That’s alright, and I’m also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.
I’m not sure if you’ve come across it yet, but there’s a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.
Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.
I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.
I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.
On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.
edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.
But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.
I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))
That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.
It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.
Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.
Desktop Linux is far from it’s only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can’t simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!
Enough folks drank the coolaid,
You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.
with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet
I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.
Tor is slow
It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation
and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers
This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.
Lynx
I know of two other uses for it:
I don’t care much about the OS people use
On a surface level, same. On the other hand, I do believe that more users, if combined with certain design and documentation choices, can enable more contributions and fixes and software support, and I believe this has already been a huge factor in recent improvements to the Linux experience like Proton.
Can’t possibly be more vulnerable than Windows
The linked article provides many examples where security techniques lag far behind Windows. Vulnerability isn’t as simple as being ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘less vulnerable’, it’s a complex concept, and both GNU/Linux and Windows have design decisions which make each better than the other in various ways. We need to understand security in a more nuanced way than “x is better than y” if we actually want to protect ourselves from threats.
A Linux installation can be set to run root with no password or prompt. A Linux user can choose to never update their software - one could argue that Windows forced OS updates are an improvement here. The argument that the typical user has more technical understanding is a weak defense (as in, we really really really should not rely on that) and also irrelevant when we’re talking about Linux gaining a wider audience.
Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.
Average users aren’t installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.
A few years outdated, but relevant: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
Much better than I’d expected, that’s great to hear! The minor bugs are always annoying, but like you mentioned, the speed boost hopefully outweighs it.
Definitely update us on UE, I’ve haven’t explored the EU or Unity on Linux, and it would be nice to know if they work, because “you can use Godot” doesn’t work for everyone.
Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.
Is this just an automatic suspend after inactivity? Because if so, I think it the inactivity timeout can be disabled in the settings menu, as a workaround until you can figure it out.
I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.
Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it’s a nice experience.
Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
Keyboard has too many keys, bloat/10
probs don’t need that mouse either
If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?