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An Indian status card is an official document issued by the Canadian government to First Nations people who are registered under the Indian Act. The card serves as proof of identity and legal Canadian identification, and can be used as ID for domestic flights.
He was then on the phone with WestJet customer service, and they didn't even know what an Indian status card was. They started asking if Corbiere was from India.
Well then it's obviously because of the name. Stupid Columbus...
/s
It's not an ID document that people often see. It's easy to get confused and in any uncertainty, it's best to not allow the passenger in. Though they should be aware and it should be a part of their training.
The westjet employee didn't read the expiry date at the top, 2029, and wouldn't when they tried to show them again. It wasn't uncertainty it was arrogance
If your job mostly revolves around checking people's documentation and you fail to recognize government-issued ID (from the country in which you work, no less), you're objectively shit at your job.
I don't understand why you're making excuses for the airline. I did a better job than this as a 19 year-old cashier selling lotto tickets.
Fun fact (for everyone that does not already know). When Christopher Columbus was attempting to reach the East Indies by sailing west, he instead landed in the Americas, which he mistakenly believed to be part of Asia. He then misidentified the native people as "Indians".
‘I took an oath that I would risk my life for what Canada stood for’: members of Canada’s military say they didn’t expect that risk would be carcinogenic environmental contaminants in their offices
CFB Moose Jaw is contaminated with forever chemicals (PFAS). Employees say toxins at the Canadian Armed Forces base caused cancers, neurological disorders and other illnesses
Instead of simply encouraging the buildout of a private Canadian cloud, the government should invest in the expansion of a public cloud—built and run by a Crown corporation with public financing to serve government needs, but potentially to expand beyond that too. The government already has data centres of its own, but in recent decades it’s more often looked to the private sector to supply more of its computational needs instead of developing in-house capacities as it did with older forms of information technology.
Ok, but they aren't allowed to use consultants. We don't need another ArriveCAN or Phoenix.
I don't really think cloud compute is a social good deserving of a government agency to be honest. I think the government should build out its datacenters and use it to build stuff, like a federal instant payment system that replaces Interac. But I don't really buy the argument that the government should bother to sell some of its capacity.
Whatever the government tries to sell here is going to be akin to IBM Cloud platform. It's going to be clunky, evolve slowly, with lame support. No sane business should choose that. It makes more sense to pick a non-US company with Canadian-located datacenters. Who should choose a slowly moving bureaucratic provider? The government itself. So just keep it private.
I don't really buy the argument that the government should bother to sell some of its capacity
I agree ... the reason Amazon started AWS is because their compute need fluctuates throughout the year and they needed to build out their data centers to meet their peak need... most of the year it sat unused.
The government doesn't have that problem, they can build out for their projected need and not have tons of waste.
The government should not be hosting a public cloud service; if they really want to do something like that they should do a public private thing with Canada Post, maybe.
I personally have moved all of my hosting off of US servers, my ISP uses exchange for their email server where ever it is hosted I do not know so I have been moving all my email things onto the Canadian host. I started using apple’s hide my email years ago so I have decided to do a more extensive hide my email setup with my host. I have a pi hole system setup so with the 120+ emails so my internet data is worthless to Google and all the other US advertisers.
Advanced cloud services are based on good hardware, decent software, and surrounding infrastructure that combines these both into solid solutions that can be provided as a business activity.
Europe is good with operating the hardware.
Phones are constantly buzzing, and scammers know the easiest way to you is through your text messages.
Lately, many people are seeing more text messages from unknown numbers, saying things like “Unpaid highway toll detected on your vehicle.
Ubisoft has updated its End User License Agreement, and it’s instructing its users to remove and destroy their games completely should the title be taken offline.
Essentially, the EULA has given Ubisoft free rein on its ability to stop supporting a game, writing: “You and Ubisoft may terminate this EULA at any time, for any reason. Termination by Ubisoft will be effective upon notice to you or termination of your Ubisoft account, or at the time of Ubisoft’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the only company that has the same terms in its EULA. The likes of Capcom, Sega, and even the Oblivion Remaster have the same clause in their terms and conditions, meaning the stipulation isn’t unique to Ubisoft.
The Linux foundation seems ready to finally axe a Microsoft-made remote network protocol for USB that is still a part of modern Windows operating systems.
So if my mint install updates I won't be able to use USB tethering? Is there a way to update my phone to use USB CDC NCM? Or would I have better luck recompiling my mint install to add the standard they just removed? I'm pretty new to Linux (literally made the switch last November) and I sadly have to use USB tethering when my ISP shits the bed with routing to the US
Does anyone have recommendations for some chalk that resists water very well?
I'd love any recommendations of brands, specific chemicals or properties to look for, or maybe questions that I would need to answer about the environment.
I'm planning to use my chalk on my asphalt driveway.
Honestly chat GTP is your friend. Or download an applications like Sim Daltonism that simulate how colors appear to individuals with different types of color blindness.
A.I response.
To understand how a cartoon like Harvey Birdman might look to a colorblind person, it's essential to consider the different types of color blindness and how they affect color perception.
Types of Color Blindness 1. Red-Green Color Blindness: This is the most common form, which includes: * Protanopia: Difficulty distinguishing between red and green hues. * Deuteranopia: Similar to protanopia but affects green perception more.
Blue-Yellow Color Blindness: Less common, affecting the ability to differentiate between blue and yellow colors (tritanopia).
Complete Color Blindness: A rare condition where individuals see the world in shades of gray.
Visual Representation in Cartoons * Color Perception: For someone with red-green color blindness, colors that are typically vibrant red or green may appear muted or indistinguishable. For instance, a bright green tree might look more like a grayish or brownish color, and red objects may blend into greens or browns.
Cartoon Examples: In cartoons, characters and backgrounds often rely on bright, contrasting colors to convey emotions and actions. To a colorblind person, these contrasts may be less pronounced. For example:
A cartoon featuring a red apple on a green background might appear as a grayish shape against a similarly muted backdrop.
Characters with red or green clothing may look similar in hue, making it challenging to distinguish between them.
Oh man, I was freaking out for a second after clicking one of the simulations and seeing no difference from the regular image. Then I thought to check whether NoScript had blocked scripts from the site. Yeah. So, it hadn't loaded the simulated image and I was seeing the original.
The government took on debt the same as households, using low interest rates to lever themselves up. Now that rates are rising due to aging demographics we are forced to look at our debt burden.
This is why what Trudeau Sr did was stupid, and why what Trudeau Jr did was stupid, all that spending is future austerity. The only way its not is if you debase the currency further using QE, and you shift those bonds to the FX market via a depreciated currency, which ends up in even higher interest rates.
Taking on debt is normal in a government budget. In fact you have to take on debt to be able to develop your country. As long as it remains below a certain percentage of the IGP, we're fine.
What this government fails to do, as all previous government failed to do for the past 40 years, is to tax the super wealthy and close tax loopholes.
Well spending money to grow requires the money be spent on infrastructure, if you're simply giving away money using borrowing then its obviously not going to have a yield greater than the input, and you'll be paying interest in perpetuity.
As far as infrastructure spending goes, there is PLENTY of work to be done. There are so many BIG issues that need to be addressed in Canada.
Government built public housing
Reduction of automobile dependency and building rapid mass public transit across Canada, at least between major metropolitan areas, that is independent from existing rails where CN and CP have priority over public trains.
Reduction of oil & coal electricity production and increasing wind, solar and nuclear powerplants.
Nationalizing communications network and deploying them to the farthest populated areas of Canada giving everyone access to reliable high-speed communications.
Fixing the drinking water in many regions of Canada where the water has become undrinkable due to pollution or deteriorating infrastructure. Especially around native residential areas where they have been requesting this for ages now.
Fixing abandonned fossil fuel extraction areas that are polluting the country and releasing toxic crap and greenhouse gasses.
Speaking of greenhouse gasses, we should start planting a fuck ton of trees, as our government had promised to do a few years back.
Well I'd say the issue with housing in Canada is zoning obviously, land values in our largest cities are far too high that government inserting themselves into the bureaucracy is silly. We need to break the sprawled zoning and force the municipals to lower the development taxes that have been increased thousands of percent and are being passed on to new home buyers. Greenbelt is another issue, as we have a lack of space to build and yet we want to continue to massively grow the population.
Mass transit would be great too if we actually built it, we are still the only country in the G7 without high speed rail. All we ever get is lip service on climate change, things like EV subsidies for the rich to consume more by replacing their 3 year old Lexus with a sports car, likely in order to artificially grow GDP so that the liberals have a better chance at winning elections.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying I just dont ever see those results, I see massive waste and plunder.
We need to break the sprawled zoning and force the municipals to lower the development taxes that have been increased thousands of percent and are being passed on to new home buyers.
This is not going to work. You know what's going to happen? They'll remove the tax, and the prices will remain the same, and the housing promoters are going to pocket the difference. If people are already paying the insane high prices that we have now, why should they lower them if they can maximize their profits?
Greenbelt is another issue, as we have a lack of space to build and yet we want to continue to massively grow the population.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. Also this is very Toronto specific.
Mass transit would be great too if we actually built it, we are still the only country in the G7 without high speed rail. All we ever get is lip service on climate change, things like EV subsidies for the rich to consume more by replacing their 3 year old Lexus with a sports car, likely in order to artificially grow GDP so that the liberals have a better chance at winning elections.
💯%
I agree with a lot of what you're saying I just dont ever see those results, I see massive waste and plunder.
Well that's because we need to stop electing the Liberals or the Conservatives (who are basically the same party, fiscally speaking) and finally give the NDP a chance. Canada is a rich country. Except all the money's in the hands of an elite few and they have ways to avoid paying their fair fucking share while they reap all the benefits of our social services and infrastructure. Once we fix that, we'll be able to move ahead with these projects. It'll make Canada grow so much, too. The returns will be very big.
Not disagreeing the Trudeau jr years were awful financially, but not all spending is future austerity.
If spending results in higher revenue or higher income for Canadians, then that does pay a return. Infrastructure is expensive but it’s a great enabler of other commerce and economic activity.
But when the government takes on debt it does need to take that seriously for exactly the reasons you mention
Trudeau Sr. was, as far as I know, the last PM to land a budgetary surplus, back in the early 1970s. Since then, every single PM regardless of name or party affiliation has added to the national debt. If you're going to attempt to sling mud, please at least make sure that everyone involved gets their deserved level of coating. (As for whether your thesis is valid in the first place, everyone else seems to have that discussion well in hand.)
This [public service cuts, government financial austerity and all the other stuff in the first bunch of paragraphs] is a descent into fascism. By defunding the state and over-funding the military, Canada is careening towards disaster. And unsurprisingly, the voices that are paid by the corporate class, are cheering this descent on.
Come on, let's get specific. Call out our fascism where the descent into fascism is happening under Carney's government: Bill C-2, Trump ass-kissing, parts of Bill C-5.
I am diametrically opposed to wanton public service cuts, but let's be targeted and accurate at what we are calling the descent to fascism.
I mean it's not an outright fascist policy, but it is a fascist-enabling policy, so I'd say the characterization tracks. When public services are cut, poor and vulnerable people become even poorer and more vulnerable, so when a fascist blames liberals and minorities for all their problems and promises to fix those problems, they listen. Economic uncertainty is the bedrock on which fascism is built.
Tbh I'm starting to think Carney is worse, if only because so many Liberal supporters are unwilling to criticize his actions, despite how much they align with Conservatives' goals.
If Poilievre was the one ramming through things like Bill C-5, these same folks would be livid!
Alternative theory, the people pulling the strings are already in control, and Trump is the useful idiot who can be the bully/lightning rod for international ire.
Carney isn't going to do any favors. He's leaning toward austerity measures to pay for the 5% budget pledge for NATO that he was strong armed into accepting and now has acquiesced to the demands of the Broligarchy.
But hey, I'm absolutely convinced he can fix the housing crisis in Canada!
He can... As in he knows very well how to, since he was one of the main culprit for years. I will eat my hat if he does. But hey when I pointed that out during the election I was a Tankie and Trump supporter or something.
To be fair, we had to vote for the banker cuz the only realistic alternative was a nazi-handshaking maple maga moron. We picked the best of the shitty options.
I would have LOVED to see Jagmeet in the big chair, but too much of Canada is too racist to vote for someone in a turban, and the rest were going to vote for PP.
So ya. Cheney is a fucking banker. But he's better in every way than PP.
FIFY, because clearly not in every way. In many ways, as evidenced here, he sucks just as much.
The issue is that now we're stuck in the same cycle again of someone who's going to make thing measurably worse for the average person, while driving the overtone window further right, and thus further drive the rise of the far right. Voting for the lesser evil is how we got to here. The system works as expected.
When the majority keep saying npd is never going to win so i will not voting for them of course they will never win. Of you kwep voting for the same two parties thst failed multiple time, the country will keep getting worse
Hard agree. But it's a function of FPTP. If we had a better voting system (like Trudeau promised!) then a lot more people could vote their conscience instead of doing strategic voting. But until then, voting strategically is often the best move.
Having a bad system mean we should make more efforts to change things with our our hand rather than waiting the government. See all services getting worse and inflation growing witht the status quo we are in
Apple was so successful in avoiding taxes in Europe that it is estimated that it paid in some years a tax of just 0.005% on its European profits.
And that is why stealing from a corporation is not a crime. They have deprived you, personally, of benefits and services that your government can not afford because of tax dodging. They are killing you, personally, by privatizing your health care, by opposing electrification, by using single use plastics for nearly all packaging. They are keeping you, personally, poor by suppressing wages, raising prices, and outsourcing labour to markets where slavery is not only tolerated but the norm.
You can not injure a corporation, you can not hurt it's feelings. Pirate, lie, steal, cheat, get every penny you can from the 1% and use it to help the other 99.
These companies have also devastated local news media markets, peddle propaganda and disinformation in our societies which they claim is not their job to moderate, through their investments in AI are poised to become some of the biggest polluters, and many of them profit a lot from the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine which is being used as a warfare and AI training lab
The last thing you do when a toddler throws a tantrum is give in to their demands. You reinforce their behaviour and teach them it works. Every child phsychologist can tell you that.
So why the fuck are world leaders, with the resources of an entire country, enabling this whiny man-child?!
The last thing you do when a toddler throws a tantrum is give in to their demands.
But when it's a toddler with a (nuclear) gun, you do have to tread very carefully and choose your battles wisely.
I can't say yet if Carney has currently made all of the moat wise choices. I don't think anyone has enough information (including him) yet to make that call. Time will tell.
The media can keep bashing the Canadian government scrapping the tax. The last minute "capitulation" as many in the media is framing it as, while true, is also disingenuous on how Canada has to deal with the US given the cards it has in hand. Canada right now still relies heavily on exporting things to the US and keeping the US at the table talking is the best it can do right now until it can secure other trade deals around the world. Proximity matters and even more so when they are still is a superpower.
Canada still has many options despite this digital tax. What about banning US big tech? What about changing the rules about tech companies entering Canadian job space (and it doesn't have to be a tax)? Other countries have managed (eg. China, Denmark), so why can't Canada? The government can fight on one front, but Canadians themselves also have to. The boycott of travel to the US and of US goods clearly has made impact, but Canadians can do more. Support open source software like Linux, move away from Adobe and so forth. There are alternatives and some even Canadian ones. If we are to truly give the Canadian government good tools to fight, we too must do our jobs individually.
I think the point is that by capitulating on this, Canada has gained time. Time to make deals with other countries as trade partners, time to source necessities (that they have gotten from the U.S. for literally decades) from other countries, and time to build up their own military might in case Trump makes good on his idiotic "51st state" bullshit.
I guess we'll find out in time, but that's sort of my point. Trump's well known to fold (TACO), maybe he would have shown up to the table anyway, or written us a letter!
Here's the thing. They have markets too. And his Taco behavior is rocketing every market across the globe every time he does this. And some speculate that he is making a load of money by doing this. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't, I don't know. I don't think he's smart enough to actually take advantage of this. Though I know there are people out there who are and are making a ton of off of this. But all these countries crave stability, and the only way they're going to get it is if Trump stops with all of his idiotic tariff talk. And before you say anything, no he will not learn his lesson. It has been over 6 months since he took office and he, despite everyone ignoring him constantly, has continued his unyielding parade of stupid.
WHAT. He sold beans for money in his first term, of course he's making money off of it.
I don't think he's smart enough to actually take advantage of this.
This is one of his major MO's making money, maybe he missed the first few times, but he's done it so much now that he's for sure making money on these bets, just like every supporter he's got out there.
Why do you think he walked away from the table because of the DST, because he cares about gig tech? They paid him -- that's why they got seats at his inauguration.
And before you say anything, no he will not learn his lesson.
Disagree, this is a lesson reinforces itself, I bet he continues this way. I'm not saying he's smart, just greedy.
That's the thing, he sells shit. He is, in every respect, a glorified used car salesman. He takes garbage and dresses it up into gilded trinkets that he pawns off on the morons who believe in him. He also definitely used Mar-a-Lago as a way to launder bribes from foreign nationals. (Yet another reason why presidents should be constitutionally required to divest everything they own before being allowed to take office.)
Disagree, this is a lesson reinforces itself, I bet he continues this way. I'm not saying he's smart, just greedy.
Trump wants a "win". He will keep doing what he is doing until he can say "See, I won!". He is that petty and small minded.
And it's possible to push for change much more easily at this level instead of the federal overnight. TBH - microsoft is used because of the history of how computers were introduced in the NA market. If you look to China for example, they skipped the entire PC generation and went straight to mobile. Windows is not big player but rather things like 'superapps' that act more like an OS than an app. That's only scratching the surface because these apps are much more because they even have financialization (see WePay, AliPay). The other big alternative is MacOS which seems to be catching on in the post-secondary and consumer market this may lead to a change in the business playing field as the older generation retires and younger people move into the workforce.
You'll never see Canada block big tech at this point I'm afraid. All the talk of sovereignty is just that, talk. None of our different government agencies is prepared to abandon Microsoft. All of our financial regulators are completely in bed with Microsoft. Most of our banks are in bed with Microsoft. Our ATMs run on Windows due to Payments Canada being in bed with Microsoft and mandating it. All of your banking data is accessible by Microsoft. Every government agency runs on Microsoft.
Every time there's an announcement about ditching US providers, ask your MP/MLA if that includes Microsoft / big tech. There's always an "out" in those announcements to allow them to dodge that one -- like "It's too expensive to change", or "too difficult to change quickly" or whatever.
I mean, look at all these "nation-building" projects that they're itching to suppress Canadian's rights to "get moving" -- they're all projects that're gonna be lead by Big US companies to extract resources from Canada. They put on a good show, but the reality is that Trump / America was right that Canada is basically a little bitch at this point. Our politicians have proven that time and again this year.
Oh of course there's always pain and big tech has always been hard to block or even tax (our government is extremely slow on figuring out tech) - just look at our very own big telecoms - we can't even get them to behave. Canada has positioned itself into a weak position because we collectively keep voting for these spineless or clueless people believing they are doing good or for private interests. I am sure there is still a large portion of people thinking that politics don't affect them or they think that their vote won't matter etc etc. These reasons are all excuses - voting is the just the bare minimum.
Canada should have its own GDPR like the EU. Our personal data and things that we put online - one should have sovereignty over it. We have nothing in place that backs our own citizens and this in itself costs Canada nothing. It is pure and simple legislation and can cause pain to big tech without even changing any operating system.
Canada got turned into the US's "little bitch" wasn't a mistake overnight. Go look at the past 30 years of policies and who voted for what - it's clear there's a trend and one political part is almost blatant in bed with the US. There are many other ways to cause pain beyond just digital taxes.
Banking wise, I look forward to a day when banks are obsolete via crypto, but this requires a large public understanding of what crypto is all about. I'd argue that the Canadian government has no real way of governing crypto given its nature of how it works. But that's another discussion.
Yea, I'm not in favour of crypto banks in any way shape or form. Over the past five years, almost every crypto coin has been blatantly used at some point for large scale fraud, and direct bribes -- Trump's a great case in point there. Even more, shifting monetary control into a crypto-verse, is overtly giving all authority and power to tech bros, who are proving in very overt fashion that they cannot be trusted these days.
Just look at SVB. Thiel and his buddies looked at SVB's balance sheet, said "We have so much money in this bank, if we all pulled out at once we could kill the bank and trigger a regulatory fiasco" ..... followed by Palmer Luckey, one of that crowd, putting forward a Crypto-first bank with his billionaire buddies backing. So the guys that caused the latest banking collapses, are wanting us to trust them to handle all the monetary stuff. Crypto being beyond government control is a nonstarter, and as soon as govt is involved is basically the same as regular currencies. But even worse the main proponents of it are completely untrustworthy, and are entirely hell bent on dismantling things like democracy. They want the power to mint their own "zuck bucks" to function as official currencies in their little tech fascist fiefdoms. So fuck that noise.
Definitely not crypto banks. I mean more of - people being able to do the transactions themselves straight from their phones or whatnot without the middleman (the banks). That's how crypto is supposed to work - and people just pay a transaction fee ("gas fees") to get the transaction done. There's a lot of work that's already been done to bring down the cost of gas fees too. Staking is like lending out your money and pooling it together while whoever borrows it has to pay you interest instead of paying the bank interest. There's a lot of shitcoins and corrupt things with crypto for sure, but that's a problem people collectively also need to solve - maybe don't "stake"/lend out your money to shady coins is a start and don't chase after this big marketed bullshit (FTX scam anyone)? There's a reason why techbros, wall street etc got in and it's because they're circumventing regulation - so looks like the bank even in this current state despite being regulated still do tons of shady shit. The penalties are just the cost of doing business.
It's a dual edged knife. Want to be free from the middleman banks? Current regulation standards don't even hold a candle against crypto. Crypto is community driven, decentralized and possibly even anti-inflationary. There are a lot of advantages but also in its current form easily perverted. Anyways, going to stop here as we're off topic.
Ask 10 economists, you'll get 10 different answers. But opinions are news now because we need to keep that train rolling in the new 24/7 news economy. My own opinion is that he "capitulated" to get the trade talks started again se he can get past that July 21st deadline and then proceed accordingly.
I also think it gives him a small bit of leverage too. They can always be reinstated the taxes since it was a 2020(?) bill with a deferred effective date
Yes, this hasn't closed the door forever (as far as I can tell), and Carney doesn't seem like an idiot, so I hold out hope this is some kind of maneuvering, and he's still as "elbows up" as he was on the campaign trail.
Yeah, I saw them in Philly like 5-6 years ago. Brent was getting increasingly agitated with the roadies in between songs. It got to the point where he smashed his monitor to pieces right on the stage. Guy clearly has some issues.
Wow, took them so long to get quote posts. A welcome addition imo (I know there's a lot of controversy around implementing it, but for me, I think I prefer it).
Oh, my understanding is that originally they didn't want quote posts because it could lead to a culture of people dunking on each other and a lot of negativity.
So I believe there was a lot of resistance early on against that feature. That's just what I've seen people saying whenever this feature was requested over the past few years. I could be wrong though.
To my understanding (please take with several grains of salt), some folks felt like it would encourage toxicity since you can essentially mock something someone said without saying it to them directly, while sending your audience to the original post, and I believe for quite some time the plan was intentionally not to add it
On the other hand, I've heard folks suggest that by allowing people to have their own isolated conversation about an idea you can potentially limit some of the harmful consequences of people with large audiences or something, but I don't remember the exact explanation
Personally I'm happy to get quote posts and I'm happy that mastodon is cautious about implementing features that facilitate hostile interactions in the way that major platforms do for engagement
Hopefully someone can chime in with a more informed/detailed explanation, but I thought I'd share what I know in case I'm the only one to reply 😀
thanks. Friendica has it and i dont see people talking down about it though. I also already seen people being that way (it was a conservative using #justsayin afterward, coming from another instance) on a reply, maybe just notify people of quote posts so its not something equivalent to be talking at their backs without them being aware of it, notification could help
I think quote posts are undesirable for the reasons you mentioned but I have to accept that it will be huge for adoption, and the flip side (promoting others work in a positive light) is also going to be really great.
This is fantastic. I REALLY hope you can set a control on a post that allows quoting to be disabled or only allowed by people you follow. A great step in the right direction.
This is the “Emergency Certified” Teacher Facebook group.
These people possibly have bachelor’s degrees, but in subjects completely unrelated to the subjects they will be teaching.
Common complaints are about the tests being too hard (they aren’t, you can memorize the questions on fucking quizlet).
My first year teaching I was pulled aside and told by my principal, “you actually have a degree in this, you’ll have to step in to help your team” - because the other science teachers were a Physical Education teacher and the schools secretary.
But no f-ggots allowed! Being a drag queen on the weekends disqualifies you to be a school principal now, no matter how good you were at it.
I am a relatively new teacher in Oklahoma. In my experience, the teachers I've worked with are a fairly mixed bag. There are absolutely amazing teachers working in Oklahoma that are knowledgeable and passionate about their content areas. I have also noticed a fair amount of teachers that are wildly under qualified or seem to only be in a classroom for the opportunity to take advantage of the system (frequently missing work, not actually teaching their students content, etc.) Oftentimes, though schools don't have many options because they simply need bodies to supervise the students. It is very heartbreaking.
"My first year teaching I was pulled aside and told by my principal, “you actually have a degree in this, you’ll have to step in to help your team” - because the other science teachers were a Physical Education teacher and the schools secretary."
I can relate to this. I'll be entering my 4th full-year teaching. In my short time working in education, I have become the most senior and qualified teacher for my subject and grade level. I do the bulk of the curriculum planning for my subject.
The politics injected into public education via State Superintendent Ryan Walters is absolutely disgusting.
Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same.
Man... every time I use LibreOffice I curse. I'm dyed in the wool pro open source, but LibreOffice has just never cut it for me. I suppose if I had a job to do and that's what I was given it would work.
The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon 'YTK' as its own localized fork of this toolkit.
As a GNOME user who is absolutely not a hater of GTK+ and GTK4 I think it's a sane decision. This is what developers of complex graphical software should do rather than to spend an indefinite amount of resources on the transition to a newer branch or a different GUI library.
Commercial 3D printers keep getting faster and faster, but we can confidently say that none of them is nearly as fast as [Jan]’s Minuteman printer, so named for its goal of eventually printing a 3D…
First of all, I'm not sure this is the best community for this, so if you think there is a more suitable one, please inform me.
So I've been looking for manufacturers that sell computers with Linux out of the box and I remembered hearing about Tuxedo Computers. Some people seem to really like them, but I've also heard of some people complaining about them too.
And so I've come here to ask this community what are your experiences with this vendor? Is there somewhere else I should look? Thanks in advance.
Describe more about your use-case. Tuxedo is just alright, but a bit overpriced IMO.
The he absolute best performance and value laptop or desktop on the market is going to be a Framework, for instance, but maybe that's not exactly what you want.
Its value proposition is in its repairability and upgradeability. You save money by repairing and upgrading the existing laptop later instead of buying a new one. If you don't like tinkering, its not a great value.
Framework does not provide firmware support. Most framework mainboards only receive one or two firmware updates within the normal lifespan of a device. So if you need a secure bios, framework is not an option.
The actual performance per dollar of framework laptops the day you buy them is poor. A lenovo or a dell will beat it in perf/$ anyday.Frameworks laptops are only attractive perf/$ wise later when you start benefiting from cheap upgrades.
Well this is one of the worst takes I've seen around here 🤣
1) Not sure where you're getting this from. The value comes from buying a known Linux compatible platform at a similar price point to any other manufacturer. The Desktop is the first AMD Ryzen Max+ platform on the market in that form factor, and those chips are well above the performance of any other Ryzen chip on the market. Fair price as well.
2) This comment is disingenuous at best, and just wrong overall. They were slow on their firmware updates during their initial pilot shipments while the platform was still in validation, so they were making delayed changes to firmware in light of that until they cleared that hurdle. Been regular updates since. Also, firmware rarely decides the overall security of a hardware platforms unless known vulnerable portions are found and then intentionally NOT fixed, which is not what happened with all of that.
3) Absolutely wrong. The price point is the same as any other machine in the same segment, which is not the general consumer crap Lenovo kicks out, but the slightly elevated professional segment. If you're not looking for that in a new device, guess what, they have refurbs at have the price. Both conditionals right there completely invalidate whatever point you're trying to make, especially when you're buying for the stability on Linux as OP mentioned, and it's a crapshoot at best with any other manufacturer in their cheaper segments of machines.
I don't know if you're shilling for some specific point here, but you need to get informed.
Not trying to be disingenuous, I have a framework 13 and I love it. Just pointing out some real tradeoffs with it that folks ought to be made aware of.
You can get a lenovo or a dell or something else with the same specs for cheaper if you're willing to give up repairability. I'm not, so I have a framework, but that's not everyone.
For firmware support, the 12 gen frameworks still haven't received a single stable update on Linux since launch despite known vulnerabilities. That's an ongoing issue, its not fixed. For some people in security a critical environments, that's a deal breaker. Similarly the 13th gen only got 1 stable update on linux and the ryzen 300s (which I have now) again have started to get vulns reported but no patches yet.
Most vendors patch vulnerabilities according to the coordinated disclosure, and framework doesn't. Not saying framework is the devil or anything, just that there's a real tradeoff for some people.
Unfortunately no, that is only for installation via windows. There is no Linux updater for it. Still no stable update on Linux for the 12th gen 🙁
Edit: oh nice actually I see they added an EFI updater! That's great progress 😀 so I stand corrected -- 3 years after launch, it got its first and only stable update on linux! Thanks for the correction.
Correct they do not, there are components on some models (like the 12th gen) that they do not support updating using fwupd. You must use either EFI updater or update from windows to get the full update on those platforms.
I have a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 as my personal laptop, was looking for something with a bit more display resolution than my old 1080p machine, but did not like the price of 4K laptops.
It has been superb for over a year now. Came with Tuxedo's own Linux, which looked pretty but wasn't for me. Installed Arch on it, has been rock solid. Is a great machine for coding on, makes a great job of running Dwarf Fortress and less stressful 3D games - Crusader Kings 3 and Disco Elysium run great, for instance. Battery life impressive too.
Been quite robust, too - heard complaints that the lid can get a bit loose but mine's fine. All the rubber feet have come off the bottom, but that's probably because I use mine on my lap. They prefer that you install their own fan control app rather than eg. just providing drivers so that you can set it up in CoolerControl, but it works fine.
All in all, good machine. Better than the ThinkBook that it replaced, and those are fine laptops.
when i bought one, they were nothing more than re-badged clevo and tongfeng laptops.
that means that they costed a little bit more than windows based laptops with the same specs; but it also means that there was no headaches with hardware compatibility and that the battery life was better if you chose your hardware correctly. (it's also smooth sailing if you pay for the support).
i bought from kfocus most recently and it turns out it's not any different than tuxedo and i suspect that all the linux laptop companies are the same; besides system76 who have started building their own laptops instead of re-badging clevo/tongfeng.
I quite like my Kubuntu Focus. I found some people complaining about the durability of System76 chassis (apparently they're plastic) and that's why I didn't go with them.
I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.
Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.
They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.
I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.
We have a few Tuxedo computers and some other Linux brands at our company and are generally happy about them. Cheaper devices have a less than perfect keyboard (though I liked the one on the slimbook) a worse camera and microphone (though some are very ok).
I'm very happy with these Linux devices. The few makes for which we needed parts also supplied them but sending the device their way for repair took longer than we'd have wanted.
It was a performance monster and still had amazing battery life. But as others have said, they only take some finished Clevo models - like most small distributors, who can't afford their own factory.
But they verify that everything runs with Linux, else they sometimes patch stuff.
And I need to highlight their support! After years with my Pulse 15 the battery became a pillow, because I used a USB C charger that wasn't working right (always switched on and off, which killed the battery) Pretty much without questions asked I got a new battery for free.
Now I have it to my nephew, who enjoys Minecraft on this laptop (still Linux), but the CMOS battery was dead. Got that one for free as well after warranty
So, I can't really complain about them. Actually the opposite.
But I still settled for a Framework 16, because I wanted something different and the models at that time weren't fitting my use case...
I just released the first version of Gosuki, a multi-browser real time bookmark manager I have been writing on and off for the past few years. It aggregates your bookmarks in real time across all browsers and even external APIs such as Reddit and Github.
I was always annoyed by the existing bookmark management solutions and wanted a tool that just works without relying on browser extensions, self-hosted servers or cloud services. As a developer and Linux user I also find myself using multiple browsers simultaneously depending on the needs so I needed something that works with any browser and can handle multiple profiles per browser.
The few solutions that exist require manual management of bookmarks. Gosuki automatically catches any new bookmark in real time so no need to manually export and synchronize your bookmarks. It allows a tag based bookmarking experience even if the native browser does not support tags. You just hit ctrl+d and write your tags in the title.
Feature Highlights:
A single binary with no dependencies or browser extensions necessary. It just work right out of the box.
Use the universal ctrl+d shortcut to add bookmarks and call custom commands.
Tag with #hashtags even if your browser does not support it. You can even add tags in the Title. If you are used to organize your bookmarks in folders, they become tags
Real time tracking of bookmark changes
Builtin, local Web UI which also works without Javascript (w3m friendly)
suki cli command for a dmenu/rofi compatible output
Modular and extensible: Run custom scripts and actions per tags and folders when particular bookmarks are detected
Browser Agnostic: Detects which browsers you have installed and watch changes across all of them
Also handles multiple profiles per browser
Stores bookmarks in a portable sqlite database compatible with the Buku. You can use any program that was made for buku.
Can fetch your bookmarks from external APIs (Reddit and Github for now).
Easily extensible to handle any browser or API
It's open source with an AGPLv3 license, Checkout the README and website docs for more details.
It's our Republic and I think while what is happening now is despicable it won't push enough people. Suspending elections. ... That will rouse the nation.
Masked agents of the government posing as civilians are arresting people by the thousands - legal resident or not - across the country and we have not risen up. This man’s cult following literally attacked Congress as they tried to overturn an election and we did not rise up.
What makes you think suspending an election is going to tip the scales?
What makes you think suspending an election is going to tip the scales?
Mostly that at least right now there's hope for midterms to change things in Congress and then the presidential election to get Trump out. Right now we still have the trappings of a Republic. I think if elections got suspended all belief in a peaceful solution will be erased and people will react.
You have a point though, bread and circuses go a long way towards kowtowing the population. That and the risk of death at the hands of the state. I don't know where the line is that people will readily accept potentially getting shot especially if they're in white man suburbia.
I would definitely put my money on white nationalists.
Seperationists don't tend to join the Canadian military, nor would they typically display stickers of the American flag on their trucks as you can see in one of the images on the article. Also, when's the last time the souverainiste mouvement got violent? I can't think of anything more recent than the early '70s.
So a handful of guys thought they seize land and hold off an entirety of Canada's Police and Mikitary to hang onto it. They have played too many video games or watched too many movies.
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath. The main housing problem in Canada is that there is not enough of it. We can see this by looking at prices and rents, but also by …
I know I’m new here, and I understand some may feel unsure about trusting a stranger. But I come to you with my heart open, because we truly have nowhere else to turn.
My name is Britnny, and I’m a transgender woman living in Gorom refugee settlement in South Sudan. I’m here with three other queer sisters women I now call family. Together, we’ve survived what most people couldn’t imagine: daily threats, hunger, violence, and complete abandonment. But now, even survival is slipping out of reach.
The South Sudanese government gave us an order: leave the camp and go to Juba or face arrest. That deadline has already passed. We’re living in terror, unsure when the next knock on the door might come, or when we’ll be dragged out, humiliated, or worse. We weren’t given any help no money, no transport, not even a safe place to go. And for people like us trans and queer women Juba is not safe. We fear being beaten, harassed or even killed in the streets simply for being who we are.
Right now, we’re holding on with nothing. No shelter, no food security, no peace of mind. We don’t need luxuries we just want a chance to be safe. A kind friend who was once in the same camp helped us set up a fundraiser to help us relocate safely and find shelter in Juba. But we need help to make it real. We’re not asking for pity,we’re asking for solidarity, for a hand to hold while we try to escape what feels like a death sentence.
Please, if you can share, donate, or even just boost this message, you could help save four lives. We just want a chance to live. A chance to breathe without fear. A chance to make it to tomorrow.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for not turning away.
I feel for you, but I hope you understand why people are hesitant to trust a stranger on the internet asking them for money. As well this isn't exactly a community designed for that. Wishing you the best.
Loops is still in beta, so there's no other instances yet, but it's gonna use ActivityPub like everyone else does so it can federate with Pixelfed (and probs mastodon). Also, like 90% of Fediverse instances require registration, usually to prevent spam and other crazy shit (CSAM, literal gore, etc.) from being posted. Just gonna have to wait a bit.
I actually agree that registration is silly. It's trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it's probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.
Didn't realize you just wanted to scroll. Yeah, almost no instance requires registration to scroll. Once again, I think Loops is just requiring registrations now because the project is unfinished, and probably can't handle a large amount of users. They also need easy feedback from users.
Yeah, definitely could be making faster improvements, and it's disheartening considering Pixelfed hasn't had major improvements either. But I'm not a coder, so other than the fact that I donated to the spring Kickstarter, I can't complain much.
It's Dan's whole M.O: he gets excited about some new project, goes on a rushed coding rampage, releases some alpha-quality code, then loses interest and starts the chase for the next shiny toy.
tiktok alternatives would suffer the same problem that shorts and loops do; they are content creator driven platforms so unless you incentivise content creators to move you just get reposts from other platforms or ai generated slop.
Loops, like everyone rightly said, but while this initially peaked my interest, at this point I'm a little skeptical about this project. Dev seems very keen to overhype and tease new features, but usually fails to deliver, like the webUI that was supposed to be days away last year but still doesn't exist. For a fedi platform, not being able to access it via a browser on a desktop is the most bizarre thing to me. I'd hate for fediverse tech to follow this mobile-only trend.
Thinking nothing more wonky than mint/pop!/bazzite/elementary. I know there is never “one” perfect one but feeling like trying something new on this machine that’s at least somewhat push button. Since it no longer receive regular updates from Apple I just want to keep this machine available for use when needed.
I’m pretty comfortable on the above ones I mentioned. I’m not a coder/engineer so I tend to lean heavily on flatpaks and such, though if I have to go into the terminal occasionally I can usually poke my way around
Why don’t you type “MacBook Pro?” I think “MBpro” and “MBP” is probably confusing to people and they might not even know you’re talking about something that isn’t PC/Intel-adjacent.
The only problem I’ve had was the Mac not going asleep properly, and immediately waking up. But that’s something I encountered on other distros including Mint also.
Found a fix for it.
Ctrl key hasn’t been a problem. Often on many distros the old hybrid Nvidia graphics and the old Broadcom card were both problems. But ok on Mint and EOS.
in case you can't stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you're set.
two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won't come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won't wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I'll dig up the the script.
stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.
I just released the first version of Gosuki, a multi-browser real time bookmark manager I have been writing on and off for the past few years. It aggregates your bookmarks in real time across all browsers and even external APIs such as Reddit and Github.
I was always annoyed by the existing bookmark management solutions and wanted a tool that just works without relying on browser extensions, self-hosted servers or cloud services. As a developer and Linux user I also find myself using multiple browsers simultaneously depending on the needs so I needed something that works with any browser and can handle multiple profiles per browser.
The few solutions that exist require manual management of bookmarks. Gosuki automatically catches any new bookmark in real time so no need to manually export and synchronize your bookmarks. It allows a tag based bookmarking experience even if the native browser does not support tags. You just hit ctrl+d and write your tags in the title.
Feature Highlights:
A single binary with no dependencies or browser extensions necessary. It just work right out of the box.
Use the universal ctrl+d shortcut to add bookmarks and call custom commands.
Tag with #hashtags even if your browser does not support it. You can even add tags in the Title. If you are used to organize your bookmarks in folders, they become tags
Real time tracking of bookmark changes
Builtin, local Web UI which also works without Javascript (w3m friendly)
suki cli command for a dmenu/rofi compatible output
Modular and extensible: Run custom scripts and actions per tags and folders when particular bookmarks are detected
Browser Agnostic: Detects which browsers you have installed and watch changes across all of them
Also handles multiple profiles per browser
Stores bookmarks in a portable sqlite database compatible with the Buku. You can use any program that was made for buku.
Can fetch your bookmarks from external APIs (Reddit and Github for now).
Easily extensible to handle any browser or API
It's open source with an AGPLv3 license, Checkout the README and website docs for more details.
Right now it's not yet built-in but it's on the high priority list of features and should be fairly easy to add soon. It will be either a self hosted sync server or a replicated architecture.
For mobile it can be achieved with the autoimport feature and Syncthing
🔄
This guide describes a workaround for multi-device bookmark synchronization using existing GoSuki features and third-party tools. Native multi-device sync is not yet implemented in GoSuki.
Right now it's not yet built-in but it's on the high priority list of features and should be fairly easy to add soon. I am planning to do it as a self-hosted docker.
For mobile it can be achieved with the autoimport feature and Syncthing
🔄
This guide describes a workaround for multi-device bookmark synchronization using existing GoSuki features and third-party tools. Native multi-device sync is not yet implemented in GoSuki.
Interesting, could be nice to help move away from Firefox Profile by being able to import from it rather than "just" the current installed Firefox instance.
I am not sure I understand the use case but as it stands now you can select a profile and run Gosuki once, it will import everything from said profile or even all profiles if you prefer.
Not yet, it manages snaps but I can add flatpaks as well. I made it so all definitions are in a single file so that people can easily contribute by testing. I will update the documentation to reflect this.
Emerging from the festering depths of the Finnish underground, GRAVE HEX are set to unleash their debut album, “Vermian Death”, on August 22nd, 2025 via Nigh...
All I want is to be able to record only one application, rather than all audio. I know I can turn off the mic audio in OBS, but I haven't figured out how to record only a game's audio, e.g. I'm using Pipewire.
I'm not super familiar with OBS for... actually capturing/streaming games, but if you add a new source of "Game Capture", select your game window and the check the "Capture Audio" option it should work. Though I see it is marked as beta lol
Add a new souce of this type, and it will add a new audio track, for which you can select which application(s) you want to be captured for that source. Works pretty much like the pipewire screen capture source in obs, but for audio.
I usually have 3 of these sources running: Discord, Game and Music player audio; in addition to a normal full desktop audio capture and my mic. They all go on separate audio tracks in the output file.
Basically all written in the title. Does anyone know if Canada is actually accepting us as refugees from the US yet, or no? Any information is appreciated, thank you!
No. Canada has an agreement with the US that nobody entering Canada from the US will be seen as a refugee and will be deported back to the US. Vice versa is true with people entering the US from Canada.
It's the Safe Third Country Agreement. They even have big red letters saying "yes this agreement is still in effect".
For some bizarre reason, Americans are defined via international treaty as "not refugees". Nothing the US government does to its citizens is allowed to be considered inhumane, oppressive, or persecution.
Because they're all different circumstances. If you're fleeing from the government in your previous country, then the US is considered safe and we won't let you in. If you're fleeing from the US government, then the US might not be considered safe and you'd be allowed in.
There are currently several people claiming refugee status from the US that are under consideration. If the rule was a blanket "no" they would've been denied immediately.
Americans can still apply for refugee status. That agreement makes it so if you come to the US and Canada as a refugee from a third country, you can only apply for status in the first country you entered.
US Citizens are still eligible for refugee status, assuming they meet the other criteria.
The safe third country law predates the bulk of the current insanity, and Canada wants to maintain decorum with Trump due to ongoing tariff and sovereignty threats. Dropping out of that agreement shouldn't be required to accept someone's refugee claim and requires less political capital.
The UN has expressed concerns about Canada designating the US a safe country and asked our government to stop this. I'd be surprised though, if either major party listens to them about it. :/
In practice I doubt Americans would end up qualifying for refugee status, at least not yet. I'm pretty sure you have to show there are no safe places in your country, and many US states are more reasonable for LGBT folks than some Canadian provinces are.
Last I heard, refugees needed to demonstrate a clear, immediate, concrete, mortal threat, that you couldn't feasibly escape anywhere else in your country.\ And if you're rejected you may not reapply and you may even be barred entry.
But I'm not a lawyer, so idk the details or what would qualify as such a danger (it even if I was given the correct information, so take it with a grain of salt).
simply being lgbtq+ isnt eligble enough, you would have to face persecution, as lgbtq+ isnt threatened as a whole in the USA in the near future(jailing, killings, wartorn). eg,some place fleeing from IRAN AS LGBTQ+ would be eligible, or of a specific demographic like religion(ba'hai). You can still flee to safe spaces in blue states, blue areas, so its not really eligible, unless all the states starts targeting lgbtq+(with above persecutions), right now its mostly rhetoric and anti-trans laws here and there, and not really enforced as a whole for the most part.
if you have specialty, in stem try looking for certain positions. though rare, scientist "refugees" are possible.
The kind if person who would benefit from that shouldn't be using a computer. But then again, most smartphone users shouldn't be using a phone. How about choosing different default settings in an installation based on a central "expert" vs "newbie" setting?
People who find computers useful should be using computers.
This weird idea from some linux users that only people who see their computer as a hobby and have mastery over them should be allowed to use them, and that computers should be designed exclusively around the needs of computer-as-hobby users, is absolutely nuts.
Its a tool. It should be designed to be useful as possible to anyone who needs such a tool.
Sincerely, Another linux user who cares about UI/UX and is tired of this kind of junk. It's a dumb argument, let's all stop making it please. Linux supports all your "technical user" wildest dreams, let the average people have their features and design considerations too.
Its a tool. It should be designed to be useful as possible to anyone who needs such a tool.
Twenty years ago I might have agreed. Now, in hindsight, I can say that giving everyone access to computers & thereby the internet has brought out the worst in humanity, including mass-manipulation and authoritarian regimes thanks to people making even worse calls in elections than they used to.
The devil is in how things are made useful to users who just want to get things done. The problems comes with corporations making decisions about what users should need to understand, and what users want. There's been a lot of dumbing down and manipulation in that process, serving the needs of those corporations and advertisers and not the needs of the users.
Software can be made useful for those who don't want or need to undertand all the details, in a good, non-harmful way. The principle of separation of interface and implementation even demands it. But our society being what it is, that largely doesn't happen, so I'm inclined to agree with your pessimistic take.
I recently installer something, and KDE showed me where it ended up in the launcher, which I appreciated, and now I'm not supposed to use a computer. Really? Thanks.
At least me wife will be happy, but I'll need to find new work.
What qualifies as "expert" setting can be very divisive.. for me, it would be removing this menu entirely. Or even switching from KDE to sway or similar ^^U
But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful. It helps finding the category the app you just installed belongs to. If you install an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before): which category should it be at? games? education? development? graphics?
My main point is: If the desktop environment "expert" toggle is set once, gimmicks like this one here would be disabled by default. On a default installation, with the "expert" toggle to "off", those same gimmicks might be enabled by default.
Everything in the desktop is a gimmick... remove all visible things of the desktop and only show apps. Settings can be handled in a text configuration file. Or are some of these gimmicks actually useful, even for "experts"?
I have many times, installing a new app on a Windows Server, just gone in and seen the latest installed app and clicked on it. Sorry, that is my best example as that is where I most often use this feature - I don't install that many apps on my desktops.
If this defaulted to off, then it would actually be useless.
Would just be the other way around with what posts you see online. Instead of OP you'd see "how can I find my newly installed apps" and the same "ahem" screenshot reply.
Except that if people don't know the feature exists, they might not ask about it. If you see the feature exists and you don't want it, it is easier to figure out how to turn it off.
There are many feature that are turned on by default - this is just one of them.
I see plenty of posts here, on the kde matrix, on the kde forums, on the bugtracker asking for non existing features.
I have no clue about the exact percentages, their motivations or feelings, so it's hard to conclude anything.
Personally, I more often ask for nonexistent features (and i feel no barriers there) than turning off something that is on by default - which is a good sign I guess?
I’m glad there’s a toggle, it seems like it would actually be useful here but I’d probably turn it off.
With that said, there’s a special place in hell for the multitudes of apps that have red notification dots all over the UI with no clear indicator as to what they’re about or how to clear them 😁
I cannot wrap my head around the use case of this. Is the attention span of people really this degraded in 2025 that they need to be reminded what program they just installed?
I think the author has a valid point. This just clutters the UI and adds unnecessary mental load by directing your focus to the indicators every time you open the application menu.
Don't get me wrong, I am not against a "new" label in every context but in this specific case it just feels unnecessary.
*edit: If the use case is: Little Timmy installed a new program on grandmas PC and now she can see the new program better I guarantee you grandma will be super confused when the green dot disappears and from that time on can't find the program anymore. I support a couple of KDE systems with users like Grandma and a dynamic UI like this is contra productive in my experience. For grandma you put the app she is supposed to use in the taskbar as a starter and that's it. No "new" label needed.
Some apps have weird names and I forget what they're called. Showing a "new" badge, even if it's just for the first few times I open the app, makes it more likely that I'll remember the app's name.
Thanks for the reply. Forgetting the name of the application you installed 10 seconds ago was not something I had considered. I wonder if this a common occurrence since this literally never happened to me before.
You can set most KDE menus to show the "Comment" key of the .desktop files instead of the "Name" key. So "KDE Advanced Text Editor" instead of "Kate".
Packages can come with several "programs" that aren't necessarily named the same as the package. Example: Calibre installs menu items for "Calibre", "EBookViewer" and "EBookEditor" on my distro.
It's not about forgetting...it' about helping to quickly find what you just installed and what is all included.
What's the problem here? I said I had never had that problem before and therefor was wondering if that's a common problem users might have. So that would make the feature indeed not as useless as I thought.
I install graphical and visual design apps. And I'll navigate to the category by mouse. I don't memorise the names of all my apps. I'm not in IT, and I'm not working with text all the time. I'll right click the app icon and go 'Add to favourites', so I have a highly productive, 1 click access to important apps. I'm interested in usability, am not a beginner and I know my UI and settings well. I can see why people find this tiny green dot useful. It's OK if you are not into usability. But note that there are many different user types, with different needs at different times. And the flexibility of KDE Plasma makes it a really great desktop environment.
It's more about which category a particular specific software belongs. If a kid installs an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before). Which category should it be? games? education? development? graphics?
I personally don't use this kind of menus with categories, I prefer dmenu style launchers where you type to search what you need. But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful.
I was very annoyed when I got this, but remembered that it's KDE, and turning it off is 4 clicks. Proprietary software often doesn't allow you to turn this off (easily). Windows has this "feature", where is the setting?
I don't think it's a productive "feature", but considering it can be turned off so easily I don't consider it a complete showstopper.
The main issue is UX imo. On Windows 11, it's "5 clicks", but you have to open the settings app and find the setting two submenus deep. On KDE, it's right click > configure application launcher > toggle setting > apply.
Yeah, for some reason they've seemed to made it harder to find the actual start menu settings instead of more generic taskbar settings. So that's a fair point.
It sounds like the author of the article is more concerned with the incentive it creates for developers to push useless or sloppy updates ("impact driven development") than the UX.
My understanding is that this only happens in newly installed apps, not recently updates ones. They are only highlighted because the user installed them, not because the developer did anything.
It's a screenshot of the application launcher, the menu to launch apps already installed, not the software store.
Thing like this are why there's a million settings in KDE; every dev is prepared for the inevitable "but I hate it, make it go away" complaint. Granted, this complainer was pretty respectful and threw in a donation to soften the blow. Most people just act entitled, like the dev personally affronted them with their update.
I find this complaint very strange. It's a dot. It helps people find what they installed.
But if this person doesn't need it, how would they ever see it? Most power users I know never even look in the menu, so they would never know there is a dot in the first place.
It's all a show. Some people are just desperate for attention. "Oh, look at me, I'm OCD" as if that makes them cool or something. This person just spent €100 for literally nothing (glad it went to kde of course). Being annoyed by this is, IMHO, very stupid. It's a menu that can't even stay open. Who's sitting there sifting their menu all day long that this bothers them? 😂
I'll never understand why this "new/green dot" thing exist, but I'll also never understand why it would bother anyone. lol. Like, it's in kick-off. How often are you scrolling through kick-off? Does anyone keep that menu open at all times that it triggers your OCD seeing it? Am I missing something? Or is it just people seeking attention?
When I install a new application, I generally run it immediately. Having the new indicator might be nice to help find it - they don't always drop into the menu where I expect.
I agree, I can't see why it upsets the author so much. "You've installed a new app, here it is." "YYYEEEAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!"
On July 8 and 10, hundreds of healthcare workers in Minnesota could go out on strike. They are nurses and physician assistants who are members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) who are upset about what they say is unsafe staffing, as well as …
The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities, often over the objections of students, paren…
So the officers are going to be prisoners as well? They will be on site, hanging out in a tent in the swamp.
I understand capitalism, I have no respect for the economic system but understand it, but a Canadian company hires out the people for US prisons in this economy? Then $25/hr for 60 hours a week, to live with scared people.
From what I understand it from reading the post it is something like a week on a week off. I am sure it would be very stressful and I do not see people lasting long times; or there would be people who stay employed for a longer time, like an oil rig. I can see the proud boys applying and getting the jobs and people will die there, until it rains and the proud boys get a little wet and scared of the water.
IIRC, in the early 20th century, it was considered fashionable in some segments of French Canada to get all one’s teeth pulled out and replaced with dentures, so maybe time is a flat circle here.
It's an implementation of sudo in Rust (because of course) that doesn't implement every nonsense feature of the normal sudo giving it a smaller attack surface than the normal sudo while still keeping the familiar commands and ease of use (that doas is somewhat lacking)
sudo has a bunch of commands and features nobody (except the person who implemented it) has ever used, giving it quite a large surface of attack. doas is meanwhile much leaner and developed by the OpenBSD community, meaning if a feature has security concerns it won't be implemented no matter how practical. sudo-rs somewhat of a middle ground between the two, not planning on implementing every single feature of sudo while keeping the same core commands and implementing the quality of life features doas doesn't like because they're insecure, and is the solution I personally use.
As far as mitigation is concerned, the only thing you need to do is to confirm that your system's sudo version is at least version 1.9.17p1 or later, which can be done with the command sudo -V. If your version is older than 1.9.17p1, update immediately.
From questions of cannibalization to degrading the value of all of gaming, Xbox Game Pass has been zeroed in on as a potential symptom of last week's massive gaming lay offs.
Two open source game development powerhouses join forces here... the Godot Game Engine and GB Studio game engine, combined... gives you GodotBoy! GodotBoy ...
Experience a landmark moment in jazz history.This rare, one-hour video captures highlights from the 1989 edition of the legendary Live Under the Sky festival...
OOTL/TL;DW: - Provided the petition is successful, our government must respond to the call of action:
We, the undersigned, People of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to work with international partners, including the United Nations, to urgently deploy peacekeeping forces to Gaza for the protection of civilians, to support the delivery of humanitarian aid, and to uphold Canada’s commitment to international humanitarian law and the responsibility to protect vulnerable populations.
Please continue to sign the petition and share this around as it's likely that many of the signatures will be culled similar to the Stop Killing Games Movement! - deadline for signatures is July 26, 2025
As Canadians I know that we can make a positive difference for ourselves and our supporters!✊
The Canadian government is going to have to respond to a demand that, working with international partners, they deploy peacekeeping forces to Gaza.The push c...
Discourse is modern forum software for meaningful discussions, support, and teamwork that gives your online community everything it needs in one place.
Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.
The 2015 Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was thought to be the threshold for averting severe climate change impacts.
Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS
Hello, I've been saying it to myself for a year now, but I'm on summer break rn and I really need to do something with my life. Here's some of the software I plan to host. Goal is to not spend more than $150-200, I do have some gift cards though.
Absolutely Will Run:
Nextcloud & Immich - I want to replace Google and OneDrive
Might do in the near future:
Jellyfin - my mom and I usually just bootleg by using Kodi on our FireTV, so not a major need rn, but might be nice for future purposes.
piHole - better overall ad blocking, so I don't have to use nextDNS on all my devices, and maybe help my mom out.
VPN - I currently pay for Proton, and we use it on the FireTV, but it sucks cause it doesn't have killswitch. I have several devices and profiles that I use, so I was thinking maybe just an overall VPN might be nice
Seeding - I think it would be nice to give back to the community, since I torrent every now and then.
OS Plan: I plan to use Proxmox as I have a little bit of experience using it, and others seem to like it a lot for managing multiple software.
I know I don't need to go full power mode rn, so I wanna stick with something low end that I could maybe upgrade in the future. Should I just buy a used laptop/PC, or get like an Optiplex or ThinkServer? I don't wanna rack up my parent's electric bill. I already got some hard drives a year ago, so but is using an external drive bad?
I know to use the Ethernet ports so my signal isn't shit, but I gotta work out the best spot I can put my server. I do know an okay amount of networking knowledge, and I'm a cyber student anyway so this is like a fun yet educational personal project for me.
When it comes to external access and security of these services, should I stick with Tailscale? Some people have concerns over the proprietary bits and are using headscale instead I guess.
If you really want something upgradeable, used enterprise SFF is the way to go: discountelectronics.com/
However, the hardware market is in a weird spot right now; you’ll get far more bang for your buck with an Intel N150. You can find a 16GB DDR5 w/ 1 TB SSD around the $200 mark, and that’s what I’d roll with in your shoes, assuming you don’t mind living without a spinning disk. Your Jellyfin and Immich instances will run far smoother.
The ocean around Antarctica is rapidly getting saltier at the same time as sea ice is retreating at a record pace. Since 2015, the frozen continent has lost sea ice similar to the size of Greenland.
So this has been annoying me lately; drivers leaving excessive spacing when stopped for a red light. I get it, you don't want to be right on the next guys bumper, you should leave space to escape if the guy in front stalls or somebody tries to carjack you. But 2-3 car lengths? It really bugs me when they do it in a left turn lane causing a back up to the travel lane resulting in overall congestion. Or, if they're first at the light, they don't pull up far enough to reach the road sensors that trigger a light change. I haven't been able to isolate to a specific demographic, seems to be young, old, black, white, you name it. Maybe they're just stoned at the wheel. I'm tempted to roll down my window and ask 'wtf'? I'm in the Northeast US. Has anybody else witnessed this?
"Space ice" contains tiny crystals and is not a completely disordered material like liquid water, as previously assumed, according to a new study by scientists at UCL (University College London) and the University of Cambridge.
Neither of the people mentioned in the article said anything wrong. Fucking babies can't handle getting what they voted for. They love dead kids anyway, what the fuck is the problem?
I think so. I lost count of the little things, it really was death by a thousand paper cuts.
I was a pretty rabid fan of Ubuntu, still have an x86 and ppc CD of 5.04 somewhere.
But by the time snaps started appearing, and then Ubuntu pro, Ubuntu decided to revert some of my customized configs in /etc after an upgrade, I had had enough. When snaps were reinstalled after an upgrade in 2021, I just flipped over to Debian, which has come a long way in being usable out of the box.
I have been using ffmpeg to convert audio files to MP3 format for my commercial web service and have found out that ffmpeg is no longer available in my version (12.
At the time, canonical was throwing its weight around and essentially bullying Debian upstream repos. Around this time, there was a mass exodus of the Debian leadership over this kind of thing.
The old guard of Debian wasn't as... enthusiastic about systemd either, but look what they use now.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and it's basically the same thing, just faster since it uses native packages instead of Snaps. Ubuntu might as well run all it's apps in Docker containers.
You could rebrand Debian to Ubuntu and most users wouldn't even notice.
Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.
It's rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it's quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.
It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.
They have a great short name and solid logo.
Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don't remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.
Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it's their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.
Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.
But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don't care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.
Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.
Not really with archiinstall, but indeed as you say reading the manual is an expectation. Their philosophy is "creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools", as well-summarized by Wikipedia.
wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best
tbh that goes for every distro. It's just that Canonical is more hands-on with its approach. The major complaint with Snap besides performance issues is Canonical making it so that only the Snap versions of popular apps (most famously, the bundled Firefox) are available by default.
I don't know about everyone else, but the last couple of years has had the most unstable Ubuntu releases, with the most unrecoverable releases when issues happen.
I've since moved to Fedora for desktop and straight Debian for server.
I used it a little way back in 2005-2006ish, and decided to give it a try again after a third reinstall of ubuntu within a year last year.
though, I'm about to get a "new" laptop and may toy around with Arch on the old one. I had previously tried setting up Arch in a VM but that's not supported and ended poorly.
I like arch because: - it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things - it is community run and not beholden to a company - packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream - the wiki and forums are the best of any distro
the wiki ~~and forums~~ are the best of any distro
If you don't participate in it that is. If you veer only a little off of their strict rules, then Arch forum will ban you and they won't allow you to even read the forum.
I don't really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:
I'm a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.
Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it's trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.
Arch isn't particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.
As to why particularly Arch? I think it's just that level of control. I admit it's not for everyone, but again, if you're at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.
Arch has a very in-depth wiki that's the go-to resource for a lot of Linux users, and it offers a community-driven way to have access to literally anything that's ever landed on Linux ever through the AUR. It's also nice to have an OS that you never have to reinstall (assuming all things go well).
Why that turned into such a cult-meme is anyone's guess though.
About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.
Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren't nearly as toxic but still culty. "Way of the future" etc.
All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.
The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)
This is it mostly for sure. I used to be that True Linux Enjoyer. I still install arch sometimes but I only ever use an arch-derived distribution now that comes with an installer. I already feel like there’s not enough time in the day without having to manually copy files off a USB stick
I have a similar need for a "niche" install. I need Arch for it. I'm doing a laptop installation with LUKS2, TPM2, Secure Boot, systemd-boot with UKI, BTFRS, Apparmor and it has a Oculink eGPU dock station.
Last time I used EndeavourOS, I managed to get the graphical installer to install BTRFS on LUKS, it did require custom partitioning in the graphical installer, snapper just worked after that.
Zram (or was it Zswap?) was pretty easy to enable after installatiok
The bootloader might be beyond what the graphical installer can do though... I never really bothered switching...
To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn't use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.
One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.
I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the "True Linux Explorer", but the wiki outage accelerated it.
And here I am, just planning on going to Mint or something whenever win 10 support finally actually ends. I had Ubuntu like 15 years ago for a while, but I'm at a point where I want to do less learning about my operating system.
The way I see it, you can have an OS that breaks less often and is hard to fix, or an OS that breaks a little more often that is easy to fix. I choose the latter. 99/100 times, when something breaks with an update, it's on the front page of archlinux.org with a fix.
The problems I've faced with other distros or windows is the solution is often "reinstall, lol", which is like a 3 hour session of nails on a chalkboard for me.
How user friendly is the installation process? I've never tried, so I don't know. I'm curious now; just based on how people talk about it, I always perceived it as as distro that requires a lot of technical knowledge to use like Gentoo, which I unsuccessfully tried to install way back in 2010. I'm more knowledgeable and patient these days, so I may be able to work with arch.
You can use archinstall and it is dummy simple. Just have another computer or phone around to look things up and go down the menu like a checklist. My admittedly limited arch experience has so far been "run archinstall, use pacman to install tools as I run into things I'd like to have". I have a Framework 16 with the built in GPU, I imagine some hardware complicates this process but just look stuff up it's all out there unless you're on some really wild hardware. Even without archinstall you can follow the arch wiki and you're basically replicating what the tool does but using the wiki as your checklist and needing to type more
Well, Ubuntu uses Snap, which is a rather poor packaging solution that basically no other distro has adopted. By default it's a little bloated, it's made some controversial decisions (rust coreutils), and other distros just do what Ubuntu does better (like Mint)
People that got into Linux when most of the main distributions were easier to install than windows in most cases. Some people wanted to show off that they can install a Linux like it was when we did it back in the 90s for some reason I still don't understand till this day. I do like their wiki though. Works great for debian as well as arch.
I've been a slackware user since the late 90s. I take for granted how easy it is to install today. I've been tinkering with a socket 7 build, and nothing is easy. Installing slackware 8 is a pain in the ass. I can't even get half my hardware working on win95! It's not like riding a bicycle.
It's funny because I see the same cult behavior, but for Fedora. I've never understood the point of this distribution that has never worked well for me.
I'm on Manjaro by the way, because I love everything about Arch except the release style.
Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it's a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.
Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn't broken it yet, and he's capable of breaking every single OS.
That said, never heard of fedora being a cult at all. Hell I feel it gets far less recognition than it should honestly for being cutting edge and stable.
But you're still getting updates every day, just two weeks later than Arch. The "testing" is just two other branches somewhat closer to the Arch package releases.
I'm using Fedora, but I'm not going to say it's my favorite. I liked MX and OpenSUSE a lot. Just had a hard time with running them on a computer. Fedora just worked out the box.
When I got fed up with windows 8.1 (and windows update bricked it), I first used ubuntu. How well or not it worked depended on the version. In version 19 it got some ugly white message boxes. I searched for how to change their color and found an angry dev saying no you cant change that. This was the final bullshit. Then I switched to arch, which lets me choose how my stuff looks and doesn't have the whole 3/4 versions are buggy thing. It works and ubuntu does not.
Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.
Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.
Normal people who use Arch don't bring it up much, because they're all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.
The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.
Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE, it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.
People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.
Mir and Snap were bigger issues though as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.
But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel's back. People left windows for linux so they wouldn't have to deal with this kind of nonsense.
I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3. Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.
I decided to see what Arch Linux was about and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux. Arch + Xfce for the win.
I left Ubuntu after Unity, it could have been the greatest thing ever, but Canonical deciding what was best for me felt too much like Microsoft just shoving whatever garbage they wanted to my system.
I'm quite experienced in Linux but I wouldn't use either. Arch is great if you like to tinker, Ubuntu sucks for the not so libre approach , corporate ties, telemetry etc. I distrohopped before but today I just install my debian based distro and shit works.. Ubuntu I've installed twice before when I was new to Linux, and have had a major issues every time due to official updates that broke internet drivers and other things, that's a fun one when you only have one PC . Not to mention its so bloated that shitty computers that I like to thinker with it have a hard time catching up. The arch thing is also mostly a kind of meme, targeting the more unbearable nerds. People I hated when I was a noob (they will let you know you are) But they are found everywhere and in general I don't think there's more of those people in arch community than anywhere else. It's more of a stab at elitism than arch specifically.
I feel like it isn't really specific to arch, every distro has a following, but some are more "passionate" about it than others. I think arch, NixOS, and gentoo are the most notable.
It has: - a great wiki - many packages, enough for anything you want to do - its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you. - and the Memes.
While Ubuntu is a desktop distro that does server too and shove their snaps in your face, even though they're slow to use and bound to their (proprietary?) server.
pacman, seriously, I don't hear enough of how great pacman is. Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message "lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found". I haven't had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don't have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I'm lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
Hmm, finding what package a file is in is absolutely possible on Ubuntu/Debian too. You can use the online Ubuntu/Debian packages search, or use apt-file.
The packages don't exist on Debian, they'd need to be built from source. Dependencies are a bitch on Debian (apt will remove things by itself). That's why I like the AUR.
"I run Arch btw" became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. "Look at my l33t skills."
Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical...well...petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They're increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole "Not Invented Here" thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they're still clinging to.
For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.
I left Ubuntu for Arch because I got sick of Arch having everything I wanted and Ubuntu taking ages to finally get it. I was tired of compiling shit all the time just to keep up to date.
Honestly glad I made the change, too. Arch has been so much better all around. Less bloat and far fewer problems.
I installed arch before there was the official install script. It's not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)
All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you
IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.
The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.
In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That's sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn't change then it's likely to stay that way, but it's not the same thing as reliability.
I think Arch is so popular because its considered a middle of the road distro. Even if not exactly true, Ubuntu is seen as more of a pre-packaged distro. Arch would be more al a carte with what you are actually running. I started with Slackware back in the day when everything was a lot more complicated to get setup, and there was even then this notation that ease of access and customization were separate and you can't have both. Either the OS controls everything and its easy or you control everything and its hard. To some extent that's always going to be true, but there's no reason you can't or shouldn't try to strike a balance between the two. I think Arch fits nicely into that space.
I also wouldn't use the term "cultists" as much as "aholes". If you've ever been on the Arch forums you know what I'm talking about. There is a certain kind of dickish behavior that occurs there, but it somewhat is understandable. A lot of problems are vaguely posted (several times over) with no backing logs or info to determine anything. Just "Something just happened. Tell me how to fix it?". And on top of that, those asking for help refuse to read the wiki or participate in the problem solving. They just want an online PC repair shop basically.
I'm not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more "evangelism", that's unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.
Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the "stable end states". You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.
That is the main reason I use Arch. I am not a Linux expert but I am able to solve most of my problems reading the wiki. I used to use Ubuntu and Mint but those ended with me copy pasting stuff into the terminal and not really learning anything. When I switched back to Linux this time I went with Arch.
Because there are still people who have not yet seen the light. Once everyone has joined the fold they will not be able to remember why anyone resisted in the first place.
There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.
Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.
In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.
Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.
There's also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.
And the Amazon "scandal".
And then there's the telemetry stuff.
Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him... unapproachable and edgy.
Nix is great but not the saving grace I thought it would be. I daily it. Like it. Run cinnamon coming from Mint. But to be fair. It takes real effort and time to setup your config file, comment it thoroughly and then master the system. Once it's fully automated backups and all you can hop machine to machine and it's like you never left your OG machine. There's pros and cons for sure.
If there was a simple Debian based distro that I could declaratively manage via a single config file, I think I'd try it. I.e. not using Puppet or Chef that can only bootstrap a system state, but something to truly manage a system's entire life cycle, including removing packages and anything littering the system file tree. But since there isn't, I'm using NixOS instead.
Having a DSL to declare my entire system install, that I can revision control like any other software project, has been convenient for self documenting my setup and changes/fixes over time. Modularizing that config has been great for managing multiple host machines synchronously, so both my laptop and desktop feel the same without extra admin work.
Nixpkgs also bolsters a lot of bleeding edge releases for the majority of FOSS packages I use, which I'm still getting used to. And because of how the packaging works, it's also trivial to config the packages to build from customer sources or with custom features. E.g. enabling load monitoring for Nvidia GPUs from btop that many distros don't ship by default.
I've started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let's you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).
After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back. Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it's just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It's been more stable than windows 10 for me.
Tldr: arch let's you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.
I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.
When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.
The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.
Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.
Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.
I don't really understand either. Where are the Gentoo and LFS elitists? It seams like there should be more of those than arch elitests. Maybe it's just because more people use arch.
Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it's missed on other replies.
I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that's right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I'm talking about the original ncurses installer here).
After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with "I use arch BTW", which meant you didn't need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.
Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of "it doesn't happen on my distro" effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.
This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the "I use Arch btw" replies and thought they meant "I know more than you because I use Arch", so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using "I use Arch btw".
That's when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn't break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn't help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren't cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.
At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I've tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it's a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it's also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other "noob" distros because at the end of the day it's all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).
As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same "I use Arch btw" guys dumping on Ubuntu for being "noob", other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.
I used Ubuntu as my first distro out of curiosity sometime around 2006. I've tried others (Mint, Pop OS, Debian, Fedora) but mostly settled with Ubuntu because it was just kind of ok for me and as another user said, there was a lot of articles that helped with getting things working because it became popular.
I had heard of Arch and to your point the it's complicated thing very much kept me away from it even though I have been using computers for around 30 years and was comfortable using a terminal.
The other thing is gaming, I consistently had problems with the nvidia cards that I've had over the years and never really cared to dig into trying to get things to work so Linux was kind of my testing ground for other things and just general learning about how things work.
Then I finally just had enough of Windows a couple of years ago, and with gaming support getting better I went back to Ubuntu and it just didn't feel good, I wanted something different that was setup how I wanted it so I looked into Arch.
I tried a couple of times to manually install it but my attention span (ADHD) kept me from focusing on the documentation enough to actually learn what I was doing. In comes the archinstall script, it was basic enough for me to follow and understand to get my system up and running.
I went through roughly 3-4 installs using it and testing stuff after I had it running and breaking stuff and just doing a fresh install since the script made it very easy. Since then I have learned a good bit more, and honestly don't think I will ever use another distro for my desktop. Just the ability to make it exactly what you want and things just work. Not to mention the documentation is massive and the AUR is awesome.
I do use Pop OS on my wife's laptop since it decided to automatically upgrade to W11 which crippled it and I just wanted something that I could just drop on there that would work with no real configuration since the only thing it needs is Citrix which works ootb and she can use all her office tools through that and has libre office if she wants to do something locally.
I do have a separate drive with W11 on my desktop, its used for one thing, SolidWorks. Which I use enough to merit having windows.
Arch was and still kind of is seen as the "I use Arch BTW" crowd, but it really shouldn't be that way. The install script isn't fancy, but it works. I think that would be one of the biggest barriers to break that mindset and open it to more people that are still fresh to Linux. I think that having even the most basic "GUI" for installing Arch would do wonders.
I don't use either now. I have tried both. When I started with Ubuntu i was great; fast, light, all the good stuff. Then it started to get bloated and wouldn't run on my old machine... So I moved to Arch and it saved me and I used it for years.
My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.
Ubuntu? Its a can't make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.
The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.
So I love Debian but it prides itself on stability so packages tend to be older. I think this is good for a server but probably not great for a desktop. Ubuntu came along and was like we'll be like Debian but newer packages. Everything was cool for a while but then they started doing shitty things. The first that I can think of was ads in the terminal. This was not great for an open source app. Then when you did apt install firefox it installed Firefox as a snap. WTF?!?!? (apt should install .deb files, not snaps). Because of this, lately I've decided to avoid Ubuntu.
I used Gentoo for a while and it was great but configuring and compiling everything took forever. I'm getting too old for that. Arch seems like a good alternative for people who want to mess with their system. So it's become a way for people to claim they know what they are doing without having to recompile everything. (Note: I haven't used Arch, this is just my perception)
Recently I got a new laptop and I had decided to put Linux on it and had to decide what distro. Arch was in consideration but I ended up going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's got the latest but I don't really have to configure anything. If I had more time, I might go with something like Arch but I don't really want to do that much fiddling right now.
I wonder if it's just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.
A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu material was often titled "how to do it in Linux" and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn't work for you for whatever reason.
Even some software that says it's available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you're really good there's a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.
It's like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I've never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I've came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.
Arch has a cult like following because it emphasizes simplicity and customizability. If you have the time to fully administer your own system, there is no better choice.
Ubuntu is corporate, frequently out of date, and sometimes incompetent. They got big a long time ago when they were a significantly easier option than their competitors, but I really don't think there's compelling reason for a new user to install Ubuntu today.
To add to the arch management, after a while you learn the golden rule - set it and don't fiddle with it too much. Nowadays there is very little maintenance to it. I run an update followed by shutdown. Once every 2-3 months there is some issue, that takes a forum search to fix and once a year it breaks to the level where I need about half an hour to an hour to fix it.
Maybe it's masochism, but I like Arch because it forces me to make mistakes and learn. No default DE, several network management choices, lots of configuration for non-defaults. These are all decisions I have to make, and if I try to cut corners I usually get punished for it.
However, I think the real reason I stick with arch is because this paradigm means that I always feel capable of fixing issues. As people solve the issues they face, forum posts and wiki articles (and sometimes big fixes) get pushed out, and knowledge is shared. That sense of community and building on something I feel like Arch promotes.
For me, Ubuntu is ugly as all hell and comes with so much I dont need. It also ran slow on the first machine I ever installed it on. I like Arch because I got my feet wet there. It was my classroom.
The Arch users being so vocal is more of a trope to me. Never fails to make me smile.
Ubuntu started as a great endeavour. They made Linux much more approachable to the less tech inclined user.
It is an achievement to get a distro capable of basically work out of the box that hides the hard/technical stuff under the hood and delivers a working machine, and they did it and popularized Linux in the process.
Unfortunately, they abused the good faith they garnered. The Amazon partnership, their desktop that nobody really enjoyed, the Snap push. These are the ones I was made aware of but I risk there were more issues.
I was a user of Ubuntu for less than six months. Strange as it may sound, after trying SUSE and Debian, when I actively searched for a more friendly distro, I rolled back to Debian exactly because Ubuntu felt awkward.
Ubuntu is still a strong contributor but unless they grow a spine and actually create a product people will want to pay for, with no unpopular or weird options on the direction the OS "must" take, they won't get much support from the wide user community.
I don't know if that ever was true but I definitely disagree with that nowadays because Arch is in my opinion significantly more approachable and easier to daily-drive than Gentoo.
I have to use Zoom for a online class and I was wondering how I can make my Zoom experience more private? Is there a Zoom client that I can use like how there are privacy-focused Discord clients? What privacy tips would you recommend?
GrapheneOS is currently under a state sponsored attack attempting to misrepresent it as being for criminals, which we covered a bit at grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/…. These poorly researched, biased and inaccurate news stories have led to more harassment towards our community and team.
These attacks are taking a multi pronged approach including pushing existing fabricated stories and harassment towards our team. We'd appreciate if our community was more active than usual in debunking misinformation and attacks on our team. It's a very abnormal wave of attacks.
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
Los Google Pixel son los máximos representantes de Android, con permiso de Samsung. Es por ello que convencen a los usuarios entusiastas del sistema...
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 has been through extensive public Alpha/Beta testing and should reach our Stable channel today. We'll continue fixing various upstream Android 16 regressions such as the back button issue impacting the stock Pixel OS we fixed in our latest release.
July Android Security Bulletin will likely be published today. We obtained early access to the signed partner preview and confirmed no additional patches were required, so we set the 2025-07-01 patch level last month after we backported Pixel 2025-06-05 driver/firmware patches.
Tomorrow will likely be the first monthly update of Android 16 with a new Android Open Source Project and Pixel stock OS release. We won't need to backport Pixel driver/firmware patches since we're on Android 16 and can simply incorporate and ship the monthly update within hours.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to backport driver/firmware patches due to dependencies on the new major release. We were only able to backport everything required for the 2025-06-05 security patch level because Android 15 QPR2 is much closer to Android 16 than Android 15.
After our Android 16 port was completed yesterday, we started fixing an Android tapjacking vulnerability disclosed last month:
We have a fix implemented and it will be included in our next release, likely with the monthly Android 16 update tomorrow.
This vulnerability was disclosed to Google in October 2024 and Android still hasn't fixed it. Security researchers should report vulnerabilities to GrapheneOS in addition to Google. This now joins our many other GrapheneOS exclusive fixes for serious Android vulnerabilities.
We've decided to make another release today with our fix for the Android tapjacking vulnerability because we need to fix a DisplayPort alternate mode regression specific to 8th generation Pixels which doesn't impact 9th generation Pixels.
I dug out my old Asus Zenbook (UX305CA) and refurbished it: gave it a good cleaning, replaced the thermal paste, installed a new battery, upgraded the SSD, and did a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 (don't judge; everything else in my house is still Debian and/or OpenWRT).
The only thing I can't upgrade is the memory since it's soldered on. It's got 8 GB which hasn't really been a limit given my use cases, but since I'm in upgrade mode, I was thinking of running it with zram configured.
I just setup zram and gave it 50% of the physical memory as a starting point, set vm.swappiness to 140, and am using zstd as the compression algorithm.
Haven't noticed much difference, so there doesn't seem to be much CPU performance penalty even on this low-spec CPU (base clock 900 MHz lol). zramctl shows it's got 726 MB swapped to it currently which is compressed to 126 MB. Not bad! The only thing I haven't done yet is set the power profile to "Power Saver" - if there are going to be noticeable performance penalties, that's probably when it will show up.
I've only ever used zram on Raspberry Pis and on an old netbook, so I'm not sure if using it on a machine with an otherwise usable amount of RAM is even worth it.
I'm using zram on all my systems, be it 4GB or 16GB. Usually swap is empty, so there's no compressing for the CPU to do anyway. If a RPI is capable of ZRAM, your PC won't break a sweat.
ZSTD is really fast. I'm using btrfs compression too, and don't notice any performance impact either.
Zram is good, i would use lz4 as a compression method, it uses a lot less CPU than zstd and compression makes it around 50% bigger than compressed using zstd (50% compression vs 33% compression on zstd). So on CPU bound scenarios, it holds better than on zstd in my opinion. Same on btrfs, it feels a lot faster on lzo than on zstd.
I suspect zram's swap device only consumes RAM when it actually contains swapped pages, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone link an authoritative statement on this?
I use it on a 32 GiB workstation, also with PERCENT=50 and ALGO=zstd in Debian's /etc/default/zramswap, and vm.swappiness=60. This is its only swap device. I like that it avoids needless SSD wear and painfully slow interactivity during large compile and compression jobs.
Is it worth it on your system, which has only 2 CPU cores? If your memory-intensive workloads compress well, then I would think yes, for the same reasons that I like it. If you find your CPU struggling with it, you could always change to a lighter compression algorithm.
On the other hand, if your memory-intensive tasks don't compress well, then no, I would not expect it to be a good use of your CPU.
You'll never know until you try it. I suggest checking the output of zramctl when running tasks that create memory pressure.
I suspect zram's swap device only consumes RAM when it actually contains swapped pages, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone link an authoritative statement on this?
I'm wondering the same. I haven't read anything authoritative, but it definitely seems like it only consumes the RAM it's using. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to create block devices that exceed the physical memory. I started to wonder when I had it set to 50% (4 GB) and gave it a stress test. The 4 GB it allocated filled up but was compressed to just about 1 GB, so I thought "surely this isn't wasting 3 GB of RAM to hold 1 GB of pages."
The guidelines I've read seem like there's some guesswork involved in the planning. Basically you can make the zram device as large as you want so long as the compressed data is less than the physical RAM (not all pages compress equally as you mentioned).
I've since bumped it to 200% of system ram (16 GB), and I think that's probably good enough for my use cases. I'm seeing about a 4:1 compress ratio, so I could go higher, but 8 GB has been plenty usable up until now. 🤷 I also left the original swap file in place with a lower priority as a spillover (I'm not really missing the 4 GB of disk space that uses, so might as well keep it).
If you can have a swapfile or swap partition, zswap will have much better experience than zram. And since Linux 6.8, zswap can disable writeback entirely so there will be nothing written to disk, just need a swapfile/swap partition to make kernel happy. aur.archlinux.org/packages/zsw…
partially revert upstream changes in Android 16 breaking parts of the lockscreen layout including the date and media info
Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL: add back feature declaration for Pixel Thermometer support lost in our Android 16 device port migration which prevented fresh installs of the app
Terminal (virtual machine management app): disable VM console feature since it isn't supported by the stable release of Android 16 outside of debug builds and trying to use it breaks installing the new images (the feature can be enabled once the core OS supports it in production builds)
update Pixel HAL compatibility matrix version numbers for Android 16
add lockscreen synchronization failsafe to protect against unknown vulnerabilities
improve code quality and add unit tests for our strict CVE-2024-50089 protection
kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.6.94
fix port of our 2-factor fingerprint authentication tests to Android 16
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 is now available in our Beta channel. There are 2 main known issues which will be fixed in the next release: lockscreen date and media info are not properly displayed due to an upstream AOSP bug and Pixel Thermometer doesn't appear in our App Store.
Last month, we provided the 2025-06-01 Android/Pixel security patch level early in the month before the stock OS release as preparation and then backported Android 16 firmware and kernel/userspace driver patches to provide the 2025-06-05 Android and then Pixel patch levels.
Our 2025062700 release raised the overall patch level to 2025-07-01 since we got early access to it with a verifiable signature and know we already provide the patches. We usually do an early Android Security Bulletin release before the stock OS but it was done for July in June.
Android Security Bulletins are backports of High/Critical severity patches to older Android. Starting this month, the initial release of Android 16 is one of those older releases. It's split into AOSP userspace patches (YYYY-MM-01) and driver/firmware/Linux patches (YYYY-MM-05)
YYYY-MM-05 patch level has a device-specific portion with more driver/firmware patches. For Pixels, it's the Pixel Update Bulletin. Most Pixel Update Bulletin patches aren't specific to Pixels but the Android Security Bulletin doesn't cover Samsung cellular, Broadcom Wi-Fi, etc.
Pixel Update Bulletin patches are what we had to backport to Android 15 QPR2:
These were for firmware/drivers/services for Samsung cellular (including the Radio Interface Layer), Broadcom/Qualcomm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, NVT touchscreen, fingerprint and TPU.
The only part truly specific to Pixels was the TPU patch. Bear that in mind when you look at those Pixel Update Bulletins. Other devices are meant to have their own bulletins covering the same things if they use those components and also further patches. It's fully up to OEMs.
Android Security Bulletin (ASB) is published on the first Monday of the month unless it's a US/Google holiday in which case it gets pushed ahead a day or two. The Android release for the month is a separate thing from the ASB backports, usually published the day after the ASB.
ASB is likely July 7 and the Android OS release is likely July 8. Our aim is to have Android 16 in our Stable channel prior to July 8 so we can ship the initial monthly update to Android 16 instead of needing to backport Pixel Update Bulletin patches which could be infeasible.
Each month, Android has a new stable OS release. It's a monthly, quarterly or yearly release. Quarterly and yearly releases move along the development branch about the same amount and have a similar amount of changes. Those have months of public Developer Previews / Betas first.
Pixels ship the latest monthly, quarterly and yearly release each month. Non-Pixels ship an initial yearly Android release and then only Android Security Bulletin backports until they ship the next yearly release. ASB backports are a subset of the AOSP patches, not all of them.
GrapheneOS needs to follow the stable releases in order to provide the full AOSP privacy/security patches. It also needs to keep up with them in order to ship Pixel driver/firmware patches which are made for the latest stable release, but we'd still need to do this on non-Pixels.
fix upstream Android 16 issue causing very large Binder transactions due to the size scaling based on the number of apps installed across all users including base OS apps
reduce virtual memory reserved for Binder buffers back to 1MiB now that we have a direct fix for the upstream issue causing more to be required and using a larger virtual memory reservation size appears to have a small chance of failing
revert our fix for a screenshot process crash that's now fixed upstream in Android 16
Android regularly adds and splits permissions for new API levels. Legacy apps are handled by treating them as requesting the permission to provide a toggle for it. For example, Android 13 converted the existing toggle for disabling notifications for an app into a new POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission.
The Android Open Source Project has infrastructure for this since it's a regular part of the app sandbox and permission model improving. We add Network and Sensors permission toggles in GrapheneOS where Network is based on the existing low-level INTERNET permission and Sensors is entirely new.
Nearly all apps are unaware of these non-standard permissions just as they're unaware of new permissions added by Android before they get upgraded. Therefore, we enable them by default for compatibility but provide the ability for users to disable them at install time like the standard permissions.
For Network, apps request INTERNET, so we provide a toggle for rejecting that request in the initial app install dialog. If it's added in an upgrade, it's disabled by default. For Sensors, apps don't request it so we handle it similarly to how Android handled POST_NOTIFICATIONS for existing apps.
When Network is disabled, we act as if the network is down for compatibility. We won't run network-dependent jobs, various APIs will report it as down and we give errors matching it being down. When Sensors is disabled, sensors not covered by standard permissions give zeroed data and no events.
For usability, apps trying to use those sensors when Sensors is disabled will trigger a notification from the OS which can be disabled on a per-app basis. This informs users about what's going on so they'll know the app is either doing something sketchy or that it may actually require it.
F-Droid has an incorrect approach to installing apps which wrongly warns users about the standard Android POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, our OTHER_SENSORS permission and previous Android permission additions/splits. They wrongly blamed GrapheneOS and didn't fix it:
They're now realizing that it happens with standard Android permissions added / split in new releases. Their approach to installing apps has been incorrect in multiple ways for many years and this is one of them. Their approach to listing which permissions are used by apps is also very incorrect.
F-Droid has a long history of denying issues including covering up serious security flaws. In some cases they eventually ship a fix but still deny it. It's a major factor in why F-Droid is not a safe or trustworthy source of apps due to major security issues not being acknowledged or addressed.
Multiple of the F-Droid developers wrongly blaming their app bug on GrapheneOS in that issue are Calyx contractors. They prioritize attacking GrapheneOS with inaccurate claims and fabricated stories about our team over fixing a bug in their app impacting both GrapheneOS and non-GrapheneOS users.
We've repeatedly brought up F-Droid not properly listing permissions or checking for them. Their understanding of Android's permission model is wrong. The way they list permissions misleads and misinforms users. It's one of many major F-Droid flaws they consistently don't acknowledge or fix.
Due to F-Droid deliberately causing friction and annoyances for GrapheneOS users, we'll be implementing a feature similar to our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer for it. We'll can resolve deliberate issues created for GrapheneOS users ourselves as we did with Revolut.
Search efforts continue for a fourth day as a girls' summer camp confirms 27 children and staff are dead, with 10 campers and one counsellor unaccounted for.
A climate change activist spray-painted Apple’s 5th Avenue storefront in New York City as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest against Big Tech’s “hypocrisy” about environmental commitments.
During an investors meeting, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa explained how the company is dealing with rising development costs in the Switch 2 era.
The vulnerability in question would've still happened if written in rust, it was not a memory leak. More an instance of feature creep, as the solution was to remove the functionality.
TikTok is ending its sponsorship of several major Canadian arts organizations, including the Juno Awards and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as it prepares to shut down its Canadian operations under a federal directive.
I had no idea this was about to happen. Why the heck did the government attack the office, which supports Canadian citizens? They should be focusing on consequences for the the way the app influences people in an unhealthy way, and is a force of foreign political coercion.
TikTok is ending its sponsorship of several major Canadian arts organizations, including the Juno Awards and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as it prepares to shut down its Canadian operations under a federal directive.
The company said it is complying with an order issued by Ottawa last November, which requires TikTok to wind down operations in Canada due to national security concerns. As a result, the company says it will suspend all partnerships and funding initiatives in the country. So, in other words, its offices will close, but the actual TikTok app will remain in Canada. Go figure.
Our (Lib under Trudeau) government banned TikTok to appease the US after they did the same under Biden. But Trump has since nullified the TikTok ban in the US. Why are we still going through with this? As a nice gift to the US tech oligarch (after we backtracked the Digital Services Tax on them)? Is the platform too leftwing for the government's liking?
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Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, is at a turning point in his leadership, highlighted by a recent humorous pancake flipping incident at the Calgary Stampede.
Despite a relatively positive polling period, Carney has yet to deliver substantial results, with only minor initiatives like an income tax cut and Bill C5 on the table.
Major issues, such as housing, remain largely unaddressed, raising concerns about the government's effectiveness.
Carney's handling of international relations, particularly with the U.S. and NATO, is scrutinized, as public patience may wane if concessions lead to unfavorable outcomes.
The upcoming trade deal deadline of July 21st poses challenges; public expectations may clash with the reality of necessary compromises.
There is growing concern regarding the government's increasing spending and the potential for significant national deficits, projected to reach around $310 billion over the next four years.
The delay in releasing a budget suggests a reluctance to disclose spending plans, which could lead to public discontent once revealed.
While government debt can be manageable if it fuels economic growth, long-term structural deficits without clear repayment strategies could pose risks.
The public's patience with Carney is expected to diminish as pressing questions about spending priorities and benefits to ordinary Canadians remain unanswered.
The government must shift its focus from large resource projects to addressing immediate economic needs, such as housing and affordability, to maintain public support.
-Kagi Universal Summarizer
Time saved reading: 8min
Original Document • Tokens: 3970 Length: 0:08:42 (time elapsed 12.8s)
I'm really torn about this comment - on one hand it's environment-destroying AI, but it also saves the need to watch a pointlessly long video that should have been an article and probably consumes as much compute as the AI summary.
True, at least when you share the results with others, the energy used is shared between everyone.
Sometimes I see these videos and want to know what they talk about but don't want to throw away hours of my life listening to them. And this is the only way I get both.
I'd really like to self host something like this so I can see how much power it's using.
If you want to go down that path - all of our actions online are environment destroying. This useless comment that I'm making needs to live in a datacenter somewhere, multiply that enough times and the energy needed just to have dumb conversations online is killing the planet on its own.
Do you mean specifically Carney flipping pancakes or politicians flipping pancakes in general? I can't speak about elsewhere but in Alberta organizations frequently put on pancake breakfasts often accompanying some other larger event. Politicians local to federal (depending on the size of the event) take it as an opportunity to do some glad-handing. In this particular case I guess Carney isn't a proficient pancake flipper.
https://lemmy.world/u/NarrativeBear
in reply to Sunshine (she/her) • • •An Indian status card is an official document issued by the Canadian government to First Nations people who are registered under the Indian Act. The card serves as proof of identity and legal Canadian identification, and can be used as ID for domestic flights.
He was then on the phone with WestJet customer service, and they didn't even know what an Indian status card was. They started asking if Corbiere was from India.
cyborganism
in reply to • • •Well then it's obviously because of the name. Stupid Columbus...
/s
It's not an ID document that people often see. It's easy to get confused and in any uncertainty, it's best to not allow the passenger in. Though they should be aware and it should be a part of their training.
BCsven
in reply to cyborganism • • •like this
gonzo-rand19 and CrankyPants like this.
cyborganism
in reply to BCsven • • •Evkob (they/them)
in reply to cyborganism • • •If your job mostly revolves around checking people's documentation and you fail to recognize government-issued ID (from the country in which you work, no less), you're objectively shit at your job.
I don't understand why you're making excuses for the airline. I did a better job than this as a 19 year-old cashier selling lotto tickets.
cyborganism
in reply to Evkob (they/them) • • •https://lemmy.world/u/NarrativeBear
in reply to cyborganism • • •cyborganism
in reply to • • •