The biggest breach of US government data is under way
This isn't really an important point or anything, but I always find it odd when people bring up sysv init when talking about systemd. That's kind of like arguing that people should switch to Linux because Windows Vista was bad. It's not wrong, exactly, but it is a very weird thing to bring up in 2025.
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I've been using mailbox.org, and it's pretty great. It's cheap, it's private, and it works well.
I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it's pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It's just not worth the trade off for something I'd basically never get any use out of anyway.
Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they've also come a long way since systemd first came around. It's also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn't all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they're all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.
That's kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don't care about that, you probably don't need to worry about systemd.
Mozilla is kind of a mess, but part of that is it's actually a whole bunch of different companies all named Mozilla something or other. It's really easy to go down a rabbit hole of angry videos and articles that make it sound even worse than it actually is, but yeah, there's some nonsense going on. It's especially sad how little the main foundation seems to care about Firefox anymore.
MZLA Technologies, the company that runs Thunderbird, has kind of worked around the shenanigans of the main Mozilla Foundation by directly collecting donations from users that are specifically earmarked for work on Thunderbird. They're doing good work with a fairly safe funding model, so I don't worry about Thunderbird at all, personally.
It's not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn't get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It's not bad, but it's a testing branch. It's not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.
The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn't a very good rolling release disto, you're better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.
My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that's not everyone's cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.
This, but unironically. When I had a small apartment I just had a big monitor with everything hooked up to it in the main room, and it was great. Now I spend all my time at my desk because I hate the stupid TV.
If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven't changed it that would be what you are using.
Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn't always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I've never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.
So, I'm just kind of curious how this would even work. Lots of people in the US already have Deepseek. If they already have it that's not importing it, is it? What if someone makes a copy of Deepseek from a server that's in the US? Is that importing it? Are we just trying to block future AIs? How is it even supposed to be beneficial to the US for the people working on AI here to have no access to Chinese models, when China can still freely use ours? Won't that just give them an advantage in developing AI?
Honestly, the more I think about this, the dumber it gets, and it was already pretty stupid on a surface level. It'll probably pass though. I don't think anybody in Washington DC is even interested in thinking about the consequences of anything they're doing. It's all pure pageantry.
Every AI model has been incestuously training off every other AI model for years. OpenAI has done it just as much as everyone else. They're just throwing a tantrum about it now because they're butthurt that a Chinese company beat them on the cheap, and they're trying to save face.
It's true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the "last" version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they're still in the "oh, this is what we'll probably do when we release GTK5" phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don't have good Wayland support. I wouldn't stress out about it too much.
XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.
I dunno, it could be, but at some point it becomes easier to just photoshop something than to try and talk an AI into replicating some hyper-specific arrangement of tiny elements of a picture.
It needs to be revealed. I'm not super into this kinda stuff, but from what I understand it's pretty easy to do if you're running it locally. You're never supposed to see this in an app or anything, but one of the big things about Deepseek is that it's easier to run on a normal desktop computer.
Let's say I make a thing. Let's say somebody offers to buy it from me for $10. I sell it to them, and then let's say somebody else makes a better thing, and now no one will pay more than $2 for my thing. If my thing is a publicly traded corporation, then that just "wiped off" $8 from the stock market. The person I sold it to "lost" $8. Corporations that make AI and the hardware to run it just "lost" a lot of value.
No, a single dumb tweet doesn't make you a fascist. Running a company that people are supposed to trust with their privacy and security and doubling down on praise for a political party that has been using state surveillance to hunt down people for choices they make with their own bodies as the party of the "little guy" does mean I'm never going to trust you again, though.
Well, it's certainly true that it varies by where you are, but I'm pretty sure Graphene isn't going to protect you from an APC any better than /e/OS, and the county sheriff where I live wouldn't know a stingray from an Xbox, but maybe I just live too far out into the middle of nowhere to be typical.
They're actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don't do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It's just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.
I also think you're overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn't just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn't even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you're not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.
Look, China isn't the devil or anything, they do lots of things better then the US. They want their "little sphere" to be Earth though. They have been making moves to compete with US influence all over the world for years now, and they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Honestly, the more I look into China, the more I realize the worst thing about it is that they're very much like the US, no matter how much both sides would deny it. The US needs to be taken down a peg or two, but replacing it with a different empire isn't the way to go. We need a world without superpowers, not to try and find the "good" one. They'll always go bad once they get to the top. That's just how massive power structures work.
There can be two problems at once. It is a problem that the information was collected in the first place, and it is also a problem that Elon Musk now has access to it. Those things are both bad. I get that government overreach has been our biggest problem for a long time, but that doesn't mean Musk is incapable of being an even bigger one given the opportunity, which he certainly seems to have now.