using stuff like wine. the linux version of steam comes pre-packaged with it. it's fine. please try linux it won't bite.

sadly i am, as mentioned, a dog on the internet and i cannot provide an actual comprehensive guide to keeping your privacy intact and yourself safe.

however, there are plenty of good guides for this sort of thing on the internet and despite how degraded modern search engines are they are not hard to find. i heartily suggest doing so and familiarizing yourself with them-- and not just because of the times we live in, because a lot of this shit is the same shit that will help keep you safe from a lot of forms of identity theft and the like. it's just good opsec.

[mcsm-confessions]

We need more what-book-would-the-cast-read headcanons, stat. Nobody's invented television yet (or perhaps cinemas) so what form of entertainment is both historically accurate and available in-game? Books!

I'll start:

Jesse, as a turbo nerd, loves the heck out of whatever the in-univers equivalent of superhero comics is (knights, not laser beams), owns special editions of the Lord of the Rings, has fun with those campy space-opera sci-fi books and and occasionally picks up the occasional nonfiction book about obscure interesting topics, which her friends will then hear about nonstop for the next week or so. She has a special fondness for Charlotte's Web, which she used to read to Reuben when he was younger. She sometimes leafs through the latest Cosmo in the convenience store magazine rack as a guilty pleasure.

Olivia also enjoys a decent sci-fi novel (albeit less space opera and more hard science), likes murder mysteries, secretly indulges in a few chastely romantic Victorian classics, eats Linux user manuals for breakfast and gets the latest edition of Popular Redstonics mailed to the treehouse every fortnight. She has occasional arguments with Jesse over the organizational system of their shared library, which tends to lapse into chaos when the latter is in charge.

Axel shares Jesse's enthusiasm for superhero comics and is first in the queue to get the newest volumes for the both of them. His memoir and travel literature collection is substantial—his stamp collection sits proudly between—and he secretly reads poetry and has attempted to make his own tentatively awkward verses. He also subscribes to Backyard Demolitionists Weekly in the mail.

Petra doesn't mess with 'stuffy old books written by dead people' (classics), but still rereads Treasure Island and other gallivanting picaresque type novels in her spare time. She digs the Count of Monte Cristo but completely missed the message about the costly and potentially futile price of revenge. Anything history related that doesn't have multiple wars in it is like pulling teeth. She used to secretly look at the Playboys hidden in a chest in her father's room when no one was around.

Lukas is invested in a wide range of literary fiction, from historical novels to the weirder avant garde novellas, and has a soft spot for little felines in his books. He's not the most well versed in philosophy but had a brutal period in his late teens when he discovered Schopenhauer. East of Eden has a special place in his heart for certain familial similarities, but he's never thought to voice that out loud. On the rare occasion that he's really irate he'll burn through a standard slasher horror novel and then discreetly return it to the library. In the future, a whimsical passage in his authorized biography will note that he's one of the few authors who isn't on outrageous (or any) quantities of drugs when writing.

Ivor reads romance novels, the sappiest, bodice ripping Mills and Boons stuff. He hides it under extreme lock and key and would probably vaporize whoever found out about it. It's another thing he has in common with his mother, which he is apparently unaware of. He also composed atrocious poetry in his sulky teenage years, which was burnt long ago. Those Gary-Stu edgy grim fantasy protagonists appealed immensely to him, and was a phase that lasted until he got the chewing out of his life from Ellegaard when attempting the same mannerisms in the lab.

Aiden doesn't read and is proud of it because he's an arrogant numbskull.

~~~

[kde-plasma-official]

whats the status of like. using linux on a phone. it feels like there are two parallel universes, one that kde lives in where people use linux on phones, and one where if you google linux phones you discover theyre almost usable but they can barely make phone calls or send texts and they only run on like 4 models of phone

don't have much experience with linux on phone so anyone please correct me if i'm wrong but

one of the problems with phones is that every vendor and manufacturer adds their own proprietary driver blob to it and these have to be extracted and integrated into the kernel in order for the hardware to function.

as companies don't like to share their magic of "how does plastic slab make light", reverse engineering all your hardware is quite a difficult task. Sometimes there just isn't a driver for the camera of a phone model yet because no one was able to make it work.

So naturally, this takes a lot of time and tech is evolving fast so by the time a phone is completely compatible, next generations are already out and your new model obsolete.

Also important to note: most of this work is made by volunteers, people with a love for programming who put a lot of their own time into these things, most of them after their daytime jobs as a hobby.

Of course, there are companies and associations out there who build linux phones for a living. But the consumer hardware providers, like Pinephone, Fairphone and others out there aren't as big and don't have this much of a lobby behind them so they can't get their prices cheap. Also the manufacturers are actively working against our right to repair so we need more activism.

To make the phones still affordable (and because of said above driver issues) they have to use older hardware, sometimes even used phones from other manufacturers that they have to fix up, so you can't really expect a modern experience. At least you can revive some older phones. As everything Linux.

Then there's the software providers who many of are non-profits. KDE has Plasma Mobile, Canonical works on Ubuntu Touch, Debian has the Mobian Project and among some others there's also the Arch Linux ARM Project.

That's right baby, ARM. We're not talking about your fancy PC or ThinkPad with their sometimes even up to 64-bit processors. No no no, this is the future, fucking chrome jellyfishes and everything.

This is the stuff Apple just started building their fancy line of over-priced and over-engineered Fisher-Price laptop-desktops on and Microsoft started (Windows 10X), discontinued and beat into the smush of ChatGPT Nano Bing Open AI chips in all your new surface hp dell asus laptops.

What I was trying to say is, that program support even for the market dominating monopoles out there is still limited and.... (from my own experience from the workplace) buggy. Which, in these times of enshittification is a bad news. And the good projects you gotta emulate afterwards anyways so yay extra steps!

Speaking of extra steps: In order to turn their phone into a true freedom phone, users need to free themselves off their phones warranty, lose their shackles of not gaining root access, installing a custom recovery onto their phone (like TWRP for example), and also have more technical know-how as the typical user, which doesn't quite sounds commercial-ready to me.

So is there no hope at all?

Fret not, my friend!

If we can't put the Linux into the phone, why don't we put the phone around the Linux? You know... Like a container?

Thanks to EU regulations-

(US consumers, please buy the European versions of your phones! They are sometimes a bit more expensive, but used models of the same generation or one below usually still have warranty, are around the same price as over there in Freedom Valley, and (another side tangent incoming - because of better European consumer protection laws) sometimes have other advantages, such as faster charging and data transfer (USB-C vs lightning ports) or less bloated systems)

- it is made easier now to virtualize Linux on your phone.

You can download a terminal emulator, create a headless Linux VM and get A VNC client running. This comes with a performance limit though, as a app with standard user permissions is containerized inside of Android itself so it can't use the whole hardware.

If you have root access on your phone, you can assign more RAM and CPU to your VM.

Also things like SDL just released a new version so emulation is getting better.

And didn't you hear the news? You can run other things inside a VM on an iPhone now! Yup, and I got Debian with Xfce running on my Xiaomi phone. Didn't do much with it tho. Also Windows XP and playing Sims 1 on mobile. Was fun, but battery draining. Maybe something more for tablets for now.

Things will get interesting now that Google officially is a monopoly. It funds a lot of that stuff.

I really want a Steam Deck.

Steam phones would be cool.

[skysometric]

there's no place to call home on the fediverse

i've been using Mastodon since long before the implosion of Twitter brought it into the mainstream conscious. i'm a fan of the tech, in theory. i have my hangups, like the fact that switching servers means you lose all of your post history, or the many instances that still play social politics with each other. some of these problems are being worked on, others i've (usually) been able to work around.

but something else is festering lately, and it's more than just the usual social politics.

the promise of the fediverse is alluring: you can follow all of your friends on any other site, from the comfort of your home server! except, lately, that seems to be impossible. no matter what i try, there's always friends of mine that i cannot follow for one reason or another.

for example: i'm not a big fan of Meta's new Threads, but i know a few friends who use it exclusively – and the promise of interoperability with Mastodon means that, in theory, i could just follow my friends from my Mastodon account. win-win, right?

well, no, because my instance has outright blocked Threads. and so have most of the smaller instances i've seen. this is purposeful, because they are (understandably) distrustful of Meta and anything Meta touches.

no matter how much i sympathize, though, it does mean that i cannot follow my friends on Threads from Mastodon.

i mean, hey, i could switch back to the flagship instance mastodon.social! they've openly allowed access to Threads! but there's a problem with that too, because a lot of the smaller instances (that my friends are on) also block mastodon.social.

as to why, many of them cite the waves of spam and bots that harass other users on a daily basis – that kind of thing is hard to moderate on both ends, so i vaguely understand the intent behind this decision. (i do not understand most of the other reasons for blocking the largest instance on the fediverse and alienating folks from their friends, such as disliking its owner. but whatever.)

long story short, right now i am denied access to many of my friends – and if i switch servers, losing all of my post history in the process... i will still be denied access to many of my friends.

"so run your own server!"

okay, let's pretend that i have the spare resources to spin up a server, and the desire to be a sysadmin for that server. like let's just set aside the tech cost that most people cannot afford, just for one second, because there's a more glaring issue here:

i'd still get blocked from many of my friends.

know why?

because many servers AUTOMATICALLY BLOCK small instances with only one user, citing security concerns and data scraping!!

there is literally no right answer here. no matter what i do, i will not be able to follow all of my friends on Mastodon. it is an impossible problem.

many folks like to call Mastodon the Linux of social media and say that the reason it hasn't caught on is that it's too complicated to understand. but even as a techie who understands exactly what's going on, i find Mastodon an impossible to parse social graph of blocked instances and inter-server drama. as things stand, there is no person who can join a server and follow all of their friends – there will always be compromises.

all i want is to find a home on the fediverse... but every house is part of a homeowner's association that wants to secede from the city.

[autolenaphilia]

The main reason to use Firefox and Linux and other free and open source software is that otherwise the big tech monopolies will fuck you as the customer over in search of profits. They will seek to control how you use their products and sell your data. When a company dominates the market, things can only get worse for ordinary people.

Like take Google Chrome for example, which together with its chromium reskins dominate the web browser market. Google makes a lot of money from ads, and consequently the company hates adblockers. They already are planning to move to manifest V3, which will nerf adblockers significantly. The manifest V3 compatible chrome version of Ublock Orgin is a "Lite" version for a reason. Ublock's Github page has an entire page explaining why the addon works best in Firefox.

And Google as we speak are trying to block adblockers from working on Youtube, If you want to continue blocking Youtube ads, and since Youtube ads make the site unuseable you ought to want that, it makes the most sense to not use a browser controlled by Google.

And there is no reason to think things won't get worse. There is for example nothing stopping Google from kicking adblockers off their add-on stores completely. They do regard it as basically piracy if the youtube pop-ups tell us anything, so updating the Chrome extensions terms of service to ban adblocking is a natural step. And so many people seem to think Chrome is the only browser that exists, so they are not going to switch to alternatives, or if they do, they will switch to another chrominum-based browser.

And again, they are fucking chromium itself for adblockers with Manifest V3, so only Firefox remains as a viable alternative. It's the only alternative to letting Google control the internet.

And Microsoft is the same thing. I posted before about their plans to move Windows increasingly into the cloud. This already exists for corporate customers, as Windows 365. And a version for ordinary users is probably not far off. It might not be the only version of Windows for awhile, the lack of solid internet access for a good part of the Earth's population will prevent it. But you'll probably see cheap very low-spec chromebookesque laptops running Windows for sale soon, that gets around Windows 11's obscene system requirements by their Windows being a cloud-based version.

And more and more of Windows will require Internet access or validation for DRM reasons if nothing else. Subscription fees instead of a one-time license are also likely. It will just be Windows moving in the direction Microsoft Office has already gone.

There is nothing preventing this, because again on the desktop/laptop market Windows is effectively a monopoly, or a duopoly with Apple. So there is no competition preventing Microsoft from exercising control over Windows users in the vein of Apple.

For example, Microsoft making Windows a walled garden by only permitting programs to be installed from the Microsoft Store probably isn't far off. This already exists for Win10 and 11, it's called S-mode. There seem to be more and more laptops being sold with Windows S-mode as the default.

Now it's not the only option, and you can turn it off with some tinkering, but there is really nothing stopping Microsoft from making it the only way of using Windows. And customers will probably accept it, because again the main competition is Apple where the walled garden has been the default for decades.

Customers have already accepted all sorts of bad things from Microsoft, because again Windows is a near-monopoly, and Apple and Google are even worse. That’s why there has been no major negative reaction to how Windows has increasingly spies on its users.

Another thing is how the system requirements for Windows seem to grow almost exponentially with each edition, making still perfectly useable computers unable to run the new edition. And Windows 11 is the worst yet. Like it's hard to get the numbers of how many computers running Win10 can't upgrade to Win11, but it's probably the majority of them, at least 55% or maybe even 75%. This has the effect of Windows users abandoning still perfectly useable hardware and buying new computers, creating more e-waste.

For Windows users, the alternative Windows gives them is to buy a new computer or get another operating system, and inertia pushes them towards buying another computer to keep using Windows. This is good for Windows and the hardware manufacturers selling computers with Windows 11 pre-installed, they get to profit off people buying Windows 11 keys and new computers, while the end-users have to pay, as does the environment. It’s planned obsolescence.

And it doesn’t have to be like that. Linux distros prove that you can have a modern operating system that has far lower hardware requirements. Even the most resource taxing Linux distros, like for example Ubuntu running the Gnome desktop, have far more modest system requirements than modern Windows. And you can always install lightweight Linux Distros that often have very low system requirements. One I have used is Antix. The ballooning Windows system requirements comes across as pure bloat on Microsoft’s part.

Now neither Linux or Firefox are perfect. Free and open source software don’t have a lot of the polish that comes with the proprietary products of major corporations. And being in competition with technology monopolies does have its drawbacks. The lacking website compatibility with Firefox and game compatibility with Linux are two obvious examples.

Yet Firefox and Linux have the capacity to grow, to become better. Being open source helps. Even if Firefox falls, developers can create a fork of it. If a Linux distro is not to your taste, there is usually another one. Whereas Windows and Chrome will only get worse as they will continue to abuse their monopolistic powers over the tech market.

[techav]

On Reinventing the Wheel

I have my little 68030 computer I built and I have my crude little kernel that lets the computer run BASIC for up to 8 users at the same time.

But wouldn't it be great if those users could do more than just type in small programs to watch an endless stream of HELLORLD fill the screen? You know ... silly things like print words on paper or, I don't know, save to a disk, maybe?

It would be great. I would love to be able to do that.

I'm not there yet.

See, I only have the one serial printer, so I really need some way to share it among the 8 users. Perhaps when a user wants to print something I could hold it in memory until the printer is free. I could print a page for one user, then move on to the next in queue so that everyone gets their turn at using the printer.

... I may have just reinvented the print spooler.

But that sounds like it would be difficult to add as a state machine to my kernel, and it would only make it more difficult to add other features later. It would be so much easier if I could just run this print spooler as if it were another user, just like I'm doing with BASIC.

... I may have just reinvented background processes.

If I'm running my print spooler program as a user-level process, then I could take advantage of the kernel function call I already have for writing data to a serial port. Oh, but I don't want to give up one of my 8 terminals; I would much prefer to use one of the two 6850 UARTs I had on the main board. I would need to update that kernel call to use the 6850 register set when the print spooler prices needs to send data, but still use the 16550 register set when the user programs need to send data. Perhaps I could just standardize the parameters and return values for the transmit/receive functions for the different devices and have the kernel call the right one based on what the process needs.

... I may have just reinvented device drivers.

Oh you know I bet I could do something very similar for reading & writing files. I could have a kernel function call for reading or writing a sector on the disk, but have another process that does the hard work of interpreting the disk data as the files requested by the user programs.

... I may have just reinvented the user-level file system driver.

I am absolutely reinventing the wheel. Every step of the way, every problem I come across is a solved problem. The Dartmouth Time Sharing System was doing all this with BASIC on a single computer 60 years ago, and it wasn't the first to try sharing a computer like this.

So yes, I am reinventing the wheel ... but I understand why it's round. I understand why the axel connects to the center of it. I understand why it must be able to spin independently of the cart.

Every step I take down this road, every solved problem I solve again helps me to understand why we do things the way we do. I have spent hours poring over the source code for Unix, for NetBSD, for Linux, Minix, Fuzix, DOS, CP/M, and others. Compared to what I have built, these are all massive, hugely complex beasts of programs that break my brain to try to understand.

But each time I reinvent the wheel I understand just a little bit more about how these existing systems work. I understand a little more about the problems the original programmers were trying to solve and the problems they faced, and I understand a little bit more about why they chose to build things the way they did.

And that is why I do this.

[ms-demeanor]

Oh hey since you just reblogged a post about this, can I get some tech advice? I have two old Dell laptops that are running slow bc (I suspect) dell has some chip installed that can tell if the charger is Dell brand and throttles the cpu if not. And they have since stopped recognizing their chargers. If I install linux, will that fix the issue? Or is it a hardware problem?

So there's not really a way that Dell can do that but realistically the computers are probably just running slow because they're old (5 years is the usable time we estimate for business laptops; after that they may continue *working* but they'll likely be too slow for our customers to consider them good work computers without some significant upgrades). But if they aren't recognizing the chargers there are 3 possibilities I can think of off the top of my head:

1 - It's a battery issue, not a charger issue. Over time batteries fail and will stop holding a charge no matter how long they're plugged in. The solution to this is to replace the battery, which you can usually do for between 20-45USD on amazon

2 - It's a charger issue. Your AC adapters may have both independently failed, it's possible! Low-cost non-OEM chargers often don't have particularly long lifespans, and replacing them may be the way to fix this.

Second possible charger issue is that it may be the wrong power level for the batteries. Sometimes you might look up something like "Lenovo e15 charger" and you'll see one that looks right but it turns out you've ordered a 45w instead of a 90w, and that is a pretty big problem. You need to make sure you're getting something with the exact specs for your specific computer. Here's an article about it. 

3 - It's a charging port issue. This is one of the more common problems we see on older computers; basically over time with enough plugging and unplugging the port that connects your charger to the motherboard comes loose. This is something that can be a relatively cheap and easy fix in some cases, or a really difficult fix if the thing is soldered directly to the board. Here's a video of someone replacing the charging port on a Dell Laptop for a general idea of what kind of work might be involved in fixing this.

Okay! Now for some basic troubleshooting! Please test for the following:

If the computers don't power on at all while the AC adapter is plugged in then the issue is either the AC adapter or the power port.

If the computers power on while plugged in but they don't hold a charge, the issue is the battery.

If the battery holds a charge for some amount of time (over an hour) but takes forever to charge, then the problem is that you aren't using the correct AC adapter.

If the battery doesn't charge, the computer doesn't come on, and it's the correct AC adapter you can possibly test the adapter with a voltmeter, test the adapter on another computer with the same power requirements, or disassemble the computer and check the power port connection to the motherboard.

But yeah if the computers are powering on at all, right off the top of my head I'd guess either it's a battery issue or a voltage issue with the adapter.

Linux would not help at all with those issues (though hopefully you've got someplace to start looking to resolve those problems now), but if your computer is running slow because it has older hardware that was designed for a different era of computer use (which can be as recent as 5 or so years ago depending on the specs) then a Linux install will likely help. Though keep in mind that if you do an OS swap you will not be able to run any of the programs you currently have for those laptops on those laptops. I think that Linux is good and want more people to use it generally, but I recommend Linux to new Linux users primarily when the computer they're thinking of installing it on is used mostly as a web browsing machine. An old computer with Linux Lite will generally run faster than an old computer with Windows, but if you're trying to get the old computer to play modern games it isn't going to be fast with either OS.