Payment by facial recognition, what could possibly go wrong ?

I walk past at the wrong time and pay for someone else’s coffee ? Wrong person gets charged through an ID mistake ?

It works exactly the same way ambulance access to pedestrian malls and shared zones works.

They don’t drive through at 60mph lights and sirens and “get the hell out of my way” attitude.

This is the UK not the US.

They can drive quickly up to the restricted zone, then they’re progressing at 5 to 10mph with the passenger watching for inattentive pedestrians.

Before the howl of outrage this is short distances in a high density city. The difference in travel time by slowing down for the last mile is a minute or two. Time that could just as easily be lost by inattentive drivers not moving out of the way en route.

Lol. Do you really think only govts can track you via your phone ? Both the phone OS providers and the telcos can readily do so, and additionally many apps ask for access that allows them to do so if you’re not careful. Refer the jogging app that compromised military security in Afghanistan & the middle east for example.

That doesn’t make the flock cameras irrelevant though. It takes an additional step because a) you can’t opt out of number plate tracking and b) it’s facial recognition as well as anpr into a central tracking database.

Good, this nimby group and its control of the council has been working to shutdown pubs and make restaurants uneconomical for several years. They moved into the social heart of London then are trying to close it down.

Unlikely, he’s been running it a loss for years now, propped up by his money, his billionaire mates’ money and some launch contracts in addition to Starlink.

This is the reason he’s building in terms into the IPO that prevent him being ousted - public companies making losses are at risk of board shakeups, he’s making sure that isn’t possible before the float launches.

He doesnt care if twitter or spaceX lose money, they’re valuable levers to get what he wants

We have a very large 5th column funded by Putain & the Fanta Fascist. We can’t get complacent.

Good. The sooner the US pulls out the better, the newly fascist America isn’t going to uphold NATO anyway, so the sooner the band-aid is pulled off the better

So the Palantir whitewashing has started, seems the backlash has scared the techno-fascists. A shame the Guardian is uncritically on board. Feels more like a Daily Heil or terrorgraph sort of article

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

OP has a reasonable concern, Microsoft has had a troubling past history, and embrace extend extinguish hasn’t gone away, just look at the office file standards shenanigans.

It’s certainly the case that the purchase of github is intended to create a platform that has network effects (making it hard to leave).

Microsoft has proven many times that their participation in FOSS tends to come with a catch or an intent to subvert.

Yes Mint is a good choice for your migration. It has been put together in a way that makes it intuitive for a windows refugee. The menu layout has the “start” (mint) button bottom left with your apps in there.

The system apps are named obvious things like “software manager” and it has default apps installed to get you going.

Being derived from Ubuntu it is the best supported platform for commercial apps/games but with Ubuntu’s weird choices (snap etc) tidied up.

It’s the most recommended linux distro for beginners for a reason. It’s a solid reliable well thought out platform

Ok we’re talking at cross purposes.

Yes, mullvad has a noble repo, it doesnt have a xia repo (which is the mint equivalent version name)

Attempting to add the mullvad repo using the old ubuntu instructions failed because noble =/= xia

Yes you can work around that but its not beginner level.

Op asked if Flatpaks was the answer whivh imho it isnt, the best answer is downloading the .deb

Really sorry, it’s too long ago to remember the exact error,

but IIRC

when you followed the ubuntu instructions for adding the repository it would kick an error because the command included a reference to noble and mint os name is xia so the contents of the osrelease when checked didnt match and it threw an error.

Could be wrong, I didnt document it.

The work around was to edit the commands.

All a moot point now as

a) the instructions now on the mullvad site don’t reference noble and

b) mullvad now appears to be in the mint store (which is how you should always install if possible

Not correct, only true if you’ve manually added the repo

Further to this, mullvad vpn and browser are now in the Mint store.

Download and install from there

EDIT

Apols, they’re not, I checked on the machine I had faffed around with to get the mullvad repo working. Please ignore

It’s reasonable advice. Mullvad is literally the only time I’ve found the ubuntu instructions to not work on mint

Where does mullvad say it’s not meant to be used on Mint ? I literally have it running on 5 mint devices.

Can’t see that on their website at a quick search

Saying it is not supported is not the same as not meant to be used

In fact to the contrary this references install for mint

https://mullvad.net/en/help/install-mullvad-app-linux

Got to the section that says

“Download and install the app”

For a command line explanation

Honestly though just download the .deb and double click on it out of the folder to get debi to install. It’s all gui and easy

Doesn’t always work - for example the mullvad browser won’t install on mint with the ubuntu instructions as OS version gets reported as Xia not noble (if I’m recalling the issue correctly it was 6-9 months ago)

Yes you can amend the commands to get it to work but it’s definitely not beginner level, I had to faff around for an hour or so before I worked it out

For mullvad vpn the client will tell you when there’s an update available by a very obvious flag in the app that you click on to download it then click/double click on the file out of the downloads to get debi to install it.

To answer the broader question, where ever possible install apps via software manager, that way they are updated with apt / update manager.

I would suggest using flatpacks sparingly as they are disk hogs.

Great advice.

Btw you don’t need -S to install a package, just

paru packagename

Works fine

Mullvad works fine on both LMDE and stock mint fwiw

True we say 15th September, not 15 September