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15
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2,750
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2 yr. ago

  • There are three distros derived from Arch that try to do very different things:

    • Endeavour is Arch with a friendly installer. That's it. It will install faster but then you'll be using Arch, and that's not a good idea for a beginner.
    • Garuda is also Arch but with a few more helpful tools and apps. Same reasoning as above.
    • Manjaro uses Arch packages as an upstream source (like Ubuntu vs Debian) but does things to them to make it stable. Which, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of Arch fan foam at the mouth and you've probably already been linked to "manjarno" and similar idiocy. So you'd have to deal with that.

    But seriously, I have mixed feelings recommending Manjaro to a beginner. The distro itself is super-stable and easy to use because you basically have to do nothing. I have non-computer savvy family members on Manjaro without admin privileges and it works perfectly.

    But the trick is that doing nothing part. You have to leave it alone and not modify the way it works, and beginners often feel the need to tinker with the system.. Not only that but it's hard as a beginner to figure out online what's generic Arch advice and what's Manjaro-specific and which of that can be applied safely on Manjaro and which is an Arch-ism that will ruin your install.

    If you're set on trying Manjaro I can offer a list of recommendations to give you an idea of how to navigate the dos and donts.

  • The Deck is configured by Valve in a way uniquely suited to it, and they also make sure it works properly. It's not going to be the same on vanilla Arch installed by you on your own PC.

    Common wisdom for a beginner is to use something like Debian or Debian-based like Mint or Ubuntu because they're popular and stable so you can get a safe start. I wouldn't recommend Arch or Arch-based to a complete beginner.

  • There's no reason for them to keep defying the court. It could make the ruling worse for them and GDPR fines are hefty to begin with. They can't possibly hope to gain anything of equivalent or greater value to the fine from a bit more data.

  • Things you can't do with the website:

    • Login with biometrics. Wants password and 2fa each time. As it should, but it gets tedious, especially when I want to confirm online payments (which need to be confirmed inside the interface after you login).
    • No contactless payments. You can enroll a card into Google Pay but fuck Google, I don't want them seeing what I buy.
    • No notifications, hope the bank is willing to send SMS instead.
    • Bit more tedious to send money to someone because the website can't look up contacts by name, have to look them up separately and copy the phone number over.
  • Looking forward to this one. I use vertical tabs on Edge at work and it's very useful on wide screens.

    Hope they remembered to add a bottom to collapse/expand the tab bar.

    Now we only need tab groups and we'll be all set.

  • This is not a new problem, .internal is just a new gimmick but people have been using .lan and whatnot for ages.

    Certificates are a web-specific problem but there's more to intranets than HTTPS. All devices on my network get a .lan name but not all of them run a web app.

  • 7 was actually surprisingly well optimized. It ran OK on an office PC with 512 MB of RAM and a 512 MHz CPU.

    You wouldn't use it like that because by that time apps like browsers and office were starting to feel restricted by that little RAM to the point you could only run either or. But the OS itself stayed out of the way as much as possible, and if you gave it just a little more RAM (like 1 GB) suddenly you had a usable office machine.

  • But you only have two kidneys, how will you buy a third Mac?

    Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

    Non-Apple laptops can be just as reliable and last just as long nowadays, and you get to upgrade them at a fraction of the cost. Actually I should say you get to upgrade them, period.

  • It's not that the ad issue isn't going to be solved, it's that ads are here now and we have to deal with them.

    They are going to be replaced by direct micro-payments eventually but the puzzle pieces have been slow to get into place (also Google and the whole ad industry haven't been cooperating for obvious reasons).

    One of the major hurdles was the [in]ability to make online payments of a fraction of a cent but the digital Euro aims to make that possible (among other things).

    With that and support for direct micropayments implemented in the browser we'll be able to give a web page owner that fraction of a cent they get from ads now but only IF we want to, and when we do that we cut out all the ad industry as middlemen.

  • Everybody should be using DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or over TLS (DoT) nowadays. Clear DNS is way too easy to subvert and even when it's not being tampered with most ISP snoop on it to compile statistics about what their customers visit.

    DoH and DoT aren't a full-proof solution though. HTTPS connections still leak domain names when the target server doesn't use Encrypted Hello (ECH) and you need to be using DoH for ECH to work.

    Even if all that is in place, a determined ISP, workplace or state actor can identify DoH/DoT servers and compile block lists, perform deep packet inspection to detect such connections regardless of server, or set up their own honey trap servers.

    There's also the negative side of DoH/DoT, when appliances and IoT devices on your network use it to bypass your control over your LAN.

  • If you mean properly signed certificates (as opposed to self-signed) you'll need a domain name, and you'll need your LAN DNS server to resolve a made-up subdomain like lan.domain.com. With that you can get a wildcard Let's Encrypt certificate for *.lan.domain.com and all your https://whatever.lan.domain.com URLs will work normally in any browser (for as long as you're on the LAN).