KDE and Gnome haven’t been stable or usable for the past 20 years, but will become so this year for some reason?

Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.

That should just be the title bar now

But now the windows one is getting scrapped whereas Waydroid is presumably sticking around.

I think we can trust that most phone camera apps do in fact obey the toggle they provide for whether or not to embed the GPS location data in the image.

How do snaps make money for Canonical?

There oughta be a law

I don’t think that’s true. For one thing, it’s easy to buy a car from a random person, without granting any permission to any car company to download stuff from your car and sell it. If a car company were to access your car without permission, you could sue for damages (see OP).

LocalSend is nice because you can set it up in a push configuration instead of a pull. I used to set up a server like that where I had the file, then go over where I wanted it and navigate and pull it and wait for it to download. But with auto-accept on on LocalSend I can push the file and by the time I get over to where I sent it it is mostly there already.

One approach here is the Ubuntu CD/DVD images. You can (could?) use the disk as a package source for apt to install from.

When the OS tells Android Firefox that the phone is running out of ram, it murders any tabs it thinks you might not be looking at, to avoid being murdered by Android for its ram.

Does UEFI shell have wget?

Linux hobbyists

Who else has opinions on snaps vs. flatpacks? Are they distinct to the “Linux professional” somehow?

On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won’t work on other Unixes.

I’m going to go with “be normal”.

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.

I have had pretty good luck with this actually. You can get e.g. Matlab for Linux no problem, and even weird company-specific tools I want I usually find to be available. But then I guess most of the commercial software I want to use is software for people like me. I don’t bother trying to use e.g. MS Office even on platforms it runs on, I don’t do professional CAD, I don’t do professional graphic design.

I think that Ventoy has some kind of mechanism to let you do a persistent Linux live environment. Maybe try that?

Maybe that’s when I mostly stopped getting the wrong page of stuff.

I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it’s “basically all websockets for some reason”, and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think “this is why you don’t use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request” and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.

Hello I am writing the firmware for MotherBoard 2021, a definitely completely different product than MotherBoard 2020, I am going to ship in in 2 weeks for Christmas, and I am going to write an image decoder on top of bare metal, and it is “not” going to let you hack the pants off the computer.

Said no one ever.