NormalC [he/him, comrade/them]

Free software advocate and queer bangladeshi muslim anarchy-trans.Refugee from blahaj.zone cat-trans

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  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Privacy and best practices are nearly universal across most user-obsessive distributions like Mint or Zorin and by extension most if not all distributions. Don’t let anyone tell you that one distribution is more “private” than another.

    Mint is simply just better than Zorin in everything that Zorin tries to do, perhaps if this was a year ago things would be different, but Zorin is just not as well maintained as Mint is.

    If you like the look of Zorin, that’s okay, most people do. But all desktop environments can be customized to your liking.



  • I’m not familiar with warp+ but having used Mullvad VPN with most distributions I’d say to see if it supports OpenVPN or Wireguard configurations. That way you can talk directly to NetworkManager or the respective vpn program.

    Perhaps Fedora does not have a unique package dependency that Ubuntu has since Fedora is heavily oriented toward systemD and selinux for most system tasks that may be handled by different packages on Ubuntu/Debian distributions. Warp+ may be designed in a way that only expects a ubuntu/debian derivative distro.

    I’d try consulting cloudflare customer support for more guidance and to see if they can replicate the issue on their end.


  • Are you sure that Steam is uninstalled completely from your filesystem. Steam creates a “.steam” user directory and leftover data in the directory may be conflicting with the flatpak. Delete it if it exists and then try restarting your computer. The flatpak version of steam sandboxes the .steam directory.


    As always, Steam is proprietary software and doesn’t bother to follow freedesktop standards. The support I can give can only go so far. GOG is always a better solution as it can be used with a libre client like Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris without DRM or invasive anti features. You do not need Steam to leverage Valve’s contributions with Proton and Vulkan.









  • Since presuming the computer came with Windows activated preinstalled, then the license key is likely embedded into the BIOS of the device. Reinstalling Windows will not void that license key because you already paid for it with the “windows tax.” I’ve reinstalled windows on my pre-built “gaming” PC and the license activated automatically.

    There are some pains getting a USB bootable installer image with Windows on a full GNU/Linux system, but it is entirely possible. It’s also possible to virtualize windows with GPU pass-through or use Wine/Proton which should always be examined before attempting to reinstall Windows (which is always a last resort).








    • a minimal, fast system
    • keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
    • all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
    • all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
    • very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delay

    I’d recommend Debian 12/testing/sid with the Sway compositor. Homebrew, Nix and Guix can all be installed on top of any GNU/Linux distribution to provide containerized packages. Flatpak can be used to obtain the latest version of graphical applications as well. Terminals like alacritty and kitty are Wayland natives and Foot is widely considered to be the most minimal “default” terminal for Wayland compositors. You can use Sway’s built in “swaybar” or status bars like Waybar and eww. Sway configuration is just like i3 where you can configure specific devices like keyboards and monitors from a single file.