I really hope they get sued hard for this bullshit.

• It’s a horrendous number of users that are affected.
• They really dropped the ball on this one. A child could’ve thought of that vulnerability.
• They don’t follow the most basic GDPR etiquette, i.e. notifying the data protection commission or affected users.

Holy crap, this is such an obvious vulnerability. Do they really not have a single person employed that thinks for half a second about privacy?

1. I would also recommend Cinnamon. It’s simpler than KDE and more modern than Xfce. Not as customizable as those two, but unless you’re looking for extreme customizability (and would be fine with the added complexity that comes along with it), it really should be fine.
   Cinnamon is sort of developed for/by the distro Linux Mint, which certainly would be a fine distro to start out on, too.

2. This is a somewhat shitty answer, but it’s a popular strategy among Linux users to just not install programs which you do not trust.
   I’m saying that because, well, maybe that is a valid strategy for you, too.
   But I’m also saying that, because that is why Linux is generally less well equipped in the fight against your own system than other operating systems may be.

I tried to look up, if it’s maybe the case that the data of 211M Brazillians were leaked, and fuck me, there’s been a lot of massive Facebook leaks in recent years.

Cambridge Analytica was all the way back in 2018 with a laughably small number of 87 million affected.

Later that year in September, they leaked another 50 million people’s data.

In March 2019, they found out that they had been storing passwords in plaintext, which, if I remember correctly, mostly affected Instagram users.

In September 2019, 419 million users’ phone numbers were leaked.

In December 2019, there was a database discovered that was accessible without authentication, with phone numbers and names of 267 million users. That data was enriched with some e-mail addresses and such, and then got sold in April 2020.

Then I guess, they took a year off? And are now making a comeback with 533 million users’ data leaked.

And this list is probably not comprehensive.

---

It’s also interesting that there were seemingly less data breaches recorded before 2018.

Not sure, if that’s just a result of the journalistic gold rush after Cambridge Analytica, or if it’s because the GDPR took effect in 2018, under which it’s one of the worst offenses to not make it public when you’ve learned of a security breach.

That’s more than the population of the EU. About 1/15th of the world population…

deleted by creator

I mean, Mozilla did actually experiment with a similar concept, but theirs was full-on private: All possible ads got downloaded, then it was decided locally which ad to show based on the browser history.

Admittedly, that doesn’t scale very well…

I’m 100% on board with letting niche desktops be niche desktops, but GNOME isn’t niche. It has been elected the default of many distros. Many users will come from traditional desktops and get thrown onto GNOME without being asked whether they like it or not.

As such, I do feel like the GNOME devs have a responsibility of catering to a broader audience. Obviously, they also have the responsibility to push users towards what they envision as the most efficient workflow, but I don’t think that justifies a hard break with the traditional desktop paradigm when the two paradigms don’t get in the way of each other.

I’ll underline KDE once more, because yeah. Combine it with openSUSE for maximum maximalism and minimum disk space.

Enlightenment is also kind of interesting in this regard. It certainly doesn’t have the manpower to be truly maximalist, but it has some of the fanciest graphical effects and supports features that you’re not going to find elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it’s also not terribly stable, not often packaged very well by distros, and it has some unusual defaults which you’ll have to get used to or customize them in some way.

I imagine the problem is that they can’t exactly “officially support” a device, unless an active dev owns that model…

Hmm, but isn’t the point of opening a new tab that you may want to come back to your current tab? Otherwise you could click the link directly or re-use the current tab for opening a new webpage.

At least, I wouldn’t feel comfortable closing many tabs like that. I want to at least look at the tabs, and if I’m already doing that, I can press Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab¹ as I look at them.

Obviously, I don’t want to put your workflow into question, but yeah, I also think this is something that is rather niche and should probably live in an extension.

¹ With the setting changed, so that Ctrl+Tab goes through tabs left-to-right.

I found up-to-date distros to be the least annoying when you mostly do programming, because unless you’re working in a really slow-moving ecosystem like C, most of your tooling will generally be tested against the latest or close-to-latest version of its libraries.
So, if those are the library versions that are installed on your system, that usually makes things throw up less problems.

I also had the impression that distros which do lots of custom-patching (which are basically just Debian-based distros) will break apart quicker when you have to make changes to your system (because they were custom-patched to work in this one particular way).
And sometimes you just have to or want to make changes to your system to get a tool to work.

So, my recommendation is openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora, even though they may not always be quite as easy-to-use for non-programming things.

I don’t have scientific evidence, nor are my observations terribly up-to-date, but for several years my devices had been:

• A laptop that was mid-range in 2012 (Lenovo IdeaPad N581)
• A phone that was top of the line in 2016 (OnePlus 3)

So, the specs of my phone were higher on paper, but if I remember correctly, it was actually noticeably slower when running BOINC computations.

I imagine a lot of that slowness could be eliminated when placing that CPU in a laptop, though:

• The energy saving strategy could be made less aggressive, because bigger battery.
• Heat can be pulled away by a fan (and even without a fan, better cooling elements can be placed in the additional space).
• Android is a rather inefficient OS (as are Windows and macOS, so I guess this one doesn’t apply for most people).

Well, a long time ago there was this operating system called “UNIX”, that was very popular but proprietary.

Then came along this guy called “Richard Stallman”, who initiated the Free Software movement and with assistance of that community, they started rewriting components from UNIX and published their source code under Free Software licenses, all under the project name “GNU”.

They eventually had rewritten almost all of UNIX, the only major component missing for a complete GNU operating system was the kernel.

Then came along this guy called “Linus Torvalds”, who figured he’d write a small kernel for just his computer as a hobby project. That hobby project went a little out of hand, now known as the Linux kernel, and people started using the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel.

And for whatever reason, people started referring to this combination just as “Linux”.
Stallman and the Free Software community would have of course liked some recognition, so Stallman and some community members repeatedly asked people to call it “GNU/Linux”.

That just wouldn’t stick and people eventually started ridiculing that they were still harping on about it, which lead to this copypasta (which to my knowledge is not a Stallman quote, but supposed to sound like one):

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run.
The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

Well, and nowadays SystemD has been slowly becoming an ever-larger part of this combination, so the joke is that one should refer to it SystemD/GNU/Linux, or in this case the post is exaggerating even more and saying that GNU and Linux are just small components compared to SystemD.

Yeah, Free Software licenses state that you have to be allowed to modify and redistribute the software. It does not state that you have to be allowed to call your fork the same as the original software.

And given that it is very much already good manners to not call your fork the same as the original, this trademark topic is only really relevant for distributions, when they want to apply custom patches (without renaming the software).

I have essentially no knowledge of this, but I saw a post a few weeks back where someone complained that fixing the edits that an automated tool had made based on a satellite image was more work than just manually making the edits. So, yeah, I don’t know if that path is really worth pursuing…

Seems like it might be this model: https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/clevo-nl51ru/

Not to discredit the message based on the messenger, but why would anyone publish something like that on fucking GitHub of all places? Do they want people to not read it? Are they even part of this community that cares about software freedom? Just what in the fuck was the thought process here?

Very cool that they’re sort of treading into the direction of the Decentraleyes extension.

Obviously, this is a difficult path to take, as you really want to avoid webdevs trying to pin or upgrade their libraries and that not taking effect, but generally speaking it seems really sensible to not re-download the same JavaScript libraries over and over.

I mean, speaking as a member of said community, Free Software is punk. I don’t want a fashionable representative who only says things that everyone agrees with.

Sure, I don’t need my Free Software representative to philosophize about the age of consent, but as long as he’s not telling people to rape others, I do not have a problem with that, and again, would rather have him speak his mind than not say anything that’s pushing the boundaries.