Forensic data on you is already pretty easy to obtain unless you’re taking special effort to avoid it being taken. Also when you get arrested they take whatever biometrics they like. The info on you those DNA testing companies are getting is info already easily available to the government. I guess if you’re concerned about your DNA being used to tailor ads to you, not just to criminalise you, it could be an issue, but idk I don’t think your DNA can really predict what ads will be effective on you.

Obsidian is proprietary

Compose key doesn’t use numerical codes. To type an em dash with a compose key, it’s compose followed by pressing minus 3 times. I set my compose key to Alt Gr

If I were the co-maintainer of a project I wouldn’t suspect that the person who had been actively contributing for over 2 years had injected malicious code into a binary file to distribute in the tarballs. “Jia Tan” had already gained Collin’s trust by then

That was the url my personal Z-library url redirects to, unless my personal url was compromised? Like, remember when they first went back online and you had to register to get your own url to access zlib? I’ve just been using that

Try https://z-library.se/ ?

If not, libgen normally has what i’m looking for anyway

regardless of which computer I used

That’s really bizarre. I wonder how they did that. So a different computer on a different network with a different email address and everything would still get you banned for ban evasion?

Really creepy too, obviously they’re keeping a lot of data on you to be able to be that thorough.

I agree with that assessment, I’m not accusing Collin of anything. If it is what it seems to be then I feel very bad for him. Just being cautious with wording until things are more settled/until we know more is all.

To clarify, you can still use old reddit logged in with a VPN, but they no longer allow you to browse logged out with a VPN. Still bad of course. But if you’re willing to log in you don’t have to turn off your VPN. You can sign up with a throwaway/obfuscated email if needs be

Tbh, as a current Artix user, I think the Artix documentation is lacking. Their full disk encryption installation guide doesn’t have any UEFI instructions and while they have a wiki, it definitely doesn’t cover a lot of the things that differ from systemd, which is the purpose of the Artix Wiki, ie to cover everything from Arch Wiki which needs to be changed without systemd. I get most of my info from the Artix forums. I even used the Arch wiki installation guide for installing Artix instead of Artix Wiki’s installation guide (it’s only like 3 commands that are different, they use basestrap instead of pacstrap and you install a different init system with basestrap, they use fstabgen instead of genfstab, and artix-chroot instead of arch-chroot (that last one should be obvious though)). I still like the distro ofc, otherwise I wouldn’t use it, but I think it’s lacking in good documentation. Maybe that’s just my perspective after being spoiled by the Arch Wiki for so long though lol. I can’t really speak for many distros though, I’ve not daily-driven many

Any distro that’s well-documented is not a big deal to install and use. Never understood the big deal people used to make (still do sometimes? though I think it’s mostly ironic now) about Arch. I did my first install Arch when I was kinda a dumbass but I just read the wiki (very thorough, btw, still use that wiki nearly daily) and followed the instructions. Especially with Arch, the wiki is so informative it explains the things you don’t know so you understand what you’re doing even though when I first installed Arch I didn’t know what an fstab file was, what the initramfs was, etc. I’ll disclaim that I’ve not installed Gentoo myself, but I hear from people who have installed it that it’s very well documented, so makes sense that newcomers could install and use it if they’re willing to read and learn.

Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn’t really remember much from using that laptop).

I wonder if this being a digital billboard is actually cheaper than just hiring some workers to swap out the printed advertisement every, I dunno how often they normally change, week or so?

Damn, Linux distros are doing advertising now

W

I agree with the people who say you should go back to Windows.

Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way.

Different operating systems work differently. There are several projects to get (GNU/)Linux to work more like Windows, but if your goal is to be like Windows, you won’t get any better than, well, Windows. I, like most Linux users, think the way Windows does things is terrible, and I’m on Linux precisely because of the differences with proprietary OSes like Windows. But if the differences are a negative for you, I suggest you use the OS that works the way you like it.

Your problems likely can be diagnosed and troubleshooted if you have the patience—some bugs I was experiencing took me like 6 years to diagnose what the problem was—but fixing your bugs will not change the fact that (GNU/)Linux is intended to work differently from Windows, i.e. it’s not a bug. So it sounds like it won’t solve the underlying problem.

I’ll echo what someone else said in another comment and ask why you chose to switch to Linux in the first place. Out of curiosity? In which case, it sounds like your curiosity has been satisfied and you’ve discovered that Linux does not meet your personal requirements. But I think the reasons why most people switch, ie privacy and customisability, and more generally what comes with free software ie the freedom to do whatever you like with your system, are reasons which motivate people to either overcome learning curves (to learn the better way to use your computer, the way you are supposed to use GNU/Linux distros) or to dedicate the time and effort to troubleshooting problems with their system. If you don’t have those motivations, you probably want to just go back to Windows.

I don’t really know how “visually pleasing” you can get with a terminal package manager tbh. I just have colors and ILoveCandy enabled in pacman and that’s more than enough for me, looks pretty to me.

Most people are not privacy-conscious. I don’t get what your problem is. If you won’t do something just because the majority of people don’t, then why are you on [email protected]? Go back to Facebook and Twitter and Google then

Not if I don’t need to, like if I need to have a conversation with someone that doesn’t need to be overheard. In any case turning your phone off and putting it in a faraday bag then putting it somewhere relatively noiseproof should be more than enough if you need to bring your phone with you.

I have heard from friends that they got banned for using adblockers on free Spotify. I used a tool, forgot what it’s called, for the brief time I had Spotify Premium where you could give it access to your account via the API and it’d search music piracy websites to download all the songs and albums in your library. After I had downloaded my library I cancelled my subscription. So that was entirely within Spotify’s ToS. (Music piracy is still illegal, but the violation didn’t happen against Spotify.) I suppose if you wanted to do this then doing something like that, where you just look the song up on music piracy sites and don’t actually download from Spotify directly, would be less likely to get your account banned. You still need Premium to access the API, but you could just scrape the webpage if you want.