And the second is going extinct.

Mice? What is this thing you talk of?

Exactly. I do it pretty regularly and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years.

And yet people here are still saying “no biggie”. It’s pure status quo bias.

Come on, having a 3-key combo for such a common task is a PITA. There’s a reason people have been complaining about this for decades.

Zero and I feel bad about it.

In (very partial) mitigation, I regularly contribute bug reports and other detailed feedback on lots of issue trackers.

Here’s the fundamental problem. I benefit from a whole bunch of FOSS projects. I absolutely cannot afford to donate 5 USD to each one per month. Even donating $1 to each would be unaffordable - and of course that makes no sense because of the fees problem. It’s the same problem with podcasts, and indeed basically all internet content.

We have to find a way to make non-DRM micropayments work better. It’s the only alternative to the poisonous ad-based information economy. I so want a solution like Flattr to become widely adopted. That is: I decide a cap on my monthly donation total, and then that sum is divided up among the projects I choose according to criteria I choose.

This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.

This is the sort of specialized question that should be asked in a specialized community, rather than here. It even concerns a country, and communities always exist for countries.

Who is this “we” you talk of?

And that’s on TV. Watching it as a spectator: wait, wait, wait, wait, wait (wait… wait…], WHOOSH

Cricket. Not even close.

just a voice reading a text […] Simon Whistler

The ultimate voice reading a text IMO. Specifically, a voice reading a text that it has clearly never seen before and where the producers have not even bothered to explain how to pronounce the names in it. IMO Simon Whistler is like Justin Bieber - essentially a product of the YouTube algorithm. In this case, a hipstery guy with an amazing beard and a posh authoritative accent talking confidently about… whatever. To me it just screams inauthenticity. But it’s obviously what people want so congrats to him for riding the gravy train.

Blah blah blah. Unencrypted data is the wrong default in 2025 for any OS. Linux should not be a poor man’s OS.

Sure. But defaults are important.

The main public library in Paris opens on every single day of the year except one, and it’s not Christmas Day. It’s 1 May.

I found that to be a revealing statement of values.

This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).

It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.

If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.

Yep. Pathetic and embarrassing.

This is all true. it’s something that crosses my mind whenever I spend (i.e. waste, probably) any time at all in debate. In person too, BTW, although text feels even worse because of the way it disembodies your interlocutor.

And yet. Open debate is all we have. The alternatives cannot possibly be better. I tell myself that even if 99% of it is useless, that remaining 1% can make a lot of difference statistically. I can certainly think of occasions when I’ve changed my mind, or at least seen things in a new light, because of a single comment someone made in debate. But yes, it’s rare.

If you do, then also choose full-disk encryption. It doesn’t make sense to close a small hole only to leave the big one gaping wide open. And yet on Linux FDE is mostly off by default, even in today’s era of encryption, even on laptops. Personally I don’t understand it.

Once you’re encrypted, then Secure Boot (if you even have the option of it) mitigates against the “evil maid attack”. To get access to your encrypted computer, the attacker will need physical access to it twice: first to swap out the bootloader, then to harvest the password you unsuspectingly passed to their freshly installed malware.

For most targets (i.e. you, probably), this would all be far too much trouble. But technically it closes a loophole: it means that you can go to Russia as a spy or a journalist and not have to carry your laptop on your person at all times.

Give it a few years.

I use sway in tabbed monocle mode, i.e. no windows at all, just one thing at a time like on mobile. Never going back to mousey Windowsy 1980s-style computing.