Eager Eagle

It turns out that startup funding for Signal was from a US Government tied entity. Some people won’t like that. Here’s an interesting article: Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding

Someone already commented on the “nothing-burger” this article and line of reasoning actually is, so I won’t repeat it here.

$19m / 50 = $380,000 per year per employee!!!

This $19M figure includes more things. That’s why a blog post shouldn’t be read as an accounting report. Report summaries with salary figures are available btw, one search away.

The infrastructure was not designed to minimize the cost of operations, it was designed for another purpose, data collection by third parties:

The quoted text is not evidence for this. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Elon Musk also promotes Signal:

He promotes Linux too. Also, I bet he drinks water.

I see some valid concerns / questions, but it’s immersed in a muddy water of arguments that is hard to disentangle.

I think it’s hit or miss. I’ve been having this annoying bug since I switched to Plasma 6 + Wayland and I have no idea whether it’ll be solved any time soon.

Ah - that’s all I had to do to solve it on Ubuntu server 22.04. Maybe desktop is different, maybe 24.04 is different. You can try removing additional packages or following other instructions. I won’t post any links here, as I see different possible solutions and haven’t tried any other than the one above. Let us know what works.

sudo apt remove ubuntu-advantage-tools

Just fzf + the same version control I use for my dotfiles. I have no interest in mixing machine histories like atuin offers, so that makes sense to me.

${XDG_DATA_HOME}/Trash is fairly common and afaik the default in Gnome and KDE

FreeDesktop.org trash spec

Bingus Duckus

The thing is, without a unified GUI it’s impossible to get an answer to “how to X on Linux” that doesn’t involve the CLI (and that’ll work for everyone). Even the ones that do are often distro-dependent.

People can still get things done by searching for “how to X on <distro> using the GUI”.

With the amount of fuck-ups from Microsoft, this might not be necessary, but:

The average user doesn’t want to install the operating system or doesn’t care about it as long as they can do their things, and those who care can easily do so today. Thus, IMO, advertising to the end user is a waste of resources.

Focus on permeating it in governments, institutions, and OEMs to increase market share and break the “Linux is complicated / incompatible / for developers” stigma, then organic adoption out of these environments will grow - at least among people who can actually use it with the supported software.

thanks for the red circles

kool

tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”

just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.

Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github.

Not true. Signal has a very similar client verification process to Telegram’s, described here. The lack of an iOS reproducible build is an Apple limitation / nuisance.

It’s very complicated, the 2nd jailbroken device is necessary because there’s no other way to download the .ipa, but even if you manage to do that and bit-for-bit reproduce the .ipa you downloaded from source, there’s no way to know if the App Store is sending every user the same .ipa or if your other, non-jailbroken iPhone downloaded a backdoored one.

Telegram docs even acknowledge these limitations.

Ultimately, this client verification is not the selling point Telegram’s founder makes it sound like, since most messages are not E2EE and the server code is closed.

exactly, they (Telegram) don’t need to put sketchy code in the clients when most messages are not E2E encrypted and they control the servers lol

Compression might be useful in some cases, but the bulk of my data is already compressed or not much compressible (think videos, images, compressed archives, game assets). So the trade off doesn’t make much sense to me.

Btrfs is slower than ext4, xfs, and f2fs in pretty much every metric. Noticeably slower app opening times is the reason I switched to F2FS for good.

most popular fork - hyfetch

finally touching some grass

maybe if it has too many things I don’t want.

But I find the concept a bit silly. A large number of installed things doesn’t usually matter if they’re not running. I had over 5k packages in my previous kubuntu that I was running for some 3y and it was just fine. The time and effort I’d spend cleaning it up and installing things as needed wouldn’t translate into any perceived benefit imo.

I’m now running endeavour with a third of this number of packages, since it’s a fresh install and not ubuntu. But other than some storage space and missing packages if I try to build something, I can’t say there’s much of a difference. As for storage, packages rank low in usage, for my desktop anyway.

that is vastly more readable, not only thanks to the colors, but the indentation, new lines, and straightforward section titles are a huge improvement.