• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf … and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it’s even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He’s very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a ntfy server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

“AI” is good for pattern matching, generating boiler plate / template code and text, and generating images. Maybe also translation. That’s about it. And it’s of course often flawed/inaccurate so it needs human oversight. Everything else is like a sales scam. A very profitable one.

Fedora gives you a secure and functional desktop distro out of the box while with Arch, you can get that as well but have to invest more configuration time, since you have to configure things like Secure Boot, SELinux, disk encryption, firewalls, AppArmor and other security stuff by yourself, it’s not going to have all that jazz by default, since Arch is a minimalistic and modular DIY-like distro, so it’s up to the user to configure this. Arch doesn’t put obstacles in the way of the user but also doesn’t just preconfigure this stuff. But it’s all there if you need it. Arch also offers a linux-hardened kernel variant which uses various hardening patches of the GrapheneOS project for the kernel (not sure if Fedora offers this as well). Experienced Linux users tend to like Arch’s approach because of more flexibility, modularity and minimalism while still offering everything necessary, but the less experienced of a user you are the more you probably will have problems with this approach, and the more you want more things to be pre-configured out of the box, so that you as the user have to configure less stuff. The more you view it that way, the less suitable Arch is for you.

But both are excellent and modern distros. Fedora is generally for people who want to generally spend less time configuring their desktop distro. Arch is for people looking for either a more universal distro or something more modular, technically simple and customizable.

The RedHat backing of Fedora can be a blessing (lots of great stuff came from RedHat so far) but also could become a curse soon due to IBM’s influence (which bought RedHat some time ago, and IBM isn’t such a great company, and this can negatively impact RedHat as well) and current US politics (it’s a US-based company). Arch, on the other hand, is even more independent than Fedora is and it’s a fully community-run distro, and from all community-run distros, it’s of very high quality, similar to Debian. Both Debian and Arch are also quite democratic in nature. If IBM hadn’t bought RedHat, and US wouldn’t be like it is today, I’d maybe view this differently but as it is I’d rather use a community-run distro than a US-corporation backed one. Even if Fedora is still very independent as a project, or so it seems.

If you’re very well familiar with Arch there’s really no need to switch to Fedora, but it can save you some time or configuration trouble overall in some cases, while it could also mean more potential trouble with major upgrades than with Arch with its frequent but lightweight updates all the time and never a big major version upgrade because Arch has no versions at all, it’s purely rolling, whereas Fedora is a mixture of rolling and point release. That said, if you update your Arch very infrequently (e.g. only once every couple of weeks), you will also have a higher chance of update troubles (though these are often easy to solve for an experienced Arch user, but can be crippling for a newbie). To benefit from Arch’s update mechanisms, you have to update frequently, as in every couple of days, at the very least once a week. And you really should set up a fallback mechanism, e.g. via filesystem snapshots, so you can revert an update which went wrong. Although so far, one of my Arch installations here is like 7 years old and there were only very minor update issues during that whole time, all of which were solvable via downgrading a specific package, waiting 1-3 days for the fix and then upgrading that package. So I’d say Arch is much more stable than its reputation, but still, even objectively small update issues can be devastating for you if you don’t know how to solve them, so it again depends on the user.

Another factor is probably going to be whether the AUR or Fedora’s community repos have more of the additional packages that you need for your use cases, from the packages that aren’t in the default repos.

Which of the two distros makes more sense depends highly on the user, the user’s familiarity with Linux basics, the user’s available time, and general use cases. I’d say both choices are excellent for a desktop distro, and Fedora would immediately become my daily driver if I ever became unhappy with Arch. Which so far hasn’t happened.

Another option if you still can’t decide between those two excellent distros would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, which pre-configure more of Arch for an easier desktop use out of the box. So they are more like Arch of course (based on it) but trade away some of Arch’s subjective “weaknesses” for Fedora’s subjective “strengths”. I say “subjective” because those weaknesses and strengths can be different for each user and use case. Sometimes this gets forgotten in discussions like this. It’s not a clearly defined drawback if your distro doesn’t preconfigure most stuff out of the box. Whether that is a drawback or not depends on the user. However I’d assume that most users probably prefer more pre-configuration. But still, one size doesn’t fit all.

Well this got longer than intended but I hope it helps for decision making.

BNC Feed-Through Adapters (with Terminators if needed)

I’m kidding, I’m kidding!

For anyone too young, this was how you made gaming LAN parties in the early 90s when there was Doom, Doom 2, Duke3D and Quake 1 to play. It’s a switch- and hub-less network connection where every PC is literally connected to all others in one line which is fed through each PC. Making your connection extremely sh!tty if you were on one end or someone between you and the other guy had a terrible PC or had to reboot. Well, actually it was generally sh!tty. This problem went away completely when switches (even just hubs) became commonly available / cheap for consumers.

I do miss LAN parties though. Online gaming is also great but it’s just not the same.

Haven’t read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it’s fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that’s not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.

Basically yes. The alternatives passively become better simply because of the mainstream option becoming worse over time. I think it’s still going too slowly in general but I’m not complaining, better slow than not at all.

I use several, depending on use case:

• Tor Browser for general and anonymous web browsing (e.g. reading news, looking up stuff, and so on)
• Mullvad Browser as a clear web alternative for general use
• Librewolf for generally logging into sites with personally identifiable accounts (e.g. to buy stuff)
• Ungoogled Chromium for those few sites which only work with a Chromium-based browser, or other specific cases
• On Android (GrapheneOS): Tor Browser and Vanadium All regular browsers have some hardening applied and uBlock Origin installed.

Since you only mentioned 25% gaming, I’d recommend against a gaming-centric distro like Bazzite. Instead, use a generalist desktop distro.

Since you mentioned that you’re rather new-ish, I’d recommend against Arch-based distros like CachyOS. Instead, check out e.g. Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE. (Probably in that order of priority)

These aren’t hard recommendations, so you can do whatever and probably be fine either way, but it still doesn’t fit that well.

“Infamous” just refers to newbies who sometimes call if statements “if loops”. I’ve heard this quite a bit.

In theory, the law applies to everyone. In practice, it doesn’t apply to rich entities.

It’s nice to see a significant portion of people (probably still not enough though) leave proprietary social media. Unfortunately, it took them extremely long to realize why that’s a bad thing to use.

So that’s one step in the right direction I guess.

On the other hand, there generally isn’t much hope for humanity left because we haven’t learned from past mistakes, haven’t listened to science, and haven’t ensured ourselves a decent future on this planet.

Well, “nice” to have that feature, but you still shouldn’t use Discord, or at least limit your time on it as much as possible. Remember, when you use it, you’re part of the network effect that makes Discord big. You have to resist that. Take a look how Discord compares to pretty much any other messenger or communication tool in existence: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html Avoid it whenever possible, get your friends to leave it and weaken its network effect.

So, some of the drawbacks (there’s probably more):

• Discord has weak security (see URL above)
• Discord has non-existent privacy
• Discord has an incredibly vague privacy policy which means they do what they want. Even companies with strong privacy policies screw users over routinely. Guess what companies do who don’t even care about good privacy policies. They even weakened it further a while back because they need to train their new AI features on your data as well, and probably even their weak privacy policies were in the way before. Well, good thing that the users agreed that they can change it at any time for any reason and be fine with it.
• You grant all rights of everything you write, say, share or do on Discord to Discord, and everything you type, say, upload or share is being processed by their servers
• Discord tracks what you’re typing before sending it
• Discord suspended accounts and required even more user data for “verification”, such as telephone numbers which is completely unnecessary except for tracking and data selling purposes
• Discord shares chat logs with law enforcement (and they can share everything because they’re collecting everything)
• The Discord client app tracks what programs you have running so it can for example display what games you’re currently running. That means it contains a process logger. It has to scan every running application and then finds games out of those, and then you have to hope that only the game-specific bits are uploaded to their servers. Maybe that is the case, but can you trust them, and also to never change that? No.

If you have to use it:

• Never use their desktop app, always use the web version from a secondary browser (web apps running in the browser have much less rights than locally running applications), and even then limit what the site can access to the least amount of stuff necessary. If you never use your mic or camera then block it in the browser settings. Don’t trust Discord’s own mute setting (this also applies to other proprietary software).
• Use a fake e-mail alias / telephone number when creating your account, generally give them the least amount of data possible. Opt out of any options or features which are tied to you exposing more data to them
• Don’t give them additional money e.g. for their premium stuff (you already pay with data they gather from you)
• Block at least these API endpoints which are purely used for tracking purposes (there may be more though, and they might change) [easy to do with uBlock Origin for example]:

https://discord.com/api/v*/science
https://discord.com/api/v*/channels/*/typing
https://discord.com/api/v*/track*

• You can also block these related hosts safely without impairing Discord’s main functions (again there may be more):

crash.discordapp.com
status.discordapp.com
b.stats.paypal.com
app.adjust.com
client-analytics.braintreegateway.com

Yeah, I also don’t like such general laziness. It’s also not just limited to switching to Linux, it’s kind of the same with switching to anything that’s better but slightly(!) more inconvenient than what you’re used to. Well, you can’t make or be part of some progress unless you’re willing to sometimes get off your comfy couch and do something you’ve never done before. Like switching to Linux. Like stopping eating meat. Like stopping supporting certain evil companies. Like going to vote for a non-retarded option. Like voting with your wallet for the products you use/buy and also NOT use/buy. If everyone would do it, the world would be a different (better) place. But still too few are doing it. Because it’s slightly less convenient. And that would be so damn hard to change. Oh man would that be hard. Not.

Distro hopping is fairly normal if you’re still relatively new to Linux, I guess you do it less as time goes on, because you’ll have a better idea of whether or not a specific distro is appealing to you or not. To be able to even judge that you have to try out some distros for yourself, of course, so you need to do some distro hopping in order to tell what “direction” of distro is best for you. Sure you can read about it or watch videos but it’s never the same as actually running it for yourself.

The question is kind of impossible to answer because the two are so different. It doesn’t make sense to compare Linux to a version of Windows.

Also:

One side (myself included) is usually disgusted at Windows for being so bloated, full of spyware and dark patterns, closed, untrustworthy, fraudulent and inefficient. So personally, I’d rate Linux to be as good as a non-existing future version of Windows that’s never going to appear.

While the other side (most “average users”) are usually disgusted at Linux because Fortnite, Photoshop and that random stupid thing they bought at some store don’t run on it. As stupid as it sounds but that is usually enough reason for an average user to not like Linux. Also, he’d have to install it himself because it’s not preinstalled. Also a major hurdle for that kind of user. Unfortunately, the majority of users. Users like that probably rate Linux as bad as something like MS-DOS or Win 3.x because they feel that Linux is limiting them, but at the same time don’t want to change anything about their software choices.

The main problem is that common users are usually tied to specific proprietary software (or specific formats which can only be opened by specific proprietary software) which ties them to Windows, and anything that doesn’t run that software cannot be an alternative for them. That’s probably also the reason why MacOS isn’t more popular because it also can’t run everything, but it’s still better than Windows. So unless those users change their habits and the software they use, they will always be shackled to Windows and remain on that sinking ship until they’re literally beneath the ocean, because they never realize a sinking ship.

It’s important though to not fall into the trap of creating false balance, i.e. giving the same weight to a false or harmful statement than to a truthful or good statement, in the name of “fairness” or “objectivity”. Also, conservatives tend to shift to the right currently.

netstat is kind of deprecated, ss is more modern (from the iproute2 package) and uses very similar parameters.