I can see the UK doing this, they love to implement ludicrously restrictive and impossible to enforce anti-privacy laws. My working theory is that they’re lobbied to implement them by IT consultancy firms, who then get hired to consult on, say, banning VPNs, take 10 years to investigate it at eye-watering cost to the public, then go “Yeah turns out you can’t ban VPNs, I don’t know what the previous government was thinking” and then use that money to lobby the new government to ban encryption or some other nonsense, then repeat.

As a person from the UK, I am fully expecting them to implement this in the next year or two, because ruining the internet seems to be the government’s top priority rather than say, fixing the economy or preventing Reform from taking over for some fucking reason.

I tend to just operate on the principle of: I know my setup probably wouldn’t hold up for a second if some sort of organized three-letter government body decided to focus on me, but my threat model is more the kind of general internet-sweeping surveillance fuckery that goes on. I’m not doing anything especially dodgy on the internet and I think messing around with privacy stuff is fun, so my security level is faintly absurd for what it is. I’m sure someone could crack it if they were determined enough, but I assume the amount of effort required relative to what you’d find would just make it pointless anyway.

I do KDE with Karousel, which is similar to Niri I think.

As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

I like Betterbird, I find it slightly more less worst.

I just go around looking for other people who post their problems, then aggressively tell them to read the wiki and report the thread so it gets closed.

As a KDE user, I have long ago accepted that no flatpaks will ever follow my system theme, and they will all look completely different from each other lol.

If only the Prime Minister who used to be a fucking human rights lawyer was able to explain why jailing people without a jury trial is a bad thing.

That’s essentially what I do. I’m an old user and was running arch before it had archinstall so I’m fully capable of doing a manual install, but I also don’t have a particularly unusual computer setup so the script is like 95% fine for what I need. I do a few post-install tweaks but that’s pretty much it.

You can also offline the whole of Project Gutenberg with Kiwix, it’s about 70GB IIRC.

I just don’t see the point of them when there are flatpaks. I’m not super knowledgeable on Snaps so maybe there’s some huge benefit I don’t know about, but they always just seemed like a worse version of flatpak to me.

As an old-timey Linux user, I eventually stopped using Ubuntu because they have a habit of kind of fixating on whatever they think is the new cool thing, and going all-in on it while other important things stagnate, then they get it to the point where it’s almost really good, then ditch it and go chasing after the next shiny thing.

Off the top of my head there was the Unity desktop, Mir, This thing where they wanted an OS that would run on both desktops and phones interchangeably, and now it’s Snaps. I don’t think Ubuntu is a bad distro, but I also don’t think it’s the best distro for newcomers necessarily because of it’s habit of suddenly lurching off in a new direction every few years. But that’s just me of course, if it works for you then go for it!

Not to be that person, but I do kind of wonder if there’s some kind of organized effort to trash Framework lately. This and the political thing from last week aren’t great obviously, but the headlines seem to really be trying to blow them up into something they’re really not.

If you want to check specific games you can use ProtonDB to find out how well they run/any specific tweaks to get them working.

Yeah I have two Linux machines, the laptop which is my tinkering machine and the desktop that other people use that I’m not allowed to break, and I run Kinoite on that one because it’s pretty hard to do anything to mess it up. At least I haven’t managed it so far lol.

One thing you could look into is your router, some of them let you run a VPN directly on the router and you can choose which devices go through the VPN based on MAC address (at least that’s how mine works) so that way I get my Steam Deck going through Mullvad without installing it on the Deck.

Of course that only works when you’re on your home network though, so it’s a bit limited.

I have an ancient Brother laser printer that I’ve had for like 15 years. It weighs a ton, is about the size of my entire desktop computer, but it’s also never broken or fucked up in the slightest (despite having a drink spilled on it and a cat throwing up directly into the mechanisms), works on every Linux machine I’ve ever plugged it into and is still only on about it’s 2nd or 3rd toner cartridge. I genuinely think it’s going to outlive me and I’ll have to bequeath it to somebody one day.