DefederateLemmyMl

Libre (from French) is sometimes used to solve the ambiguity of the word free in the English language, but it sounds kinda awkward in English and there’s certainly no consensus that this should be the official replacement, or that the term free even needs replacement.

Furthermore, the FSF who originally came up with the idea of “free software” still exists and is still called the Free Software Foundation, though Stallman uses both terms interchangeably.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

So you’re considering the 22H2 builds et al. separate versions, I just consider them service packs. They come with the regular updates, and the user experience doesn’t significantly change. I couldn’t ever tell you what “build” of Windows 10 or 11 I was on, but I usually know pretty well which distro version I am on.

But I guess it’s true that they contain more feature updates than typical Linux updates.

I think you misunderstood. Windows 10 was released in 2015, and will have general support for all versions until October 2025. That’s 10 years.

The current version of Mint, 22.1, was released in January 2025, and will receive support until April 2029. That’s 4 years.

Had you installed the latest version of Mint in 2015, it would have been EOL in 2019. Had you installed Windows 10 in 2015, it would only be EOL later this year.

but when you explicitly state you are against it in the README of your project that is just wild

It’s called a dogwhistle: they’re letting other racist scumbags know that they are also racist scumbags and that their racist scumbag views are welcome, without saying anything overtly racist scumbag-y.

I use Arch myself (BTW :p), but I wouldn’t really recommend that for users who freshly migrated over from Windows.

Yes, there are ways to get extended support (on Windows too btw), but a thing that should also be kept in mind is that “support” only means security patches and bugfixes, and not feature upgrades. There is also no guaranteed continued hardware support, nor guaranteed support from third party applications. On Ubuntu there’s at least the HWE kernel, but that’s also limited in time.

It’s not criticism btw, it’s just worth mentioning that the support model on Linux looks a bit different than what you get with Windows, and users should generally be encouraged to keep up with the latest release of their chosen distribution.

True, but often the distributions have an upgrade plan (for free). In example you can install an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade 4 years later to the next major LTS release. However, sometimes this has problems, because so much time and changes are in between. This is for sure.

Yes you can and should upgrade, which is what I was trying to say really. It’s less set and forget as in “just let it update and it will keep on trucking for 10 years”.

There are distributions with longer support period. Debian comes to my mind. But I don’t know how long and there were 10 year supported distributions too.

I think only the enterprise distributions (RHEL etc) do 10 year support, but they are not very usable for a desktop system, and I can tell from experience you start to run into compatibility and support issues with software if you actually use it for that long.

Debian is ± 5 years by the way.

foot is such a lovely little program. It has everything I want for a terminal emulator: it launches instantly, it has zero lag, no fluff, excellent font rendering, excellent copy/paste handling, excellent compatibility, and it’s easily configurable and themable via a sensible, well documented config file.

TFW I realize I am a foot fetishist … 😮

If you install Linux Mint today, you’ll still be able to update it in october and beyond, for the foreseeable future

One caveat: Linux distributions, even LTS variants, usually have a shorter support period than Windows, after which you have to upgrade your distribution, which is much like doing a Windows upgrade.

A particular version of Linux Mint, the example you mentioned, is supported for 4 years, whereas Windows 10 was supported for 10 years.

Not really the same scenario. PCs that could run Windows 7 could usually upgrade to 10, people were just reluctant to do so, partly also because 8 and 8.1 were such disasters. Eventually, everyone just moved on.

Today, a lot of 10 users would upgrade to 11 if they could, but their older-but-still-fine hardware is simply being cut off from Windows support.

Harmful is just code for “threatens the bottom line of multibillion dollar companies”. There is no relation to anything that matters to real people.

I think 10GbE is more intended for local applications than for internet. Say, you have a NAS with a RAID array of nvme drives for video editing purposes that you want to access from a few workstations.

Even the other day I was quite happy to have 2.5GbE when I installed my new gaming PC, and steam was able to pull all my games directly from my old computer rather than downloading them over the internet again.

Anyway, LAN speeds have always been an order of magnitude higher than common internet speeds, so I don’t see the issue.

My user.js file is entirely platform independent. I use it on Linux, Windows and even used it on my work provided Macbook. FYI: user.js only contains the settings you want to change, it’s not the whole prefs.js file. It’s just 63 lines.

I agree that chrome feels cleaner and needs a lot less fiddling to get right, but chrome is effectively dead for me. I switched to firefox for much more important reasons than a few UI annoyances.

Yes, to completely turn it off, it’s an about:config setting: extensions.pocket.enabled

Removing it from the toolbar just hides it, but keeps it running.

with every fucking install on every machine. for years.

Multiplied by all the other annoyances you have to turn off, via either gui or about:config, each and every time. I feel you.

I hop machines fairly frequently, use multiple browsing profiles, and often create discardable profiles, so I eventually just went ahead and spent some time tracing all the about:config equivalents of the settings that I typically change every time and then put them in a user.js file that I can just drop into my profile directory.

You can protect yourself from that with airgapping and backups. The bigger issue is probably that it’s becoming increasingly hard to source parts for such old hardware.

I use Windows Terminal nowadays. It feels more clunky and slow than say, foot or kitty on Linux, but it’s functional.

Before, I used to use PuTTY for ssh sessions, it feels more fluid, but it needs a lot of configuring to get the terminal behavior just right, and the settings UI is really outdated. It also doesn’t support WSL (unless you run sshd on WSL and ssh into the system).

That’s only for a single case comparison. You can’t draw statistically meaningful conclusions about what percentage of traffic the pihole has blocked over a longer period of time.

Yeah no ublock origin really won’t block all that many

Meh, it’s fairly easy to check this you know. If I turn off uBlock, my pihole logs do turn red. If it’s left on, pihole logs stay mostly green, with nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary getting through.

the chattiest DNS comes from apps and smart devices, windows and mac laptops etc.

I don’t have many of those. My work laptop is windows but it connects through a VPN only, and I have my smartphone that I barely use at home.

Why call it secondary then, that’s so counterintuitive lol

I don’t think that’s even the official naming. It probably comes from what Windows 95 called it back in the day:

On Linux, it’s just an additional “nameserver x.x.x.x” line in /etc/resolv.conf, with no indication of which is the “primary” or “secondary”.