SavvyWolf

Firefox is licenced under a copyleft license. Mozilla can’t stop distros packaging it even if they wanted to.

They’d need to replace the branding, but that’s not a big deal.

I like the idea of simple apps, but does their website have to have that silly dvd bouncing thing obstructing text? Especially since it starts playing sound if you interact with it wrong.

I’m a Firefox user and I’m not really that bothered about this tos changes. If they do mess things up I’ll probably just switch to some fork that doesn’t do the fuckery.

Wouldn’t be surprised if Mint packages Firefox with it (whatever “it” is) disabled, since they build Thunderbird without telemetry.

In regards to full system backups, there’s no real need to back up the OS itself. Canonical will give you a clean Ubuntu install if you ask then nice enough, after all. Personally, the risk of having to spend an afternoon reconfiguring my system isn’t that big a deal compared to the storage and time needed to back up an entire image.

I know systems generate a lot of “cruft” in terms of instslled programs and tweaked configurations over time which can be hard to keep track of and remember. But imo that should be avoided at all costs because it leads to compatibility and security issues.

For backing up databases, there’s scripts like automysqlbackup and pg_dump which will export a database to an sql file which can be easily backed up without worrying about copying a broken file.

I actually recently set up borgmatic earlier today and I’d recommend it except for the fact that you seem to be using Docker, and I’m not sure how best to backup containers.

I have a custom theme for Cinnamon/GTK… But they recently updated it and the new default theme doesn’t actually look that bad… But using the default theme will make me a sheep. ;_;

All three are web based frontends for git repositories; you use git to send and receive code to/from them for storage and sharing. They all also provide other things useful to developers such as issue tracking, wikis and such. They are different products that fulfill the same role.

what software does github.com use?

It’s all proprietary software (presumably) written in-house. We don’t have access to it.

whats the difference between them (pros/cons)?

Github:
Pro: Wider reach, everyone knows about Github.
Con: Proprietary; your code is hosted based on the whims of Microsoft.

Forgejo:
Pro: Open source, selfhostable. There’s a big instance on https://codeberg.org/ which a lot of open source projects are starting to move to.
Con: It’s smaller and not as well known as Github. In theory it may also lack features, but I’ve not seen any that have gotten in my way.

Gitlab:
Pro: It’s… I guess in second place in terms of popularity? It’s also selfhostable.
Con: It’s one of those open source projects with paid closed source features, so not really appealing to either group. It’s also had questionable management decisions recently.

what about self-hosting? Possibilities/Preferences?

If you want to selfhost a git server, I’d recommend Forgejo; it seems to be the most friendly towards the open source and selfhosting communities.

I know people have been investing a lot of work into getting Nvidia into a state where it Just Works, but if you don’t need any fancy Nvidia features and are starting from scratch I’d honestly just recommend getting an AMD card just so you don’t have to worry about it.

What games are you thinking of running and what resolution/frequency monitor do you have/want?

Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.

Mint explicitly goes out of its way to disable snap in favour of flatpaks.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html

Nobody seems to be putting the effort into making ATProto federated apps, sadly. The main people who would do it are also the type to stubbornly stick with ActivityPub.

I like to see companies design their software such that their main financial incentives are tied to the quality of their product. This usually involves being open source; if someone can fork it, your paywalled version better have extra features that open source people can’t make easily. I also like to see them trying to avoid vendor lockin; if it’s easy for you to switch, then they need to actively work on not letting that happen.

For example, Bluesky. They have an open protocol and (I think) you can easily transfer data between instances. If they start fucking people around, you can just jump to another ATProto app.

For Kagi, the only thing you’re paying for is search… So if they fuck that up, you can just crawl back to DuckDuckGo.

Obsidian is an interesting case. It’s not open source, but the files it works on are just markdown. If they go totally wild, I can just easily switch to VSCodium to edit my files.

As a general rule, AI can only really perform easy monotonous tasks. Anything that requires creativity or intuition is generally not doable with AI.

The most a GPT AI could do is steal some instructions from some blog somewhere on how to configure a kernel or install some distro, then generate a list of packages.

Personally, I think that the discussion around this will evolve as the news spreads, but I agree with Robert on this one. Sure, X/Twitter has become a less welcoming place than before, but shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.

Nah, I think I’m cool if Debian doesn’t respect the input of Nazi sympathisers.

It’s possible for an upgrade to break things and leave your system in an unusable state or cause your data to be lost.

However, that could happen at any time with no warning. Your hard drive could break, your charger could cause a short, your laptop could get stolen. If you have any files you don’t want to lose, I’d strongly recommend you set up a backup asap.

In terms of whether to actually upgrade, Mint 20.3 stops receiving security updates in April so you should probably upgrade to 21 sometime before then.

Android backs up data to the cloud. If the phone breaks or gets stolen, you don’t need to recover data from it - you can just pull it from Google’s servers.

In addition, people tend to not treat their phones as “permanent storage”. The concept of losing or breaking their phone is probably more clear, so they make sure to back it up in some way to the cloud or their desktop.

Also, it’s much more likely for a phone to be stolen than a laptop or desktop.

There is a major downside to encryption: If you forget your password or your tpm fails and you’ve not backed things up, then that data is gone forever. If someone doesn’t have anything incriminating or useful to theives on their device, the easier reparability might justify not enabling it.

I encrypt my home folder and Windows install just in case someone breaks into my house and steals my computer. Super annoying entering my password each boot though.

If Alice is able to send “algorithm updates” through a secure and untraceable medium, why not just use that to send a unique email address that Bob can send messages to?

If the links between participants is to remain secret, why not have a big ledger shared between a thousand people that any of them can send unaddressed messages to? Bob would send a message encrypted with Alice’s public key and it gets mixed into the ledger. Alice then pulls the entire ledger and then decrypts any messages encrypted by her public key.

I don’t see why there is a need to accept the inherrent unreliably of an llm to solve this problem.

Windows XP. It does what you want with very little nonsense, and can require a bit of technical finagling.

I think a peer to peer model could work for social media, but if you’re trying to sell it using a pepe meme, I’m not interested…

But fundamentally… Why not implement what you’re thinking ontop of ActivityPub or ATProto than rolling your own thing? None of the issues you’ve described facing them are particularly insurmountable. They just need a bit of devwork.