Very happy to read that, but honestly, when reading "$1 million USD" as investment sum, it reads more like an advertisement stunt than a real investment. (Like, 2 senior developers for one year?)

We need more diversity in Open Source operating systems for desktops, laptops and any of the *BSDs is a great candidate. (Would love to see Haiku getting some sponsorship or even ReactOS!)

Short book that hit hard:

• Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
• Never let me go, Kazuro Ishiguro
• The last unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
• 1984, George Orwell
• Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan

Nice, I like it very much when one can separate between personal fit and quality! :-)

For me the whole point of the book is to accept the story, while your own sense/mind tells you to not play along, which made me reflect about how much - dare I say everyone of us - plays along everyday... Besides this, I simply like Ishiguros writing style (non native English speaker here, so wonder what a native would think about it.)

Would love to get a list of books from you that you respect and like (or respect and don't like ;-)).

Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?

1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions

The article doesn't mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. ... oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don't get shit from the companies/shareholders.

Seriously, I'll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.

"WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc."

WTF. Most of these activities are actual lawful in the country I life in. (Especially with adblockers, the content mafia tried to outlaw it and failed in court, several times.)

Seriously, unless you are extremely specialized and know exactly what you are doing, IMHO the answer is: Always (and even being extremely specialized, I would still enable a firewall. :-P)

Operating systems nowadays are extremely complex with a lot of moving parts. There are security relevant bugs in your network stack and in all applications that you are running. There might be open ports on your computer you did not even think about, and unless you are monitoring 24/7 your local open ports, you don't know what is open.

First of all, you can never trust other devices on a network. There is no way to know, if they are compromised. You can also never trust the software running on your own computer - just look at CVEs, even without malicious intentions your software is not secure and never will be.

As soon as you are part of a network, your computer is exposed, doesn't matter if desktop/laptop, and especially for attacking Linux there is a lot of drive by attacks happening 24/7.

Your needs for firewalls mostly depend on your threat model, but just disabling accepting incoming requests is trivial and increases your security by a great margin. Further, setting a rate limit for failed connection attempts for open ports like SSH if you use this services, is another big improvement for security. (... and of course disabling password authentication, YADA YADA)

That said, obviously security has to be seen in context, the only snake oil that I know of are virus scanners, but that's another story.

People, which claim you don't need a firewall make at least one of the following wrong assumptions:

• Your software is secure - demonstrably wrong, as proven by CVEs
• You know exactly what is running/reachable on your computer - this might be correct for very small specialized embedded systems, even for them one still must always assume security relevant bugs in software/hardware/drivers

Security is a game, and no usable system can be absolutely secure. With firewalls, you can (hopefully) increase the price for successful attacks, and that is important.

I have an idea in which federal state Microsoft Germany headquarters will move next...

X-COM (from the 90's, not the remake):

I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.

In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.

So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.

I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.

There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed...

... THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED...

I didn't even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).

Haven't found any modern game, where this would be even possible!

Mandatory link to OpenXcom

First, Fedora is not Red Hat but their own community. (Although heavily sponsored by Red Hat) Second, Red Hat is FOSS.

The ones hostile to FOSS are all the freeloading companies, which used the work of Red Hat to increase their own profit, w/o contributing anything back.

If it is so easy, cheap and so much fun to support a stable Distribution for 10 years with backports for security vulnerabilities and drivers, I am very surprised that we don't have hundreads of community distributions which do this.

Finally, over the years Red Hat contributed a load of the things we take for granted now.

(Writing this as a happy Debian user. I am just tired of reading this kind of bullshit again and again and again.)

Don't worry, while you are waiting for Windows to react to your input, you can enjoy watching some ads in the near future! :-)

• Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu

In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that's another story).

For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works(TM) and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).

Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).

I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.

I'll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)

Let me give it a try:

Imagine you are having breakfast and sitting on your breakfast table. Everything on your table and reachable w/o getting up is what your CPU holds in its register. When you need something from the fridge in your home, this is your RAM. If you need something that is not in your fridge, you have to get dressed, get out of our home, walk to the groceries store which is half an hour away, find what you are looking for, pay for it, walk home for around half an our, switch back to your relaxed clothing and finally you can continue your breakfast. The groceries store is your hard disk/ssd whatever. With compression, imagine you have a big second fridge in the basement (or the house next to yours, you get the idea). Not as good as having stuff on your table or in your fridge, but usually at least an order of magnitude better than having to visit the groceries store.

there is no android phone that I am passionate about,

Not what you asked for:

A phone is a tool which should enable you to do stuff. Be passionate about friends, hobbies, art, not a piece of plastic.

Being forced to use iOS (work phone) and Android (Samsung, also work), both suck IMHO but Android sucks less.

My next Android will be a Pixel, as others suggested custom roms are the way to go, but even vanilla Android is more functional/open/practical for my needs than iOS.

I would never buy Apples shit with my own money: Dumped down, locked down and in the end you are renting a device from Apple to pay fees for their Appstore and Cloud offerings and vendor lock in. No thanks.

... first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.

Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.

So, serious question: How is this good for me?

Edit: typo

Thanks, great input.

I totally agree - ZRAM isn't magic and of course it will fall flat on its face for loads of encrypted, compressed or pure random data. In my limited day to day usage I just never hit that situation, so far.

Again, I fully agree, I wouldn't have expected that the N4120 works so well with ZRAM. For work I am forced to use a recent mac with loads of RAM. When just browsing the web/checking emails I don't feel any noticeable difference between the mac and the Stream for the CPU. (Of course, CPU/IO bound tasks are another story, and the display of the mac is in another league.) Usually I would consider myself to be quite sensitive to speed, I notice a real difference between using Gnome (with impatience etc. extensions) and Xfce, concerning the responsiveness of my desktop.

I'll check the BIOS settings, I expect the same as you. Not sure, if I will lower the reserved RAM for the iGPU, everything works fine at the moment and I want to try some light gaming on this machine.

In theory, I would love to use KDE and use Gnome only with many plugins and tweaks (like IMHO the majority of Gnome users out there, see Ubuntu desktop).

In practice, KDE has still too many unsolved problems:

• For years now, I try KDE from stable mainstream distros in standard VMs, always something from the vanilla KDE setup segfaults within the first 30min w/o me even starting to customize it. It seems this is not only a personal anecdote, but the experience of a lot of people trying KDE. (Gnome in these VMs runs stable w/o any segfaults, these VMs sometimes are running for days)
• KMail ... even the KDE community themselves point out all the trouble with KMail: It works, until it doesn't, no support for GMail OOTB, etc ... This problems with KMail are known/reported/experienced for years now, w/o being fixed. Thunderbird/Evolution work OOTB and stable for my needs since a decade by now
• Online-Accounts for Gnome works on every distribution OOTB for me, for all my professional/private needs. Again, in theory Dolphin is a much better file manager than Nautilus, in practice I can remote mount everything in Nautilus

In summary: I am not a big fan of Gnomes UI and would much prefer KDE, but in practice Gnome works stable, lets me setup my online accounts/connectivity and email and simply works. The KDE community ignored too many of this issues for too long (stability) and is still ignoring the widely known issues with KMail (fix it, dump it or at least communicate it is not ready for general use). I lost trust that these issues will ever be fixed by now. (Was a happy KDE 3.X user back in the day.)

The original Cowboy Bebop series. Brilliant episodes with a great story arc, good characters and awesome Jazz soundtrack. The first few episodes do the overall experience no justice.

Supply chain attacks are extremely cheap/easy and very effective, so get prepared for more of them in the future.

It really bothers me, that many companies make billions utilizing open source without contributing money/employees etc. to secure/supply/maintain supply chains.

Mandatory XKCD: Dependency

The 'artist' faces a potential 2 years in prison (!).

Of course I assume he won't be put in prison for 2 years, still, the German legal system is a bad joke. Politicians/managers of companies who willfully and knowingly harm society have nothing to fear, putting an image on the wall has the potential to bring you behind bars.

Seriously, I don't understand the point of the article, if there is one.

It seemed more like a confused enumeration of systems which are POSIX conform and in the end it talks about Wayland.

Is the point that Wayland breaks compatibility with X11/X.org and is mostly a Linux thingy? (AFAIK FreeBSD is working on a Wayland port, but no one else.)

Anyway, I am a happy Wayland user for several years now, although I am of course unhappy about the split with the *BSDs, OTOH most 'NIX software nowadays uses so many Linux APIs, that Wayland is IMHO no big game changer when talking about portability anyway.

Rolling out ZRAM to all my boxes right now! 🙃

Do you also tweak other settings for ZRAM? According to ArchWiki PopOS settled for the following settings:

vm.swappiness = 180
vm.watermark_boost_factor = 0
vm.watermark_scale_factor = 125
vm.page-cluster = 0

I am testing this settings right now and cannot say I experience a difference compared to the defaults.

WTF, is there no death sentence in Japan for crimes against humanity and the damage done to rich peoples bottom line? /s

Technically it is a compressed SWAP disk in RAM, but the compression ratio is impressive and it feels like more RAM for me. My pleasure to share, hope it will help you someday! :-)

... I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures...

Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always 'I believe' or 'proven by anecdote'.

Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.

Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.

Sorry, but how are a lot of the questions relevant for this community?

Especially concerning the (family) income, age, being neurodivergent etc. These are sensitive information and seem more fitting for a market survey/selling ads.

What is your goal with the answers? What are your research questions? How will the answers help this community?

Look at the shit Apple produces and understand it is not only a function of money.

What? XXX hasn't been mentioned yet?!?

The first part was a brilliant persiflage of all the boring James Bond movies (Pierce Brosnan at that time) with awesome action scenes, a lot of fun and mostly a killer OST. To this day I don't understand that most people didn't get the persiflage part, although the James Bond agent gets killed within the first minutes of the movie...

Thanks for your answer, I guess fair enough. ;-)

Good luck for your survey!

It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop(TM) for more than 20 years now! :-)

IMHO you should first figure out what exactly happens/goes wrong with your Ubuntu installations.

Immutable distros might or might not be a solution, but if the core of the problem is really the quality of the Ubuntu updates for example, you could try to run Debian (stable).

But again, the suggestion to use Debian is throwing a solution in the room which might not fit your problem.

Just as a reference point: I am running Debian stable on Laptops, Netbooks, Raspberry Pis and in virtual machines (AMD64/AArch64) and have no weird bugs, everything works for years now and runs smooth.

Concerning the Steamdeck... I love them, they run perfectly fine, but unless you are tweaking them/do more than run games, you cannot really compare them to what happens on your desktop.

FreeCiv is a classic and still fun. rogue and nethack are good, too.

Debian, settled down few years ago and my fallback would be Fedora.

Nice thing about Debian is, I can use it for servers, desktop and raspberry pi on am64, arm7 and aarch64. This is a real killer feature for me, because I'd rather do interesting things with my devices instead of learning n different ways to accomplish the same tasks. (e.g. using different distributions for server/desktop/pi and having to figure out 3 times the names of the same packages or where the configuration file in which version is expected.)

Thank you for your advice. Right now my setup works so I'll try to not waste my entire weekend playing with technology, but if I need further tweaks in the future I'll look into ZSWAP.

One question: Do you know why Fedora and PopOS decided for ZRAM and against ZSWAP? As I wrote already somewhere else: I did choose ZRAM for it being default in Fedora, which gave me some trust that people better informed/experienced choose ZRAM over ZSWAP.

Ah, the usual propaganda from the fucking content mafia and the lobbyists they bought:

“The takedown of Fmovies is a testament to the power of collaboration in protecting the intellectual property rights of creators around the world,” Knapp says.

“Strengthening intellectual property rights is an important element of the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership,” Knapper said

I'll happily repeat again and again and again:

• If pirate sites offer a better user experience than your paid offerings, you don't deserve payments at all
• The money goes mostly to some rich fucks, fucking shareholders, lawyers and bought politicians and and not to the artists/creators of the movies (with some exceptions for the really big names)
• I will very happily pay a service which is not shitty, not region locked, doesn't annoy me with advertisement and is reasonably priced. The illegal sites are demonstrating that it is possible to sustain such an offer on advertisement alone. Don't give me fucking bullshit that it is not possible for companies like Netflix while most of the subscription fees are going to shareholders and higher management instead into creating new content

Seriously, fuck all the politicians and governments which act against the benefit of most of their population to conspire with the content mafia.

Thanks, great write-up!

Perhaps for perspective, because 'rich' is relative and I am always surprised how hard it is to forget that every person/class lives in a world of their own.

When I was studying, I had to work to support myself, coming from a working class background. My whole time at the university was like visit mandatory courses, study, work and use weekends to study some more/do classwork. My parents could neither help me financially or with advice.

I meet a study friend from a normal 'middle class' background on the street. He would spent many weekends to do short trips, go sailing, visit family, ... perfectly fine and I am happy he could afford to live like that. During our conversation he mentioned casually, that he was going on a multi week vacation, because 'Sometimes you just need to get out and see something else.'. He didn't mean it in bad faith, I just felt like shit because at that time I haven't had vacation for multiple years.

Now, I am perfectly fine with my friend living a good life. What really gets to me, though, is that for example the middle class takes all their privileges for granted and nowadays you can suddenly read in newspapers discussions, if it is still worth to go work if you cannot even afford to buy your own flat/house. Where I live, working class couldn't afford to buy a flat/house for decades now, but there was never a discussion whether it would still be worth for the working class to work. The discussion is more about how to force the working class to work more for less.

Great write up, thank you very much!

I expect Google to keep Mozilla/Firefox on the lifeline indefinitely to avoid antitrust issues in the states and EU, so Mozilla/Firefox won't go anywhere.

Still, this doesn't mean anything, because I often need Chrome or Safari to access some websites.

In the end it is quite funny: Moving a lot of stuff to the web made Linux a more realistic desktop option, at the same time to access a lot of stuff on the web one needs to run a Blink browser.

IMHO the most annoying thing is, that we could have at least some laws, which mandate that every government service must be available to Open Source users and every government paid software must run on at least Linux. Thanks to lobbying and power this will never happen.

Edit: To state it more clearly: Firefox is IMHO in bad shape and in a bad situation. Firefox won't die, but at the same time right now I already need Chrome/Safari browsers, because Firefox support is broken on many sites. I see no way Firefox can gain significant market share, especially seeing what regular consumers tolerate from Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome.

One is not enough, and a lot of great movies where already named, still, some great movies are missing:

• Heat (Michael Mann) Every single time I see it, it is brilliant and I discover something new
• Jin Roh (The original animation movie), awesome atmosphere and only after the 2nd viewing one can really appreciate it
• Near Dark (1987) Why the hell did nobody ever produce something like this ever again?
• Miami Vice (Michael Mann), 'Style over substance', in a great way, although I have the shaky camera
• Seven Samurai
• Casablanca
• Strange Days
• Point Break
• XXX (Nobody understood that it was a parody back in the days :-P)
• What we do in the shadows
• Brazil
• Rocky
• Eternal Sunshine ...
• The city of lost children
• Leon the professional
• Dolls
• The Killer (The original of course)
• The last unicorn
• Dark City
• The thing
• The Lost Boys
• Spirited Away
• Donnie Darko
• Rashomon
• Brother (2000)
• Parasite
• Hatsukoi (First Love)

... from the top of my mind. :-P

Sorry, wasn't aware of the other posts but will do my due diligence in the future!

Thank you for the heads up!