He’s not a Russian asset, he simply feels that if the whole world is run by tyrants like him and Putin, then he would somehow he could do whatever he wanted, because it would just be as simple as cutting a deal/buying the privilege (same with the Trump mentality). Musk is the embodiment of why becoming a billionaire needs to be outlawed.

Actually, I’d trust the Graphene guys’ evaluation. They do know what they’re talking about there. And it’s true that Playstore is more secure than foss store offerings, unfortunately. You see, these are built securely. Google is a security-driven company. That much is true, and I know that first hand. BUT they are not a PRIVACY-driven company. There is a difference here.

What we need, is a totally de-googled Chromium with added hardened extensions (e.g. bringing back the v2 manifest to run various privacy and security extensions). This would have more security than Firefox, but also more privacy.

I believe that’s the best way forward, because creating a new web browser from scratch with these performance expectations, is a pipe dream (looking at you, ladybird). So, yeah, the open source community needs to fork chromium, not firefox. Firefox was never great to begin with as a technology, it’s measurably slower than Chrome for example, and it uses a LOT more RAM. Linux users are known to want to resurrect old computers with less than 4 GB of ram (I’m one of them), firefox can’t deliver that. I always have to resort to Chrome to make it bearable. But I rather use an official foss fork instead. One that is trusted.

A Cirrus Logic, on VLB on my 486DX/40, with 4 MB of RAM, and a SoundBlaster card. December 1994.

Rubicon was excellent. Most of the other shows mentioned here are actually well known, but this one truly is a deep cut.

Huge sci-fi lover here. But at the same time, colonization of space for humans is possibly impossible without avatars. The human body evolved here, and it’s a vessel that works here the best. To colonize other worlds, it’s more economically viable to send machines, create biologically synthesized new species (taking dna from local species there), and then transfer consciousness to them. Similar with Avatar, but without having to have the spaceships arrive in the planet full of humans. Humans remain on earth, and they project their consciousness somewhere else, in an instant due to entanglement.

Well, in theory open source is immune to all that. However, the country a project is registered at, matters. That’s why the RISC-V project, for example, took its headquarters from the US to Switzerland. For that exact reason: so no country could strong arm it, especially since Chinese were the major contributors to the project (Switzerland is not 100% neutral, but it’s more neutral than other countries).

I blend 2 eggs with a banana, and I fry it as if it’s a pancake, with butter. It doesn’t hold together, so it keeps coming out as if it’s weird scrambled eggs. But it’s delicious, the healthiest kind of pancake (with a drop of raw honey afterwards).

Yes, very snappy.

I use Photopea on the browser when I need something that the Gimp can’t do.

Why wait? There’s no need for Windows, unless you’re running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.

No, Cinnamon with LMDE it’s slower than XFce on Debian. These laptops were slow and some had only 2 GB of ram.

My niece, my mom, and my cousin are using Linux because I gave them my old laptops with Debian in it. They don’t know how to do anything with the system (not even update it, I do it for them), but they know how to use a browser, or launch a game. Works fine for them like that.

When you say delay, do you mean that the sound starts playing 1-2 seconds later, or that the mouth and the audio aren’t synced? If you’re meaning the #1, then I have the same problem on Firefox under Debian-Testing (kernel 6.10). No solution to it.

Instead of re-installing, just use a usb ethernet adapter and see if that works. Linux supports most of them, but do some checking regardless online for the most compatible ones. Then update the system, remove that usb adapter, rebot. Now see if the original ethernet works. If still not, then continue using the usb adapter as your main source for networking.

I believe the installer version of Debian uses a newer kernel than the one it installs later, that’s why your ethernet worked during installation. Sounds like a borked driver for the specific ethernet adapter and the older kernel. Get a usb-2-ethernet adapter, and retry to update the system, in case you get a newer kernel after updating it.

As long as your printer is supported, it’s not difficult. The problem is that if you need advanced options, like artists need usually, the options aren’t there.

Ok, I managed it by myself after a bit of tinkering. This is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash
while true
    do 
        battery_level=`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity`
        battery_status=`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status`
        if [ $battery_status = "Discharging" ] && [ $battery_level -lt 21 ];
        then
            /usr/bin/aplay  /home/eugenia/Music/alarm.wav
        fi
       sleep 120
    done

Obviously change the path the .wav audio file to suit yours (I downloaded mine from the internet). Then, save the file (in my case, I named it battery.sh), make the script file executable ( chmod +x battery.sh via the terminal, or via the file manager).

Then add it to the Startup Applications settings panel on your distro (usually gnome and cinnamon have one). The alarm will sound if the battery reaches below 21%.

I use sheet paper to be honest on an Epson printer. I do use Gimp to print, although most of my editing is happening on Photopea in the browser (gimp didn’t cut it for me as an editor for my paintings, I needed adjustment layers and Secondary Colors). Then, I export a JPEG, and print from Gimp (because the browser doesn’t have all the printing options that gimp has). I use the Debian-Testing rolling release.

I don’t like snaps (nor flatpaks for that matter, they’re too big for my slow internet connection here in my Greek village). But I find it absolutely, 100%, crazy to install gimp and darktable via snaps, and not being able to print (the print option is just not there, because they’re snaps and somehow they haven’t implemented that for these apps). As an artist who sells prints, this makes the whole distro completely and utterly USELESS to me. Sure, they can be found as deb packages too, but they’re older. And Firefox is also sandboxed. And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.

So, no ubuntu for me. The only advantage it has is that many third party apps (usually commercial ones) that release binary tarballs or appimages have tested with ubuntu and they usually work well (minus davinci resolve). I don’t have a big trouble with appimages as they’re generally smaller than the kde/gnome frameworks that flatpaks/snaps use, and they’re one file-delete away from getting rid of them completely. They’re just more straightforward.

Debian-Testing (Trixie) is the way to go. It’s a rolling release, but it’s very stable, because packages end up there after being tested in Sid (their unstable rolling release). Whatever makes it out of Trixie, ends up on the normal Debian. I’ve been running it since April without any breakages.