Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it’s hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won’t tell people they’ll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won’t understand.

The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren’t up to date yet, and won’t be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I’m not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren’t FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let’s backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we’ll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we’ll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn’t vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

Simply put, if you want to install Linux you’re gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn’t paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).

Unrelated to balenaEtcher but I haven’t been able to flash ISO files from Windows 11, either by using Rufus, Etcher, Fedora Media Writer, or even the WSL. I need to borrow a computer running a FLOSS operating system or to install OpenBSD first, and then from OpenBSD to download and burn an ISO file.

https://circle.gnome.org/? Never tried their ISO software, I just use dd.

I wasn’t talking to you. This is none of your business.

Sorry, missed the Office part but both Cozy Cloud and Nextcloud support OnlyOffice. It’s 12€/month at Cozy Cloud though, and the service is France-centric… For now.

You’re missing the point. I will source my post (because I’m a nice and, frankly, jobless person) even tho I was answering to the OP, because this is a public document.

But you’re the one coming out of the wood with baseless claims. Every serious privacy guide claims that you shouldn’t use OpenPGP for opsec, which is well beyond degoogling anyway, so why are you even recommending ProtonMail over cheaper offers like Nubo, Mailo, or any other indie mail provider? Why are you suggesting another data silo in a degoogling community?

lawn enforcement agencies

Good morning Sir,

Politics aside, the OpenPGPjs library would be a viable alternative with a client side checksum program, but sure enough, the builds are reproducible.

Until then, this isn’t even technically true.

For example, you can’t import your emails with the POP3 so when your mailbox gets full you can’t even pay for one month and download them all while deleting them from the server.

It isn’t usable for free accounts and there was pre-4.0 a cult-like trend on the support subreddit to disclose your tier. I’m not aware of any moderation post, or note, asking users to stop this practice (u/ProtonMail was listed as a mod account).

I was going to add sources anyway, I’ve only had 3 hours of sleep last night, but you need to understand that we don’t owe you resources. I, for one, don’t know you. I wasn’t talking to you when you approached me with a nominal sentence, and you need to acknowledge that you base your tone on the assumption that I didn’t consent to this conversation.

So of course I’m still considering blocking you. Going this route, you would keep the same entitled, passive-offensive tone.

As rude as it is, people will only adapt to this by drawing boundaries in a more cohesive, efficient way. You need to check your attitude, and to embrace the resource-centric nature of the internet. Improve your tooling.

Thank you.

Tired. In auto-pilot mode for the last 3 hours.

Part of it is based on the OpenPGP standard itself, e.g. you only need the passphrase to decrypt your emails, not to encrypt them and certainly not to change your settings.

Part of it is based on experience.

Part of it actually needs a few sources; the Lavabit part is speculative but solid, there are bread crumbs all over the web.

I’m tired but:

• you’d need to compare the checksums of their web-based cryptography at every login,
• you could use their bridge but you’d need to give your OpenPGP passphrase to change your settings, for no reason
• they have the CIA at their administration council,
• they have an history of unethical behavior toward Twitter survivors,
• they have an history of spreading conspiracy theories,
• they have an history of contacting hosting providers asking them to remove blog posts,
• they didn’t share the Lavabit fundraiser so they could get quietly issued a US National Security Letter (overriding the First Amendment and preventing Ladar from appealing),
• they can access to your entire mailbox anyway, not just to the email contents,
• this has enabled the arrest of Social and Climatic Justice activists, they replied they couldn’t resist a Swiss court order (so that’s not their fault I guess, the tech is just bad)…

Why would you trust them for your opsec, and why would you enable them further?

Alternatives include Disroot, Nubo, and Zaclys.

#Proton #ProtonMail

As a CEO you may either attract more contents creators by paying them more or by lowering the quality of your editorial curation. It means you may either risk bankruptcy or knowingly foster depression at a global scale, unless like Mozilla’s Pocket you chose to piggyback on a decentralized model and have no skin in the game.

People have brought up Kendrick Lamar but I’m sorry, he’s never been recommended by my partner’s Spotify account. Not even once.

Some people recommend dual booting. I recommend having at least one cheap SBC in your home that’s dedicated to running Linux, and eventually to keep Windows on big enough machines for professional work, video games, and so on.

But the kids? Sure, they should run Linux, unless specified otherwise by their schools, until they’re old enough to decide by themselves.

I’d encourage you to push for free software if you’re stuck on Windows, but that’s another issue, I just think you might keep this machine on Windows and install Linux on a lowtech computer. It depends on what you need Linux for but with my eeePC the only bottleneck is the web.

I may sound too radical, but I’d go so far as to support a common Logseq knowledge graph.

Hi, this is an excellent answer.

I didn’t mean to dismiss online resources, but to highlight the continuous entrepreneurship in dismissing foundational knowledge. My post was honestly, rather bad for the reasons mentioned a few minutes ago, but the sentence “Linux is only free if your time has no value” erases the pleasure of reading books and getting new skills. It literally means that free and open source software can’t be more useful than whatever Google and Microsoft are developing, which doesn’t even include passwords managers.

Secondly, the difference you make between free and open source software are very interesting but to my understanding, it may boil down to the freedom 0 : free software is made for everyone, whereas open source software is made for specialized communities. Because most people don’t even write simple software, and I’m not talking about enterprise-level complexity here, most open source software is written for other developers. I’ve observed thousands of anonymous messages which coincidentally blurred the difference between free software and open source software by e.g. promoting the sway window manager that we know and love. On 4chan at least, calling people to hurt themselves has become an acronym (to whomever reads this, please don’t hurt yourself).

I’m not sure my own definition of free vs. open source software is the right one, but I know the actual difference is leveraged to kill people – comrades even.

And finally, I agree about everything else. I didn’t properly develop about GNU software because I was trying to leave my screen.

Hi, it may depend on the background, but personally I’ve been stuck on problems for months, only to solve them by spending 2 hours reading a book. I’m talking about basic self-taught tools like Git, your first programming language, and so on – Microsoft and Google build and leverage platforms to keep specific demographics stuck for years, and to some extent, to kill them.

I’m not talking about solving problems on a complex stack with tools that you already know, but rather about learning to program the output of a Skribe document as a social media-addict 4chan user. We’re not even talking about Makefiles here, but about hundreds of thousands of people actually giving a hand to free software development, instead of trying to change the world in free form fields.

Alright, that’s pretty cool, sorry – I thought it was a list of links automatically inserted in lieu of comments.

I’ve been trying to get into the IndieWeb for years, but I’ve been struggling to implement it. Doesn’t it rely on a central server too? Can we use it in a fully e.g. decentralized or federated way – would it even make sense, or could we easily switch to another flagship server, as we did with the Freenode takeover?

Please feel no pressure to reply, I can do my own research ^_^

Thank you, a tip for finding valuable resources is to add the best tools to your query, e.g. “org emacs para method”.

You may lookup specialized jargon on Wikipedia, and then merely append them to your query.

Hi, because there are messages on 4chan claiming that “Linux is only free if your time has no value.”

Thank you for the nice message, but to be honest, I regret posting it. I should’ve put more care into the style – anyway, there have been daily persistent anti-free software messages on 4chan for more than a decade, leading me to think about Olgina-style contractual workers. Some patterns seem to (1) defend Google, (2) put users back into depression, (3) promote the confusion between libre software and open source software, (4) shatter the EU and US IT work forces over demographic traits, through anti-LGBTQIA+, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic messages.

Some of these pattern seem to match known Kremlin strategies, others defend the interests of Microsoft and Google so well, matching other patterns I’ve observed with Android, YouTube, and Windows/Office 365 development, that I’m starting to collect evidence in Denote. I need to sort out coincidences, to account for the fact that many orgs may actually post anonymously on 4chan (including Nazis and orgs false-flagging as Nazis) but that’s one hell of a lot of coincidences.