Thanks for clarifying, as a German I did not know and was confused by this. Now I know but am still confused.

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.

• Cult of the Lamb
• Vampire Survivors
• Halls of Torment

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.

There are lots of great live bands but maybe these were most memorable for various reasons: Magma (just hypnotic), Lazuli (very entertaining live band every single time), The Pineapple Thief (great prog rock with incredible drummer), The Musical Box (playing and re-acting old Genesis. Too young to see the originals but just in time to see the remakes), Le Silo (super high energy duo or trio, don’t even remember, but man that was wild), Aranis (they don’t exist anymore unfortunately)

I don’t view it as badly. He’s probably overly defensive and paranoid and interprets some forms of criticism as attacks. But I do not see this as an argument against his competence or contributions to the project, or against using GrapheneOS altogether, at all. In fact, I even kind of like having someone paranoid as the head of a security-focused OS. Seems like a useful synergy to me. Also, AFAIK the GrapheneOS project now also has others posting about the project, not just him alone. I think this was also a result of his “miscommunication” in the past. Furthermore, the project is too important (there are almost zero high-security and high-privacy mobile OSes!) to escalate this into a problem. And furthermore again, there might also be parties involved who are ACTUALLY interested in attacking GrapheneOS and weakening its popularity, for their own gains. And so when your successful and also high-quality project is under regular attacks from various angles, you might get more paranoid and misinterpret some valid criticism as a result. Combine that with Rossman’s over-dramatic nature and high reach, and someone paranoid like Daniel might take it the wrong way. And then communication spirals out of control into various escalations. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Around 2.5-3 days. On a LAN party in 2003 or so. 2 nights without sleep. Lots of caffeine. It was fun at first but really started feeling terrible after the 2nd night.

He’s mostly correct about lots of things, but not about everything (for example, he hated on everything GrapheneOS just because its lead dev is a bit socially awkward). Plus he’s overly dramatic and verbose which can be annoying. Sometimes you must be to get abstract or complicated points across better, but I still feel he’s too aggressive in that regard. I also like what he’s trying to achieve with FUTO in general. Overall, he’s a great and valuable activist who has almost all of his eggs in the right baskets.

“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.

Some time ago I would have recommended Mullvad and Proton, but after Proton’s CEO publicly mentioned Trump favorably in some way I’d say just use Mullvad.

Don’t read too much bad news, it’s bad for the general mood. But still expect everything to go to hell, because it absolutely will, and sooner than anticipated. But you can still enjoy some amount of non-hellish time. And then make some preparations for an upcoming fascist government, rising crime/vandalism, and for climate change hitting everywhere with full force. Existing systems might not stay functional. Start building up local communities to support each other. Make the best of any situation and make forward-looking decisions. Don’t despair, but also don’t have false hopes. It will get much worse before it will get any better.

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.

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