I sincerely apologize for taking you seriously. You tried to warn me with your alternating caps, so it’s my fault. Cheers.

That’s fair, though that’s more of a flaw with the email protocol. There’s no way around leaking that to the receiver’s email provider as well.

Good point, I hadn’t considered that.

For the record, if your security is based on “trust”, you’re going to have a bad time. The whole point of a cryptographically secure line of communication is that you don’t need to trust anyone except the recipient. Protonmail users choose it specifically because they don’t trust anyone, including Protonmail.

The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation

Yep, the market feels like it’s in max-greed mode. There was a taste of fear when the tariffs were first announced, but wallst was quick to token TACO to justify just ignoring everything. My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

I assume it will take until a critical mass of those speculators start needing to liquidate. I don’t know what will trigger that, but at some point the profits come due.

I’m not a fan of having two definitions for “lint” in the tech world. Unnecessary ambiguity.

This should just work if your Android device’s USB mode is set to Mass Storage, no extra software needed on the PC. It’ll just show up like a thumb drive.

Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There’s no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it’s just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

Then there’s the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.

Ugh, can’t wait to post about how sick this is to my insta story…and tomorrow I’ll vlog my trip to the beach!

The better comparison is that distros are the operating systems (like “windows”, “macos”, and “android”), while “linux” is the kernel under the hood that end users likely never interact with (like “NT”, “XNU”, and…“linux”).

A distro represents an intended user experience. If you want a distro that has an intended user experience that is similar to windows, go with Mint or OpenSUSE. If your desired experience is like the SteamDeck, install bazzite (with an AMD GPU ideally). If that’s all you care to know, then that’s all you need to know; go use your new system how you would any other.

But if you want to dig deeper, yeah, the fact that all the distros are based on linux (and more importantly, are posix compatible) means that a lot of the software is portable across distros. But that doesn’t mean your experience on all distros will be the same. Different distros organize their filesystems differently, they might ship with different versions of core utilities based on the stability testing they’ve done, and they likely offer varying means of installing and managing new packages.

The tl;dr is, go use one distro, and then later try doing the same stuff in a different distro, and inevitably at some point you’ll go “oh, this didn’t work exactly how I expected because the other distro I’m used to handles this differently”. That’s the difference.

The CEOs you’re talking about are the CEOs in the analogy.

The analogy I use is, it’s like a magician pulled a coin from behind a CEO’s ear, and their response was “that’s incredible! Free money! Let’s go into business together!”

Literally no one ever claimed it had reasoning capabilities. It is a trick to produce a string of characters that your brain can make sense of. That’s all.

Thank you, that’s super helpful info.

If you’re not worried about evil maid attacks and just want secure boot…

It is sad to me that that is my situation actually lol. Or rather, a random windows app just wants secure boot to work and is otherwise not worried about evil maid attacks.

Cool, good to hear!

A few questions:

• is this with grub?
• if so, and I make edits to grub, do I need to trigger a re-sign manually?
• have you ever had any issues with the pacman hook?

I think the part that has me most spooked is the “Replacing the platform keys with your own can end up bricking hardware on some machines” warning.

Yeah, so that’s possible because Canonical has enough sway to get their key to play nice with manufacturers’ firmware. If you are on almost any other distro (arch included) or if you build your own kernel, it’s a headache just to get it to work at all even without dual boot. It also just might not even be possible due to a bad implementation on your motherboard (results ranging from dual boot windows refusing to boot, to a bricked motherboard).

Here’s the process for enabling secure boot for arch users. Make sure to peruse the section on dual booting.

If you’re wondering why it’s so complicated, it’s because of what secure boot is: you want to be sure you’re booting into binary that’s signed by a set of special keys. But Linux is not one binary that can be signed by Linus Torvalds, it’s a bundle of source code that is built by end-users. So if you decide to make any changes to the kernel you have on ububtu, you won’t be able to convince Canonical to sign your build, and you will need to jump through all the hoops on that arch wiki.

There are many reasons for the headache, but primarily I’d say it’s because UEFI is closed source, and msft designed Secure Boot for it, and then manufacturers didn’t care about supporting it any more than the bare minimum. And all of that together results in an ecosystem of devices that favor MSFT. That’s why Linux users don’t like secure boot.

So the second option? What distro?

Are you saying this as someone who has gotten a self-signed key to work with their BIOS + kernel + bootloader + dual boot with windows, someone who runs a mainstream enough distro that they convinced manufacturers to ship with support for their key, or someone who doesn’t run linux with secure boot at all?

Thanks, that 👍

For the record, it sounds like Payment Processors and Credit Card companies are two different middlemen, and the Payment Processors are claiming the Credit Cards are the ones with restrictive policies.

I want more people to know about GNUTaler. Let’s try to cut out all these middlemen, they aren’t necessary!

The performance is relative to the user. Could it be that you’re a god damned genius? :/