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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)LE
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  • The community has been making Winamp clones for as long as Winamp has existed. XMMS appeared the same year as Winamp, in 1997. Audacious is still around and still has a mode where it uses Winamp skins.

    The thing about Winamp is that it had its time in the spotlight for a few years and then everybody moved on to the new types of media libraries like foobar2000. Today it's just a museum piece.

  • Manjaro has been specifically designed to have fresh packages (sourced from Arch) but to be user friendly, long term stable, and provide as many features as possible out of the box.

    It requires some compromises in order to achieve this, in particular it wants you to stick to its curated package repo and a LTS kernel and use it's helper apps (package/kernel/driver manager) and update periodically. It won't remain stable if you tinker with it.

    You'll get packages slower than Arch (depending on complexity, Plasma 6 took about two months, typically it's about two weeks) but faster than Debian stable.

    I'm running it as my main driver for gaming and work for about 5 years now and it's been exactly what I wanted, a balanced mix of rolling and stable distro.

    I've also given it to family members who are not computer savvy and it's been basically zero maintenance on my part.

    If it has one downside is that you really have to leave it alone to do its thing. In that regard it takes a special category of user to enjoy it — you have to either be an experienced user who knows to leave it alone or a very basic user who doesn't know how to mess with it. The kind of enthusiastic Linux user who wants to tinker will make it fall apart and hate it, and they'd be happier on Arch or some of the other distros mentioned here.

  • Why do you assume they haven't warned Mozilla in advance?

    Also, Mozilla was fully aware that what they were doing is in breach of GDPR. I find it extremely hard to believe that the makers of Firefox are not fully familiarized with it by now.

    Last but not least Mozilla is doing this for financial gain. It's selling pur data to advertisers. Why should we excuse it? It's a very hostile act.

    If Mozilla has hit rock bottom and has been reduced to selling our data to survive then that's that. We'll find another way and another FOSS browser. Accepting it is not an option.

  • If you like this you may like Chrome too, because that's exactly how Google is trying to do things now.

    Here's the thing. I don't want my browser to do things under the hood. It's either protecting my privacy or it's not. That means it's either sending cookies to the website I'm visiting or it's not.

    When Firefox takes it upon itself to bypass cookies and collect information about me, that's surprising and unpredictable and may fail in ways unique to Firefox. It's one more thing to worry about.

    If Mozilla wants to outright and overly protect me they can offer an "allow cookies" button like LibreWolf does, our how you can get with the CAD add-on (Cookie Auto Delete).

    If they won't do that then stick to blocking third-party cookies and get out of the way.

    I don't want Firefox to second-guess what I want to share with anybody, and assuming I want to share anything with advertisers, even anonimized data, is an abuse of my trust.

    We don't owe advertisers anything, btw. They're a parasitic industry and the sooner it dies and we move on the better.

  • Exactly.

    The reason most companies decide to contribute to FOSS is because it's a lot more efficient to fix bugs and add/influence features upstream than to do it at your end of the code independently of everybody else.

  • Try using an addon like Basic Automatic Tabs Unloader, it will kill tabs completely a while after they've been closed. You can set the grace period as low as you want.

    The Firefox native tab unloader is extremely permissive and only kills tabs when the whole system starts running low on RAM.

  • I get your point, but this feature is being pushed to users prominently, and it turns out it doesn't do anything with the search results on both Youtube and Amazon, which are pretty much THE most likely sites you could think of, that anybody's going to be using. That seems like a pretty glaring omission to me.

    There are lots of bug reports already opened about it not working as intended on various large sites, including Facebook, Google Images etc.

    It's pretty obvious to me that such sites are going to keep changing their parameters because they're privacy predators. If Mozilla is not willing or able to keep the parameter definitions up to date then this feature can end up doing more harm than good.

  • pp has been introduced 3 years ago and it's a known tracking parameter. And it's not some obscure website we're talking about, it's the largest website in the world...

    If they're not going to keep up with parameters after so many years I think it's very misleading and potentially even harmful to keep offering this feature.

  • Yes, for example Youtube video links are copied with the &pp= tracking information. Search for something on Youtube, right-click on a result title, and copy with or without tracking gives you the same thing (with the pp=).

  • What bug? It's super easy to do this in an app that already has access to your microphone, like Whatsapp, then extract only keywords from conversations and send them to Meta packed as innocuous numeric codes piggybacking on the overhead of encrypted connections.

    A single byte here and there is all you need to know people were talking about cats, or perfume, or shoes etc.

    Whatsapp protocol, app and servers are closed source, and Meta apps will download and compile native code upon installation, which escapes normal JVM restrictions and does God knows what.

    On certain brands of phones (like Samsung) Meta apps come with a manufacturer-preinstalled system stub that can do pretty much whatever it wants, but is typically used to elevate the rights of Meta apps that were installed via normal means and to collect information from them as well as any app that's running ads from Meta.

    And this is a company that's a third party to the Android ecosystem — it's a lot easier for Google themselves, who are datamining the shit out of everything you do on a phone, from second-by-second location to email. And Meta is datamining the shit out of absolutely everything you put on Facebook and Instagram, in spite of any fines and sanctions. And Microsoft are datamining the shit out of everything you do on your PC and they're openly pushing Recall and Copilot and have been pushing Cortana for so long.

    What do you think Cortana and OK Google were listening for?.Hell, Amazon and Google were both caught storing recordings of people's conversations in the beginning, before they started hiding it better.

    So you're being watched in every way possible in every single thing you do that touches any technology from these companies, we have countless documented instances of them breaking privacy in heinous ways like giving up people to authoritarian governments and to anti-abortion governments in the US and so on...

    ...and you're seriously wondering if they're snooping on your conversations? They have every means at their disposal, they're using it every second, and you're wondering if they're doing that too?

    Why wouldn't they? It's obvious that we live in a world where it's ok to ask forgiveness (and you'll get a slap on the wrist, if that) rather than permission. What would possibly compel them to not do it?

    Consequences? What consequences? We already know for a fact they spy on so much stuff and we keep using their tech. There are no consequences.

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  • I use whatever online storage service I want because you can add your own encryption layer so you only sync encrypted files. rclone supports lots of services and will also encrypt files for you.

  • They're doing IP location checks, and they're doing them badly (there's not really a way to do them well). It's not working for me with people in the same town, and other people are reporting it's randomly working or not working with locations in the same neighborhood.

  • The repo delay is not the main cause of AUR warnings. While it can in theory cause mismatched dependencies for some AUR packages, in practice it doesn't really happen that often.

    The main issue with AUR is that it's completely unregulated. Anybody can put anything in it, there's no quality criteria, AUR scripts run as root and can do anything on your system, 75% of AUR packages were not updated during the last year, 15% were released once and never updated, and 10% are completely abandoned.

    Arch itself doesn't support AUR for those reasons. You should be wary of using AUR packages in general, on any system that can use them, always assume they can break at any moment, and never use them for anything critical.

  • Manjaro uses the binary packages prepared by Arch but a distro is more than just a set of packages. (In fact a distro should be more than just copying packages, otherwise it wouldn't be worth being called a distinct distro.)

    Arch's goal is to be an ultra-customizable distro. To this end it starts out extremely minimalistic and requires the user to "assemble" it during the install from basic components, just so it doesn't end up with anything that's not wanted.

    If a user can do this then they're above average in experience and knowledge; and since Arch can reliably assume this about its users it doesn't coddle them. The maintainers can afford to issue breaking changes that may even go as far as render your install non-operational, because they know their users can deal with it.

    Another big Arch feature is being a rolling-release distro and bleeding-edge. This means that packages are released as fast as their developers can make them. This means they often have new bugs. This is the price users pay for the privilege of having very fresh software all the time.

    Manjaro prioritizes a safe environment for the user and a more stable experience, where the install doesn't break (at all, if possible), and can be very easily be restored if it should break. And as a consequence it attracts users with less experience and Linux knowledge.

    However, in order to achieve this Manjaro does some things very differently from Arch:

    • It holds back new packages and releases them late(r), when the Manjaro curators deem them usable.
    • It offers an alternate package manager with a more user-friendly interface.
    • It recommends the use of long term stable kernel (LTS) releases and mandates installing crucial drivers (graphical drivers in particular) through its own custom tools.

    These differences mean that if a Manjaro user were to ask for help from an Arch crowd, the Arch users can't reliably help because they have no idea what's going on on the Manjaro side. They may use older packages and the issue being described was fixed in a very fresh version. They use tools (the kernel manager, the package manager, the driver manager) that Arch doesn't have.

    Also there's very little overlap between the average Manjaro and Arch userbase. If an Arch user is more experienced and the Manjaro user isn't they're going to have trouble relating to each other. The Arch user doesn't see an issue in some occasional breakage, whereas a Manjaro user might consider that unacceptable and so on.

    Last but not least there's a purely technical reason – Manjaro not only delays packages but hosts them in their own repositories, and sometimes goes as far as changing them. This makes it literally "not Arch" – using distinct repos is a step too far in terms of distro heritage.