Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is "no longer in your library."

this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour

No.

By installing software only from trusted sources (default repositories from your distribution are the safest software you will ever install on linux)

Yes. Opening PDFs might be safer on Linux, but general internet security and practice goes a long way, too. Using a content-blocker like uBlock Origin on Firefox can greatly reduce attack surface on both Linux and Windows as well

Excuse my silly question, but what does mpv do that vlc doesn't?

They recently got visited by officers of the country they’re in. The officers didn’t find shit (no logs, no ips, nothing)

Exactly. uBlock Origin exists for a reason. No one can block everything, but mitigation tactics exist, and to not use a product just because the website contains trackers, I don’t understand why one would do that if the product itself doesn’t contain trackers, but hey, people are different

Take your ignorance elsewhere

Debian is good, but if you use flatpak I recommend Fedora. They have (from my own experience) the best flatpak implementation. Although it varies from person to person

(Again, from my experience) Nvidia and Wayland works pretty well, even with the proprietary drivers. Debian has Wayland+Nvidia support since 12. see: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland

I don't know about your other questions, sorry

Also, not that it matters much, but it has a strong stance towards open-source software, not allowing closed software in its repositories. Although closed software can be installed by using RPMFusion

Lab rats is a strong term (not wrong by any means) but people seem to forget that Red Hat is also one of the big players trying to make Desktop Linux better. And when Fedora users report bugs to Red Hat, they fix the bugs not only for themselves, but for the entire Linux Desktop community (they are large contributors to the GNOME Project, as well as making efforts to make Wayland better). Their decisions as a company may be causing community backlash, but without those big players (Canonical, SUSE, Red Hat) Desktop Linux wouldn't be nearly as good as it is today. I see Fedora as a Debian, but company-backed (say what you want about this statement, but the Fedora desktop experience has been the same for a while, and will not change any time soon.) Fedora is also a Project, not a Product. A distinction that Red Hat takes seriously. Fedora is not profitable to Red Hat (the bug-fixes, as I stated above, benefits everyone in the Linux community, not Red Hat alone), that's why it's 100% free (both as in freedom and as in beer). Also, they have full-time employees working on GNOME and Wayland

researchers from security firm Trend Micro found an encrypted binary file on a server known to be used by a group they had been tracking since 2021

Sounds like it targets servers specifically, so desktop users should be safe

It’s not ChatGPT’s API. It runs locally, no internet required. For those interested read more here: https://gpt4all.io/index.html

Fedora is 100% community distribution with Red Hat as a sponsor and large contributor. Fedora will always be 100% free and open-source and will never charge to make source-code available if that concerns people. This reflects heavily on their Freedom foundation: “[…] a completely free project that anyone can emulate or copy in whole or in part for their own purposes.”

Red Hat may have a grip on resources and funding for the project, but neither IBM nor Red Hat have ultimate decision-making powers.

Say no to centralized platforms altogether. I don’t want to be that person, but things like these are exactly why open-source is (and should be) superior. It’s unfortunate that OSS has had so little traction in the end-user side of things

Given how federation works (and my limited understanding of it) I believe not much will change, since they simply can't Extinguish. It's all federated into different instances under different moderation teams. They hold no 'ultimate control' over anything beyond their own instances

It is basically tor browser without the tor network, but with all the privacy features that one would find in tor browser

It's a GIMP patch. OSS and all. You can find it here: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

That's fair, but at least they could say something like "you can download our songs for as long as we allow it" and not "you can download your favourite songs and listen to them any time, anywhere" when that is only partially true, since, if someone has a playlist downloaded (still talking about personal experience) and they go offline for a long period of time, they can no longer play the songs and are required to get an internet connection only for spotify to audit and say "yeah you still have a valid subscription, you can still listen offline". It's not truly offline if I have to connect to the internet every once in a while.

Again, it's completely fair, but they could at least tell more than half-truths

I'm guessing everyone who likes GNOME (me included) only uses it because of its unique workflow. And that's exactly why people were hesitant by GNOME 3 (besides the UI. I'm not a linux user from that time but damn the UI was weird seeing some old screenshots)

As a desktop user, I find the Linux experience to be one of constant improvement and learning. First time I tried Linux it was hard. Very hard. Now I know what I want. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to know new things every now and then. So, yes, over time you’ll acquire new skills and knowledge to deal with problems

As ironic as this sounds, Google can't let Firefox die because then it would become a monopoly

Never gonna happen. That's the good stuff about federation and open-source

You can backup your profile folder. See here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

I think what you’re suggesting already exists. Take a look at SearXNG: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#searxng

The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can't decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying "it is already decided" "Fedora is doomed" etc.

My comment isn’t really a viable argument but I’ve been thinking about how an advert for Linux would be:

“The top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux, don’t you want to feel like having a supercomputer at home? Why wait? Get your Linux for free today!”

Not really to be taken seriously, but if you want a real argument and example:

My laptop is really laggy with windows 10, and it came preinstalled with it. Recently I tried dual-booting Linux and Windows, and Windows was simply too slow. I am so accustomed with Linux’s speed that I wiped Windows off it. Never again.

Valve is and was aware of this problem even back then. I don't have a reliable source on this but from what I remember it all started when Microsoft begun pushing the Microsoft Store.

Gabe Newell even said Linux is the future of gaming

And for this I have a source: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-linux-and-open-source-are-the-future-of-gaming/

One thing I don't understand about all of this WEI: can't we just use a user agent switcher / spoofer to 'look' like chrome or any other browser and OS to counter this?

I agree. A lot of people went over the discussion to voice their opinions. And the proposers have adapted it since. They listen to their users, contrary to other for-profit operating systems (to reiterate, Fedora is NOT for-profit, and it never has been)

That's good to know, thanks

He has an opencollective and a patreon

Since you're more familiar with Debian, I recommend Linux Mint. Ubuntu if you don't care about snap. These are generally good and pretty friendly. If you know your way around Linux and want something else that also has up-to-date stuff (Debian is always a little behind on updates) and you don't mind reading on some documentation to get started, you could also try Fedora. Kali Linux tools are available to most distributions.

If you throw proton and wine into the mix, Linux is almost as good as Windows in game support

He has an opencollective and a patreon

Thanks for the reply. What's weird is that I've done what the endeavouros forums said (and, looking through them, they did similar steps as the ones outlined on the archwiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Preserve_video_memory_after_suspend and I still get that black frozen screen with just a cursor. I'm guessing this is exclusively NVIDIA's fault... or KDE's as I never had this problem on GNOME. Thanks anyhow

I don't think downloading directly from Spotify is possible, considering they have DRM (I might not know what I am talking about, feel free to criticize). And I tried downloading from Spotify directly using yt-dlp.

That said, spotdl seems to only download from YouTube (which is not DRM protected). So what I would recommend you do is ignore ChatGPT and use a well-known tool (such as yt-dlp) in the terminal. It is as intuitive as it gets and it does not require you to do scripting (unless you want to). And find (or create) a playlist using your YouTube account and download that using yt-dlp flags to convert the mp4 or webm files into mp3 or other

I think the docs will have what you're looking for: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options and if not, good ol' internet search is a couple keystrokes away

Oh, we're enjoying it alright! Ever since Apple announced that they would kill off a service that we were using (basically to sync files between different computers and TVs) and replace it with iCloud (for which we would have to pay a lot). It was a pain trying to set it up but eventually I got it working. Very impressed at how well it does its thing.

It will most likely be explicit opt-in, if it is implemented.

[ … ] The proposal owner suggests a compromise "suggested opt-in" design, where the UI encourages the user to opt-in, but the user must explicitly make a decision to do so or not. [ … ]

Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Telemetry#Many_users_want_to_require_opt-in_rather_than_opt-out

It’s legit just ChatGPT because it’s just ChatGPT. Microsoft is investing heavily in OpenAI

Fedora is 100% community supported. Red Hat is the primary sponsor and offers infrastructure and funding for the project, as well as full-time employees, but that’s the extent of the relationship. Red Hat doesn’t have decision-making powers. The project’s ideals force it to be open and transparent. So, if you are happy with it, stay with it. Red Hat only sponsors the Project. They don’t make decisions for the Project