The YouTube adblocker battle is going to be a constantly moving target, so take this with a grain of salt as who knows when it'll break.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and watch directly on YouTube. I don't sign in, and I track the content I follow via rss. No ads, no nags, no issues.
Piped and similar as well as yt-dlp are also great and are better options for giving YouTube the middle finger, which I fully endorse. Just giving another option.
Beehaw is my home in the fediverse, and I'm happy here. I like that they try to maintain a positive community. But if Beehaw left the fediverse, I wouldn't come along. Which is a change from thinking I might last time I saw this topic come up.
If beehaw ends up in a silo I think it will just have too little to offer for me. And that's ok. This isn't about me, it's about creating a safe space for your disenfranchised users.
I hope Beehaw stays, but I understand if they don't.
Two facts:
Whenever I see these Musk posts, I always think the title can usually be reduced to 3 or 4 words. In this case, "Elon shouldn't be trusted".
He's certainly polarizing isn't he?
I liked the guy for a minute when all I knew is that he was involved in EV's and renewable energy and such. That sentiment died real quick though!
Edit: Added the polarizing bit.
Bad behavior in Windows article up on the Fediverse for four hours and no one telling us how their Linux laptop doesn't have this problem?
My Linux laptop doesn't have this problem 😁.
Sounds like it's a combo of bad Windows behavior and buggy implementations, but had to deliver the joke first.
X11 is like a big dilapidated house. It doesn't work very well anymore and is difficult to maintain.
Wayland is new modern house. Smaller and more efficient, but missing some amenities that the old house had that some people still want, like a wood burning stove.
You'd need Microsoft/Apple/Google to agree to this to get these client side message scrapers on devices.
You'd need commercial/closed source e2e messaging services to agree to add a backdoor.
Why would they? Not that they care about end users, but corporate interests will take issue with it too. And it's a bad look. UK is just one market for these global companies. I'm not an expert in such things so I'm basically talking out of my ass, but I think it makes sense.
But even if they somehow manage it, people will learn how to circumvent it. And then there's open source operating systems and e2e messaging which are immune to this.
Edit: grammar.
Funnily enough I just, like an hour before reading this post bought an AMD card. And I've been using NVIDIA since the early 00's.
For me it's good linux support. Tired of dealing with their drivers.
Will losing me as a customer make a difference to NVIDIA? Nope. Do I feel good about ditching a company that doesn't treat me well as a consumer? Absolutely!
My guess is you have an nvidia card and are using the nouveau (open source) module instead of the nvidia (proprietary) one.
Assuming that's correct, here's Ubuntu's documentation on that. https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation
The nuances of this are beyond me, but I feel like it's likely this would eventually be overcome.
Your best protection from having your images manipulated is to keep them off the internet if at all possible (we can only control what we post).
Basically I'm saying to treat the internet as hostile. Which is unfortunate, but accurate.
I'm an American who is reasonably well traveled (though I haven't been to Europe yet) and really wants to be less ignorant about these things than most of my countrymates so I spent a amount of time trying to figure it out before looking at a map and reading the comments. I did not. I guess I'm still that American. But I'll keep trying not to be.
This seems to be an unedited version of that video with sound. I don't speak Korean so I can't validate it against the article, but the bbc has a reputation for being credible so I'm inclined to believe it. https://youtu.be/GcUe4O_53_0
As for the organization, the only mentions I've found are almost all about this, with one mention of it being a think tank in South Korea, which is weirdly little information.
The current state of American capitalism is $ > anything. So yeah, I suspect we would.
I'm worried there won't be much of a backlash.
People as a whole don't seem to care very much about the bad behavior of these big tech companies.
I hope I'm wrong.
TL;DR: Ubuntu. Because I want choices.
Ubuntu. And I've felt that way for a long time, so it's not something recentish like snaps.
I don't want my distro to decide what DE and software I'm using for me. They used to have a minimal iso which gave you, as the name suggests, a very minimal install. But now their minimal image is meant for containerized stuff and if memory serves comes with some extra cruft for that purpose.
I got annoyed and I left. And every distro I've tried since, even if I didn't stick with it, I liked better.
To add some constructiveness, as that's just complaining. That can be a good thing, just depends on the user. If they want the crafted experience Ubuntu provides, then it's a good pick. It's just not for me.
Commercial software: complete goals x, y, and z and get paid.
FOSS: Project of passion.
Short and black and white version: I'd rather use the software people are excited to make.
My take on what's realistic: Things are rarely so simple. Commercial software will often (not always) be easier to use. I feel like most users don't want to expend any more than minimal effort to effectively use their software (which I don't think is unreasonable). So in those cases and for those users, easier = better.
Also, highly specialized commercial software might be better than any FOSS options. For example, there's nothing in the FOSS world that can compete with the big players in commercial electronic medical records software.
So, while I love FOSS, and I find Capitalism problematic, sometimes commercial is better.
P.S: The response is more to the concept of the post. Your actual post is both well written and thought out and doesn't feel at all like "black and white" thinking.
Wayland != X11
Not 100% feature compatible != broken.
My opinion and also a TL;DR: of the article.
I feel like we can ignore this and it'll mostly be a non-issue. Hopefully I don't have to eat those words later.
YouTube can detect common current adblocking methods, and use this to hinder you now, prompting to comply with them. If you do, they win. You pay for no ads or you have an exception in your adblocker.
As another comment mentioned, it's a cat and mouse game. Adblockers will get ahead of it. So just wait it out.
I don't want to see any ads either. Even unobtrusive ones. It's just different levels of annoying and given the choice, I'll pick zero annoyance. I also don't want to be the product. Not just as a target for advertisements, but from information gathering for profit.
I do see the problem with this. Most sites are run with the expectation of profit. And while not explicitly my intent, I go out of the way to be as unprofitable as possible to these kinds of business models.
I do opt to pay for a couple of privacy respecting online services and I... rarely but not never donate to sites I use frequently that are privacy respecting and not ad supported. And that gives me some feel goods to support sites and services that align with my values but it's not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors.
I don't know what the solution to this is. But I mirror OP's concerns about this specific thing. I don't want my browsing to be DRM'd, and I have zero trust for Google. If this happens, they will abuse it.
Edit: Changed organizations to services. Felt more accurate.
Similar boat. I'm the only one in my friend group (many of whom are technically minded) who in concerned about digital privacy and doesn't trust black box devices.
I suspect many there would take pride in this, not feel shame.
I am ashamed of us, though.
Ubuntu is a tough one. I don't like it. I don't like snaps, but more than that I don't like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don't feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don't personally care for it but I'm glad it's around I guess is my point?
Yes, instances can do whatever they want and users should seek instances that match their needs but:
Edit: context
Edit2: Not intended as advocation for refederating. I'm content with the content available to me so I don't have a strong opinion.
Probably preaching to the choir in the largely tech savvy world that is the Threadiverse, but going to PSA nonetheless. If you're concerned about privacy, don't use anything associated with Google. Because IMO this is entirely unsurprising.
Vivaldi is chromium based and not fully open source. It doesn't deserve any more trust than chrome/edge/safari/etc.
This one is tough for me. I'm opposed to any distro being considered the "standard". It feels so antithetical to what makes Linux great.
But it's also probably what we need for better user adoption. I don't know which I'd pick if I had to, but I know it wouldn't be Ubuntu.
Frankly the Beehaw people are kind of nuts if they drop lemmy. It will be interesting what they think is better. I will believe it when I see it.
I'm personally on the fence on how I feel about Beehaw defederating or deplatformimg, if that even happens. But their concerns over lemmy are valid. It's not unreasonable for them to want something with less technical debt and better tools to protect their community.
As others have said, just use a trustworthy VPN. I use and recommend mullvad.
All you really need is to not be low hanging fruit. Plenty of people out there pirating without knowing how to obfuscate themselves that are easier targets.
Edit: Clarity.
I'd recommend against any of those choices.
Try one of the distros others have suggested.
Edit: I checked the specs on that hardware and yeah that's going to struggle. Maybe Alpine would be ok. It's fairly easy to spin up and might be fun to play with on that hardware. You'll probably want a fairly large swap if you're planning on using a desktop environment.
I don't agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there's people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.
They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.
Can they censor Lemmy? Highly unlikely. It's decentralized and not owned by any one entity. Can they censor it from you? Maybe. Governments exerting control over internet access of their citizens is old hat
Regardless, like others have said, don't assume you're anonymous here.
I think an important thing to talk about here is that Linux is not Windows. Which I know is an obvious statement, but I'll elaborate.
Most deskop/laptop users use Windows. Most deskop/laptop software is for Windows. The way that most people know how to navigate an OS is Windows-centric. Windows does what most people expect a computer to do. A lot of what your focus seems to be on is if Linux can do what Windows can. And while the answer is often yes, I don't really think it's the right question.
Do you want to use Linux? If so, use it. One of things you'll have to accept with that is that you'll lose access to some of those Windows specific pieces of software. Sure, there's wine and steam/proton and you might be able to get any given thing running. But it's not a guarantee you will be able to, or that it will continue to run. If you're really beholden to Windows software, you should probably stick with Windows. If you're willing to explore FOSS alternatives to the software you're accustomed to, even if it may not work the way you expect it to, stick around. And you should, because Linux is awesome!
Update: The survey provides this answer.
What's wrong with sh.itjust.works? Good faith question, genuinely curious. I don't know much about the instance and in taking a quick peek, I see a lot of poking the hexbear but nothing else immediately sticks out.
Lemmygrad and hexbear I'm familiar with why they're problematic.
I agree. I don't use Arch (I have in the past) but I use Arch Wiki heavily.
Arch. Rolling release is too much maintenance and AUR can be a pain. I do like the minimalist approach though.
For those of a similar opinion and aren't familiar with it, check out Void. Also a minimalist rolling release, but aims for more stable packages so less updating. Decent package selection in their repos as well.
w3m on a vt terminal connected to a headless netbsd box.
Firefox, but I wanted to give a nerdier answer.
I don't worry too much about that when meeting new people. The thing I'm afraid of is misgendering people I've known for a very long time. I want very much to use the correct name and pronoun but the ones I've known them by for the past decade or whatever sometimes slip past the filter.
Edit: and since these are longstanding relationships, I'm more concerned with their feelings than I would be a stranger.
I think most of us FOSS folks will agree that GIMP is pretty unintuitive.