edel @ edel @lemmy.ml

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5 mo. ago

Could not agree more here! Any group you follow there you see with a minimal grasp of reality?

Thanks, I have no read anything from those times so I don't know nor I want to speculate. Now, my fear from what I have observed in the last decade is real. However, living in Asia I did not have that feeling... are they blind there or is just that in the West that we sense the worse is coming.

For the new people on Linux, think of my impression playing with the different OS;

Similarities between Windows 10 and macOS is around 15%.

Similarities between Windows 10 and Linux Mint is around 20%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Ubuntu is around 95%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Fedora\OpenSUSE is around 90%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Arch\CachyOS\Manjaro is around 85%.

And with Flatpaks/Snaps I would even now narrow the difference in the Linus OS as 95, 92 and 90% similarity. For what linux cannot do for you, unless it needs high processing or gaming anticheats, a Virtual Machine with Windows will just cover you without any problem.

What makes look different in Linux is the desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon...), no much the distro per se. Find the distro environment you like after playing 20min with it, and choose the Linux flavor you are ideologically/persuaded with the most... don't worry about the rest.

Genuine questions, no malice here:

1. Do you think the solution to what is described in the article is a solution proposed more than a century ago still valid for today's illnesses? How people fell in 1910s, same as today?
2. Knowing how the world ended in two mayor wards and one hundred million violently killed, wouldn't a solution less incendiary be better? Our weapons today are infinitely more powerful than in 1910s and truly, I see politicians far more willing to use them than in 1960s.

I see how you feel with your Peertube song.

Of course, Lemmy is an amazing FOSS tool, just sad many people (if so) are a bit toxic... Of course, I was blamed in the past as troll, bot, pro-putin, pro-china, pro-european, pro-american... and few actually get involved in a insightful conversation. The way i see it, Lemmy (or any of these mediums) are just entertainment and our work should be in the real world, with your neighbors and physical communities.

No doubt, with more responsibilities there is always a tendency to conform more, but from there to vote blindly there is a stretch. I wonder what happened to the Pirate parties in Europe!! I am looking for a pan-European, not necessarily federalist party in Europe but the few available do not convince me... I am tempting to create one (partially joking)... or just give up and find a peaceful live in some coast.

The official Israeli CBS cites 50% of Israeli Jews having their ancestry in Europe, primarily Ashkenazi and post-Soviet groups.... but of course, with DNA test ban in Israel is hard to know for sure... Being 75% of the Israeli population Jewish, that places it as 2/3 of Jews in Israel are from European origin... and that is their own stats. I would even say more are.

Let me know if you find a better venue... I am also disappointed in Lemmy. Is it so hard to find a place where people try to understand why things are one way and another before slapping each other.

I'd lived in a very swing state, in a very swing county and thanks to that predicted elections like no pollster did (even Trump in 2016 as he came down a escalator and every media laughed at him)... I saw no more malice in an average Trump voter than a Kamala one, I find a portion of them both as equally racist (some 30% I would say), one just is more vocal and explicit while the other chooses to express the racism passively aggressive.... Two black family moved into our street and one Trumper told me that he does not like the "blacks in front" and a long time Democrat neighbor told me instead... that she was going to move to a better school district "because demographics"... what is the difference?

The theory is that. What is perplexing is how with so many countries, with so many stakeholders (voters, industries,...), the discipline is incredible. The Ursula case is interesting, the US did not like the candidates that was posed to win (Manfred Weber as probably saw on him as too patriotic German and Margrethe Vestager as too popular with Europeans with her antitrust cases on American companies)... so imposing ignoring the Spitzenkandidat system and resorting only to secretive backroom deals... it is amazing this is what the EU has become!!! It is no surprise most EU representatives in the parliament know no clue about the candidates and just follow party lines, but still... I would expect some more dissidents. Meloni in Italy is interesting too... her speeches were vociferously anti-establishment but the media was kind of passive with her... and no surprise, she is indeed perfectly inline with the establishment... but, the media were told to be nice with her before elections so the apparatus knew beforehand her real self! There is a vetting process before hand!

Screw me! I feel bad because instead of welcoming those now disenchanted MAGA, we are shunning them away and pushing them toward Musk's new party and the like. We did same mistake after Trump's 1st term too.

Germ theory was unknown then and those Spaniards lacked understanding of contagion, well I'm lying, the people then knew about contagion with blood and corpses but not through items like air or blankets. The disease spread, while catastrophic it was fully unintentional. The only accounts like the famed Bartolomé de las Casas described the diseases as "divine punishment" or "mysterious plague", never as a warfare tool.

However with the British, again more than 2 centuries later, there was knowledge and intent as per Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet discussing it "Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes?" "I will try to inoculate them with some blankets…" during the Siege of Fort Pitt (1763).

Very true, but Spaniards did not know about the lack of immunity from European diseases and never had that intention for erasure of Indigenous. The English, that colonized 2 centuries after the Spaniards, used European diseases as an additional tool for complete genocide on indigenous.

So true... but unlike the US, where it is well known there are sectors that earn lots of money and power, I don't know exactly how it works in Europe since everyone losses with these choices. I am positive, the US choose Ursula for the post (I bet they do like when selecting the General to rule Pakistan where he is vetted for a couple of weeks in private) and forced into the EU with bypassing the Spitzenkandidat process. But why so many powers in Europe let that fly?!

It is perplexing to me how she has been able to get where she is with that story and how the media complicit with it!

For the non Europeans, she is Kaja Kallas, the EU Foreign affairs representative. She is extreme bellicose, specially toward Russia and representing a tiny minority of Europeans on the matter. But she encapsulates perfectly her boss (Ursula). Europeans elected a completely different parliament recently with a clear mandate for a radical chance... to end up with the corrupt Ursula von de Leyen once again. I strong believe these positions in the EU are heavily vetted by the US before allowed to run.

Colonialist Spain formally recognized in 1542 Indigenous peoples as "free vassals of the Crown" as Spaniards themselves, not slaves. Of course, as in The Mission movie portrayed, many colonialists violated the Crown's laws (Columbus himself was imprisoned for violating a Crown law from 1495 banning enslaving Taíno people). The Spanish crown wanted conversion + integration whereas British sought *erasure * of the Indigenous. But it was not just the Crown laws, individuals from Spain easily intermarried from early on, the English did not.

This distinction of the Spanish colonist vs all their norther neighbors that were far more repressive. I attribute this to the Spanish experience under Islamic rule for 8 centuries, where differences were highly tolerated and conversion was 'only' mandatory for those not considered as "peoples of the Book" mentioned on the Islamic scriptures.

To conclude, Spanish colonialism, from the Americas to the Philippines, was abusive, sometimes heavily, but the centuries later the 'civilized' British one was plainly genocidal from beginning to finish and the independent United States, continued with the legacy if not increasing it. In word of historian James Axtell: "The Spanish asked Native people to become something else [Christians]; the British demanded they vanish."

It is a trend started that started a decade ago (ironically with Obama!) but the transition is now complete; Americans with a skin color, let alone if naturalized, are not considered "actual American" therefore no longer news worthy. At least, they still give a conditional pass to those darker skins conforming with the ideology of the presidency that happens to be ruling at the time.

The Proton CEO is quite active in twitter and participates in podcasts. Well, one day he praised one action of the Trump administration on antitrust and a whole community attacked him for "praising Trump" when he did only a nomination for Attorney General for the Antitrust division. I highly doubt he is a MAGA supporter and listening to him for 30min on any of the multiple appearances he was on, will confirm you that. Several things concerns me on Proton, the CEO's ideology ain't one of them.

Unrelated to this, I wish people was more forgiven of Trump voters, it is not the monolithic the Left tries to portray it is. Trump sold himself as fighting the establishment, being anti-war and pro-antitrust (many small business owners supported him). People voted for him even suspecting he most likely was lying. Many people, both in 2016 and 2024, voted for Trump because Hillary was very pro-war (for instance she say she would attack Russian military directly in Syria) and Kamala proudly said she would not change anything on Biden's policy in the middle of Gaza's massacres. MAGA has many racists, many! (Democrats has is share too, but usually quieter but one can notice them at the grocery stores!) But what made Trump win was desperate disfranchised Americans with no other alternatives that promised Change. Europeans should keep quiet too... in the last elections they voted as different as they could demanding change to end up with Ursula von der Leyen for another term. Democracies in both sides of the Atlantlic are heavily ill and people, in desperation, vote for whoever promises change, independently of anything else.

Coming from Windows, OK with a bit of tech journey and into gaming here is my take in no order of preference.

1. TuxedoOS if you are inclined to Debian/Ubuntu side. Slow updates but it has latest KDE and very stable in my experience.
2. If you just want set and forget (minimal updates) Linux Mint (Ubuntus fall here too) Now, it is not very appealing aesthetics.
3. Fedora. Probably the best overall, but if you have beef against IBM/Red Hat, ditch it, its superiority is very marginal. Gamers like the spin Nobara, some performance increase but minimal.
4. Arch is not that unstable as portrayed, but one time in a critical time is bad enough, even if very rarely occurs. You assess your risk. The popular baby today is Arch's CachyOS due to catering to gamers.
5. OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed is maintained quite good and very close to Fedora in being perfect overall, but fewer people behind and less support. I would only go with it if you have a specific reason why (German, Yast tools, rolling release but stable,...)

At the end, like many people say, it is likely you will hop... until one day you find that distro hoping is pointless and that all are actually very close to each other and could easily coexist with any of them all. The difficult and uncompromising aspect usually is with the desktop environment like KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon...

Of course... for us normies... GrapheneOS is the way to go. Very high targeted individuals in the West should however consider HarmonyOS. Of Course the Chinese government has eyes on that one but not specifically targeting you... unless they use it to trade intel on someone of high interest for China but no much collaboration between West and China intelligence agencies today...

True, popularity increases the chances someone auditing. But, to a point. Ideally audit should be performed with every single update and on the servers, and there the premise of more eyes does not hold true no more. Then it comes trust. In a company like Tuta, the people behind showed their faces from day one, the same people are there, is a tight team so harder for a bad apple to do something. Considering both Tuta and Proton were good from inception (and I believe it may be the case), it would probably would be easier for an intelligence agency to penetrate Proton than Tuta, just for the structure that appears they have from outside. Now, Tuta made a horrible mistake once! In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, independently of one's take on it, Tuta made the "Standing with Ukraine" (March 2022); that was a mistake, it may many doubt if privacy still their paramount over any other ideology. Maybe they have change since since no statements on Gaza... or maybe they agree with what is happening... who knows... that is why they should not make any statements at all, or clarify that while they have their ideologies in no case, ever will compromise their stands on privacy. To be fair, Proton did the same... nothing on Ukraine but on Gaza "We unequivocally condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians […] We also condemn violence against civilians in Gaza"; so I guess both are comparable here! My trust for both is slim, as a company, and even their individuals.

Some of those mentioned likely are compromised, but cannot figured out which. The thing, is to diversify our risk and the privacy minded to use different platforms (Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN for instance).

The good news, is that if an agency is compromising something, they will likely won't use the intel gathered in court cases in order to leave it open to future prey, so that is good for vast majority of users. The very few that are relevant enough should not trust even the genuine privacy tools and resort to enhanced methods and combining methodologies.

My impression, and just impression, is that I would trust **Tuta **more than Proton (and not because Proton's CEO that many interpreted wrong anyways) On VPN... a tad more trust on Mullvad. Signal, I would not use it for high stakes communication but OK for most people. GrapheneOS seems okay and we know for sure it does not leak info on a daily basics, but we have to be careful, it could have an obscure code dormant waiting for a trigger or could easily send data to an unsuspected server, Ironically, if I were Snoden, I would feel more comfortable using a Huawei Mate with HarmonyOS than a Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS... of course China spies too massively, but it has far less beef with Snoden than the US does, therefore not of much interest to Beijing.

Remember that overwhelming majority of FOSS goes without any audit, let alone a comprehensive one. This is what some trusted party should put AI checking ASAP all the FOSS out there!