Changing the Duolingo icon to look sad, old, and wrinkled is a strategy to make users curious, so they open the app to see if there are new updates or content. In other words, Duo is only trying to get your attention.

This tactic is rooted in the psychological effect known as the "novelty effect," where new stimuli can temporarily increase engagement and motivation. Snapchat similarly employs this strategy with the red dot and yellow dot on the Bitmoji.

"Linux saved itself."

• having FOSS code
• being able to silence all system services to detect that bump
• being able to run stuff in different ways, without a core system component (with and without systemd, as that backdoor only used data when sshd was started via systemd)
• having people be perfectionist about performance measurements
• having devs test upstream code not shipped to normal distros
• being so good microsoft pays people to work on software for it

Can we stop calling a good software dev autistic or stuff?

RIP Jia Tan

Meanwhile Inkscapes official methods to get the GTK4 nightly are

• appimage (broken by design)
• snap (only sandboxed on ubuntu and requires snapd)
• ppa (only on ubuntu at all, but possible through distrobox)

When there is a beta release there will likely be a flatpak soon though.

"The local governor, manipulated by the terrorist group Hamas, called this murder"

~ literally what our lovely western mainstream media would say

In June 2020, a New York Health Department COVID-19 advisory suggested sex through "physical barriers, like walls", but did not specifically reference glory holes, as part of broader measures on dating and sex during the pandemic.

This is so COVID

Better hardware manifacturers for Linux:

• Clevo (ODM, nearly exclusively from companies like below)
  • Novacustom
  • System76
  • Kubuntu Focus
• Tuxedo
• Framework
• Slimbook
• Starlabs (only order what is in stock)
• Lenovo Thinkpad

Not for anything I listen to, they just embed standard product ads in their talking

No as both are lossy codecs you will always lose quality doing so. You can do it with ffmpeg.

parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.opus ::: *.m4a

You may want to tweak parameters for bitrate, etc. But this is not needed at all, as AAC had patents that are now expired.

If you get .flac, .wav or similar lossless music, you should encode that with opus. But lossy to lossy makes nearly no sense (apart from specific players not supporting them)

Gaslighting is a colloquialism, loosely defined as manipulating someone into questioning their own perception of reality.

What?

This!!!!

This!!

People, stop celebrating "freeing" software of maintainers that want to prevent being exploited.

Why... is Canonical so good with business connections and spreading desktop Linux around the world? While they use fu**ing Snaps and break GNOME as "their desktop"?

Great plan! Forking Antennapod would be a good idea I guess.

Also many youtube videos are 1:1 available as podcasts, using the sponsorblock db here would already help.

Thats like "child labor is bad because they cant do high quality work".

Bullying is bad. Period.

Hahaha no way. Im Germany we say "Sparen!"

https://github.com/boredsquirrel/dont-use-appimages

Appimages also install another distro onto your system. May be small, but you have no deduplication at all. Flatpak could do a better job at enforcing the use of very few runtimes, but at least it is transparent what is used, unlike with Appimages (where you have no idea if any app has a runtime with a vulnerability etc).

If they use compression, you replace disk space with CPU power.

You might want to check flatpak disk usage using this tool

Mine is

28,88 GB "naive"
21,57 GB with deduplication
16,24 GB with compression

For all my apps, including a ton of stuff I just test. And that on a 1TB drive is just not important.

Appimages can be placed in ~/.local/bin/ which makes them kinda okay for terminal use. But none of the formats is terminal friendly. Flatpak has a veeeery descriptive syntax, which makes sense but for sure it is a pain to write.

There are easy workarounds for that though, like this aliasing script

But yes, CLI stuff is not covered but that is also okay. Flatpak deals with all the huge GUI apps, the distros can take care of the small rest.

Of course thats not perfect, but snaps have no sandboxing without apparmor (with patches) and appimages have no sandboxing at all, ignoring firejail which is a root binary and has had security vulnerabilities in the past, making it basically a privilege escalator.

Yes they break that strange XDG idea, and that makes sense. Every app is a container, and if you delete that app directory, all its settings are reset etc. It is a huge advantage for a clean system.

For sure the directories are long as f*ck but that is an okay drawback for having the ability to control the app data so easily.

Gentoo is moving the non-technical organization overhead to Software in the Public Interest (SPI). As noted above, SPI is already now recognized at US federal level as a full-fleged non-profit 501(c)(3). It also handles several projects of similar type and size (e.g., Arch and Debian) and as such has exactly the experience and background that Gentoo needs. What are the advantages of becoming an SPI Associated Project in detail?

Financial benefits to donors:

tax deductions [1]

Financial benefits to Gentoo:

matching fund programs [2]
reduced organizational complexity
reduced administration costs [3]
reduced taxes [4]
reduced fees [5]
increased access to non-profit-only sponsorship [6]

Non-financial benefits to Gentoo:

reduced organizational complexity, no “double-headed beast” any more
less non-technical work required

[1] Presently, almost no donations to the Gentoo Foundation provide a tax benefit for donors anywhere in the world. Becoming a SPI Associated Project enables tax benefits for donors located in the USA. Some other countries do recognize donations made to non-profits in other jurisdictions and provide similar tax credits.

[2] This also depends on jurisdictions and local tax laws of the donor, and is often tied to tax deductions.

[3] The Gentoo Foundation currently pays $1500/year in tax preparation costs.

[4] In recent fiscal years, through careful budgetary planning on the part of the Treasurer and advice of tax professionals, the Gentoo Foundation has used depreciation expenses to offset taxes owing; however, this is not a sustainable strategy.

[5] Non-profits are eligible for reduced fees, e.g., of Paypal (savings of 0.9-1.29% per donation) and other services.

[6] Some sponsorship programs are only available to verified 501(c)(3) organizations

You can still donate to the SIP and the Förderverein in Germany.

This. There nearly never is a community, at least in practice. Bigger projects have different roles, but its mostly "if you dont know how to code, you are likely not helping"

This already raises a few questions:

• AlmaLinux, Rockylinux or Oracle Linux? They should be all nearly the same
• why not RHEL which is free for a bunch of machines?

I think CentOS Stream is way better for Desktop usage. RHEL has a release cycle of 5 years! This is way worse than Debian, which is always made fun of for being outdated, but its also really stable. I dont see why it should be even more stable.

I would honestly use CentOS stream which is probably similar to Debian, but has SELinux support.

The only supported Desktop is GNOME afaik. You can in theory run a modern Desktop through Distrobox or use EPEL to get others.

But then you are basically in Fedora territory, more stable packages but not officially supported. And I dont know what versions these Desktops have.

Then the question, what about atomic OSses like Fedora Atomic Desktops? These are even better for reliability.

Rpm-ostree could be adapted to CentOS Stream or also these RHEL clones. That sounds like a pretty good idea tbh, as the .spec files already exists, you just need to build it on COPR.

For atomic Debian there only are VanillaOS Orchid and EndlessOS.

EndlessOS seems to not do well, their installer is pretty broken and they are still using GNOME 41.5 while Debian 12 is on GNOME 43 since 8 months or so (GNOME got so much better in the last years, especially looks). So dont use it I guess. Also their website is quite a mess, relying on weird hosts to even download the .iso.

VanillaOS Orchid just did nothing when pressing "install" in a VM and is still beta.

Also rpm-ostree is way better than A/B root with a traditional package manager, as you have git for your OS, can reset, rebase, etc.

There is still a SIG (special interest group) for "atomic CentOS" but since all the CentOS sunsetting all their links are broken, the "project atomic" is replaced with Fedora CoreOS which I find very overcomplex and of course it is way less stable.

It should be pretty easy to build an atomic variant of CentOS Stream or the others

• use the container image from quay.io
• add rpm-ostree (they even have the package in their repo but no idea how updated that is)
• add the latest LTS kernel from CentOS Stream, Almalinux, RockyLinux or wherever from; and all the other needed packages workstation, server, virt-host, ...)
• remove dnf and yum

I wonder if this could be done easily with the bluebuild framework.

Removing AUX ports, forcing people to throw away their headphones, because you ALSO nowhere sell your overpriced USB DACs.

Climate Destruction

Stealing already existing nature land, forcing people out of it, and "taking care of it" and get carbon credits for it like what?

Mine Coal or Oil in 2024. Same with building nuclear plants.

We had a thing in Germany, where nuclear industries needed to pay for the disposal of nuclear waste. Instead of calculating real numbers, they should invest ⅒ or less of the actually needed money into trust funds. Like... what? Money doesnt grow just like that, it comes from exploiting workers, and "magically" they didnt need to pay that much. And of course that was too little so now the tax payers have to pay for these horrible companies.

Fedora Atomic Desktop, mainly KDE.

• Fedora adds their pretty useless Fedora Flatpak repo, that is more secure but has unofficial packages, an additional runtime in RAM and a very small set of apps (they need it due to "legal problems" when preinstalling apps. Like... just dont preinstall them but add a startup page to install them manually?)
• There is no good way to use NVIDIA as it needs proprietary drivers and some tweaks. Ublue fixes that. Same with other out-of-tree stuff. Not really their fault, but be aware that atomic Fedora has basically no proprietary NVIDIA driver support.
• i think their kernel is extremely bloated, I would prefer having separate ones for only intel, amd, nouveau and also removing all the legacy hardware drivers nobody uses
• an x86_64-v4 (or at least v3) variant would be really necessary (my 2012 Thinkpad is v3)
• they will likely prefer to use flatpak firefox, just like ublue does, ignoring the inability to sandbox processes at all. This is the list of issues that need solving until Firefox "can be shipped as flatpak"
• they use toolbx (with that silly rename from "toolbox") instead of distrobox. Distrobox has way more critical features like a separate home, which prevents breakages through conflicting dotfiles. Toolbx is the worse product.

Also, their traditional KDE variant is very bloated, which is why I updated this guide

But overall its still my favourite distro. Has a nice community, all the desktops you want, SELinux (which is btw required to make Waydroid somewhat secure) and their atomic stuff is an awesome base thanks to ublue.

Microkernels for the win! Monolithic kernels can be built tiny though, so they are also pretty stable

Add this search string in Firefox/Librewolf/Mull. On Desktop you need the addon "add custom search engine", on mobile its integrated. (No idea why)

Tor

There dont seem to be discoverable lemmy instances on Tor, even though there is a guide.

You could use this for searching lemmy over tor:

Note that the (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy") method seems better. The fedi-search is also awesome.

Hahaha that is actually mentioned in the article below

According to Robin Stern, PhD, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, "Gaslighting is often used in an accusatory way when somebody may just be insistent on something, or somebody may be trying to influence you. That's not what gaslighting is."[17]

Yeah Fedora uses that since forever and will even switch away from it in half a year or so, to tuned.

But a users reported way better batterylife on Ubuntu than on Fedora. So maybe they do something better?

The thing is, Linux Desktops dont have a unified WebView. I wonder how that would work on KDE and others

• TPM encryption or LUKS in general
• general distro architecture like ostree

Wow that extension is nice! Way better than the overcomplex "Firefox PWAs" I suppose.

Likely some DRM or tracking crap. So this is a Microsoft Teams message, not Firefox. What OS do you use?

To my knowledge they did some horrible "performance" fixes like disabling Windows Defender.

Windows requires you to install random software. If you are really careful, you could live without antivirus, but honestly just dont.

If your PC doesnt tolerate the overcomplicated Windows 11, any Linux distro is lighter.

I recommend to give Fedora Kinoite a shot. It is a very modern distribution model.

Fedora Discussion is a good resource for help, and I am always down to fix the small Kinoite issues like video codecs or flatpaks.

Do you HAVE to use Cinnamon? XD its a very slowly evolving Desktop Environment, Wayland is still experimental. I would recommend to try KDE.

Yes and I did a similar script but "just create a script" is a really bad solution.

Apps should need to declare a shortname and flatpak should have a shortcut for those with a separated command like flatrun.

Made pH 14 lye to break down some plant cells and extract stuff. Then putting "surgical spirit" (I hate common english terms) in it to extract it, pipetted it carefully and let it evaporate.

Best DMT you can get :D

What Desktop are you using? GNOME and KDE, as well as prealpha COSMIC and probably more support this out of the box.

Uhm did you forget a /s ?

If something is free Software, there is no supply chain. There is no security and no guarantees. For sure all these volunteers are mostly trying to deliver a good product, but they are offering free labor.

Saying "bullying is bad for the outcome of the product" is kinda ironic, as "not paying these devs" also is bad. This is just the extreme form

As did Fedora for RPM packaging since 31. Good progress, but signed commits have nothing to do here I think.

Or xz ;D