complete abolishment of animal agriculture is not done overnight with in one fell swoop. It’s done with small changes here and there. Slowly forging a new culture where it is considered worse and worse to treat animals badly. (and what counts as animal abuse will start covering more and more things). Slowly changing the norm. Same goes for privacy, user rights, etc. There are of course some key moments, watershed moments, legislations (GDPR for example), but those had a long journey of tiny steps all over the world before they came into being. Sort of like tectonic plates building up tension over tens, hundreds, thousands of years before they snap into place in one huge earthquake
I see others have written a large amount of information so I’ll just stick with a short bulletlist of the main go to distros IMHO. (replace Gnome suggestions with XFCE for example if you want more lightweight and classic OS, but not optimized for touch)
That’s exactly the reason why I switched to Gnome. If someone would give me an axe and tell me to chop down a tree in 6 hours I would spend 18 hours sharpening the axe and forget about the tree. Whenever I try KDE, XFCE and others I will spend days adjusting things to my liking while on Gnome I just start working. Sometimes something bothers me on Gnome and I will either just install an extension, or realize it’s impossible to adjust it and I just go back to work.
Obligatory XKCD comic strip https://xkcd.com/927/
I use this remote. specifically made for Kodi https://osmc.tv/store/product/osmc-remote-control/
Doesn’t cover tiling wm’s but Phoronix did an interesting benchmark on gaming performance on kde vs gnome (and wayland vs x11) recently. That at least indicates that between those options the DE does not matter. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu2110-wayland-xorg&num=1
I also like to think of it this way. Even if Mastodon gets “centralized” we will at least not have a hard barrier forcing us to only use that centralized instance. If that centralized instance fucks up, there is at least always the possibility to create and join a new instance. Without the risk of losing contact with all the people on the old instance.
If Facebook fucks up, we can’t spin up a new facebook instance.
I don’t mind “soft centralization” as long as it allows for decentralization.
Well I am referring to the social ecosystem of Linux rather than its code. How the social ecosystem will respond to this can obviously affect code if that’s the thing you are mostly focusing on. I mean for example if shitload of assholes inside the community harass a trans person for being trans then there’s a good chance that person will say “fuck it” and leave. Which would potentially negatively impact the projects said person was involved in.
If we manage to get over this threshold as a community then that can lead to great things. Just like with anything else you don’t really want to put the eggs in one basket. The more diverse the underlying community is, the stronger it becomes, and in my opinion, will increase code and communication quality greatly. I guess there’s a similarity between this and decentralization in software like Lemmy. ;)
If you want some more “direct connection” to code quality, then I could imagine that being stuck “in the closet” can really fuck up your mental health, which could result in bad code. so finally going through that step could potentially result in a lot better code quality.
But I guess what I really want to say is the following: Linux is more than just code
Slight nitpicking, sorry. But do note that EU does not equal Europe. The European Union covers a decent portion of Europe though but not all countries. To complicate things though there are complex deals between countries so often these laws also do go through local parliaments and get implemented in one way or another.
yeah, that’s the thing with security and privacy, you often have to sacrifice convenience for those two. The reason messages don’t get sent is because there is no server in between to send the messages. But in the case of signal the messages get sent to the server and then wait there for the other person to come online. So right now IMHO for a lot of people Signal is the best/least bad we can realistically use (at least in the context I live in). But Matrix is coming closer and closer, and I am looking forward to it.
There is no one answer to this question as more factors need to be weighed in on. For example the most secure way of messaging would be no messaging at all essentially.
One thing that has interested me for some time is that usually when people are weighing in on digital messaging security or privacy is that they usually just think of it “individually”. As in, from the perspective of one person using the messaging platform. Things change a bit when you had large groups of people.
For example, Like many have noted, Signal is probably not 100% to be trusted these days, but because of its ease of use and its popularity it manages to (somewhat) secure the communications of millions of people. While more secure/private solution can be more cumbersome to use and therefor less popular, but will manage to 99.99999% secure the communication of maybe hundreds of people.
So which one is better in this context. A platform managing to provide 50% security to millions of people, or a platform managing to provide 99.9% security to hundreds of people?
edit: in short. it depends on the context and the people you are trying to secure communications with. You have to make compromises here and there to reach the maximum realistic security for that group of people. My family and nearest friends for example use Signal but I am constantly keeping an eye on other solutions and waiting for them to become viable for my situation. (especially after Signal becoming less and less interesting by every day)
All the others here in the comments have put up some pretty good answers for why privacy is important. All pretty good but there’s one point I heard couple of years ago that really stuck with me.
You see, my threat model isn’t really extreme. In my current position I don’t really need to worry much about the lack of privacy. What made me care about privacy though is the following:
Imagine a town where nobody cares about privacy as they “have nothing to worry about” so they all have their window blinds open and allow pretty much everyone to see into their daily lives. It’s the norm. Now imagine that in this town, it is considered evil and worthy of public shaming to have blond hair. In this town is one person with blond hair that has had to hide her hair color with a wig for all her life. But when she gets home she closes the blinds, takes off her wig and finally has a chance to be herself.
The rest of the town folks don’t see her blond hair, but they notice that she is the only one that occasionally covers her windows. She must be hiding something.
This is why privacy norms matter. Not necesserily to protect ourselves. But to protect others.
I’m not sure I follow, how does Lemmy as a software get affected by the political leaning of its developers? I can see this happening on platforms, but on decentralized services like Lemmy? Care to elaborate? (and yes, I am aware the main instance can have its rules and what not and they can lean one way or another, but that’s just that instance)
Also, not really sure what you mean by left and right. Are you referring to left and right regarding american politics? norwegian? Those lefts and rights are completely different AFAIK. (source: I’m a fellow scandinavian)
As a self employed contractor I can confirm, the lack financial security of a fixed payment is a problem and it can be hard. I’ve example had limited income for the last 1 and a half year because of health problems, but what I did to buffer this was to give myself a fixed salary every month. The rest stayed on a seperate account. So I had a sizeable funds ready in case if something would happen. (no contracts, health problems, etc). I lived on those funds for more than a year so I would think that’s a decent buffer.
There are some remakes of old linux themes over at the B00merang project website https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html . Probably not what you had in mind though.