I’d go with the Debian package. That’s tied into the system. You get nice updates, there’s more eyes on what the upstream developers do, sometimes the Debian maintainers disable things like tracking, fix vulnerabilities in libraries. It’s smaller, less permission issues… It’s just safer and more convenient…

I’ll go for Flatpak once there’s some benefit. For example the sandboxing which is great to have for proprietary software. Or if the package isn’t available in the Debian repositories, and the alternative would be some third-party repo or deb file downloaded from a random website. And in rare cases when I need a specific version and the Debian maintainers are stuck with an old release.

Depends. Sometimes you’ll get a PC magazine or blog cover an upcoming laptop and test Linux compatibility. Or someone writes a long Reddit post after they got it, or updates the Arch Wiki. There definitely are ways to learn about Linux-compatibility with new models. We used to have Amazon comments and reviews…Just be super cautious with all the AI bots and fake comparison sites out there.

And it’s a bit more complicated with gaming stuff. Sometimes they’ll add a weird webcam, or unsupported RGB LED controller, or have weird quirks in the firmware. Some other model lines like a business laptop from Dell or Lenovo tend to be just fine and you’ll get 100% Linux compatibility. There’s no guarantee, but any way, after a few Linux nerds blogged about it you should be fine.

It loaded several times without an ad for me. So maybe they don’t have ads for Germany yet and you should try a VPN?

It’s hard to avoid, though. To my knowledge there’s cumbersome solutions like run an Icecast2 proxy and just proxy it 24/7 so you won’t reconnect. Or re-program your internet radio to start the stream muted and unmute after 30s.

Edit: Forget what I said, it does German language Shopify ads now. Not every time, but some of the times.

Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?

Yeah, probably jump ship to a life without a mobile phone, online banking and train tickets. 🙁

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Load it in Lutris and try. Most games these days work in Linux, thanks to Proton. With the exception of games with Anticheat. But since your version is pirated, any Anticheat might be removed.

Thanks for the link! As a short aside for the other people here: Try not to spam developers. That usually achieves the opposite and makes them miserable, when we want them to not burn out, and write good software for us. A thumbs-up emoji is the correct reaction for the average person. Or for the pros - a code-review highlighting specific issues within the code.

Uh. I’d really prefer if people experimented with new technology a bit more cautiously and not directly jump to “the biggest release […] ever done”.

I feel Anti-DDOS and Cloudflare as a web application firewall has traditionally been a lot of snake-oil as well. Sure there’s applications for it. Especially for the paid plans with all the enterprise functions. And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, where it serves as a means to circumvent NAT and replace DynDNS. But there’s a lot in-between where I (personally) don’t think it’s needed in any way. Especially before AI.

From my own experience, personal blogs, websites of your local club, church, random smaller projects, small businesses… rarely need professional DDoS protection. I’ve been fine hotsing it myself for decades now. And I’m not sure if people know what they’re paying with. I mean everytime we get a Cloudflare hiccup (or AWS…) we can see how the internet has become very centralised. Half of it just goes down for an hour or so, because we all rely on the same few, big tech services. And if you’re terminating SSL there, or use it to look inside of the packets to prevent attacks, you’re giving away all information about you and your audience/customers. They don’t just get all metadata, but also read all the transferred content/data.

It all changed a bit with the AI crawlers. We definitely need countermeasures these days. I’m still fine without Anubis or Cloudflare. I block their IP ranges and that seems to do most of the job. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what’s really happening. Which tools we have, instead of always going with the market leader with the biggest marketing budget. Which problems we’re faced with in the first place and what tools are effective. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. And you can’t just roll out random things without analyzing the situation properly. Maybe the correct answer is Cloudflare, but there’s also other way less intrusive and very effective means available. And maybe you’re not even the target of script kiddies or annoyed users. And maybe your your convoluted Wordpress setup isn’t even safe with the standard web application firewall in front.

Anubis is an entirely different story. It’s okay concerning privacy and centralisation. It doesn’t come without downsides, though. I personally hate if that thing pops up instead of the page I requested. I don’t like how JavaScript is mandatory now to do anything on the web. And certain kinds of crawler protection contribute to the situation how we can’t google anything anymore. With all the people locking down everything and constructing walled gardens, the internet becomes way less useful and almost impossible to navigate. That’s all direct consequences of how we decide to do things.

I’m sure we didn’t. We just needed a lot of people to work underground in the coal mines and in the heavy industry, steel etc. And those were labor intensive jobs, so they needed to attract a lot of workforce. In a coordinated effort, sure. But out of economic motivation. These people ended up working hard jobs alongside each other. And they built and shaped the region. Made it rich. And I got born into that kind if place. With some history to it and a bit less ethnic uniform population. But there’s no evidence they read some old scripture from nomadic people and thought yes, that what we need to enforce… Instead people found out there’s a lot of coal underneath their feet. And they found out the more they dig up and sell to other people, the more wealth they get. The workers wanted to have a roof over their heads and something to eat for themselves and their families. I think that’s very straightforward, and my ancestors were clever enough to figure out how trade works, on their own. I’m not aware of any evidence of a different origin story for my region. Sure. Maybe we didn’t invent the word for it. But the motivation and decisions of the feudal lords, company owners and employers, and the government is well documented.

And concerning America: Isn’t that a melting pot because all the Europeans went there? In order to seek opportunity, or not to die of famine? And some Africans got there as well and we all know how much say they had in that process? I mean obviously North America is a melting pot. Otherwise we’d find Native Americans there and Aboriginal Canadians, not a load of people with European decent. But that doesn’t have anything to do with 1965?

I watched too much Star Trek when I was young. I think 195 have to go. All humans should unite and reach for the stars, instead of some stupid in-fighting, killing each other, and burning down of wealth because of bigotry.

(Edit: I live in a big melting pot. I have enough people from Syria, Iran… and “white” people around me. And I can tell you, we all have the same goals in life, we enjoy similar things, are family fathers who all want to see their kids prosper, fight the same struggles in our lives… There’s zero reason to focus on destruction and small-mindedness. We should do better. And invest the same energy into useful things. That goes for the average people. Not the ruling class. Those -of course- are motivated to disunite and stay in business.)

I strongly doubt this war is about who’s on the board of some state owned financial institute. I mean even if that conspiracy were true, where’s the bombing of like 120 other countries out of the roughly 195 we have on the planet?

Hmmh. I’ve heard the argument before, that they’re better off almost having nuclear weapons. But it that really the case? I mean North Korea is kind of an outliar. Lots of other countries have nuclear weapons as well, France, China… and none of them is a pariah. So I’m not sure if that’s even true. Usually more weapons is more better. Or so they say.

Edit: But we’re arguing logic here. And oftentimes politics isn’t as straightforward. I mean I don’t think we know the truth anyway. It’s completely unclear to me as an average citizen if they were close to nukes, if that’s even the biggest issue and reason for this. For all I know everyone could be lying or framing things, including following more than one motive.

This is the permissive vs copyleft debate. And it’s old as time. I suppose there’s a lot of nuance with licensing. If you’re a company at the receiving end, you probably love permissive licenses. They’re easy, offer the maximum amount of flexibility and freedom. It’s so short you probably don’t even need a team of lawyers… If you write software, it’s a bit more complicated. Do you want to cater to those people, make it as easy as possible to adopt your software? Then maybe consider BSD/Apache/MIT. Do you want to build a community, stop your competitors from just taking code? Want to try to ensure it stays open? Then maybe consider a copyleft license.

I sometimes don’t care. Write some stuff for me (as a hobby) but that’s my entire motivation. I don’t care what people do with the results of my weekend of effort. Never plan to hire a lawyer or bother with it in case something happrns with it. Or it’s just a pile of snippets. I’ll dump it for other people to use and release that either WTFPL or some other permissive license. People can do whatever they like with it. With the stuff I’m a bit more proud of, or I plan to return to, I’ll choose AGPL.

I suppose with operating systems, it’s a bit similar? I mean there is a community for both ideas. Seems there are people who like either of them. They’ll have slightly different ideology, tasks to accomplish and different goals.

Is the .gl domain down as well? Or is my DNS messing with me? I can open the newer ones, though.

Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.

For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

For the services I’ll either use a reverse proxy, plus configure the applications not to allow infinite login attempts, or Wireguard / a VPN.

Normal DVD-R max out at 4.7GB. Wikipedia says there are double layer recordable DVDs with 8.5 GB, I’ve just never seen one of them. But they’re available on Amazon.

Idk. I usually just copy files onto USB thumbdrives these days.

I know. What helps is to learn which buttons to click and which ones to avoid. A good adblocker (uBlock for example) and some downloader. Not sure what people use these days, I have JDownloader2.
Still sucks, but it works. Not sure if there’s better options out there, I’m not aware of any.

I never buy premium accounts either. I don’t want to support their business model. IMO piracy needs to be free. Once I want to pay money, that goes towards the artists who created the content.