Sarcasm: 9/10 for effort

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The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.

An individual has no privacy to protect if the laws are wrong, and laws cannot be changed by individuals.

Bro doesn’t need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn’t need DE to do anything.

Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible

If by “most” you mean only the ones over 500 bucks. Chromebooks have almost completely taken over the bottom end of the market (which is more than adequate if you’re not gaming) and Chromebooks are not compatible with Linux unless you enjoy getting your hands very dirty.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

The government does not “own” Meta. Words have meanings.

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

The fact that you’re even saying such things as “time constraints” or “to learn new software” suggests an attitude to computing shared by about 0.01% of the population. It cannot be re-stressed enough to the (sadly shrinking) bubble that frequents this community: the vast majority of people in the world have never touched a laptop let alone a desktop computer. Literally everything now happens on mobile, where FOSS is vanishingly insignificant, and soon AI is going to add a whole new layer of dystopia. But that is slightly offtopic.

It’s a good question IMO. Choosing software freedom - to the small extent that you still can - should not just be about the freedom to tinker, it should also just be easy.

The answer is Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora.

Not quite. XML came several years after HTML! Both are descendants of SGML.

IMO most of the suggestions here are small beer.

If you want to be very scientific about this, and to calculate cumulative sums of harm, with no discount for the future, then just look for some little-known hydrocarbons corp - it will top the list.

If you apply a future discount, but no discount (or a small one) for the suffering of non-human animals, then some meat company will probably top the list.

Yeah I know all that, but for whatever reason this dumbass domain seems to be the only one I ever see. Personally I’m all in favor of having a respectable ,canonical domain for newbies and occasional users, but this one is not going to cut it.

Slightly tangential but PeerTube is never going to compete with the Big Red Play Button if people use juvenile domain names like “peertube.wtf”

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Ha, good analogy.

For humans, that’s true with caveats. For the natural world of which they are a part and on whose continued health they depend for their future wellbeing - it is not true in any way, shape or form.