Come on guys, come on...
Build your whole machine at home?
There are multiple alternatives, for Microsoft Windows or other Microsoft products like Office or Azure.
But it seems to me that's a step in the right direction, even if it doesn't go far enough.
Isn't that how trust works? You stop trusting those that don't deserve it. Unless you're a complete isolationist and/or sociopath living off the land in the woods, you need some level of trust in others.
You're presenting an extreme example of a false dichotomy.
Signal uses DRM to protect its users from the OS. This is nice, because now they don't have to run to some other companies that could do the same thing.
The OS and the hardware become irrelevant when you run your apps behind DRM.
At least one thing we can thank the copyright trolls for.
Anyway, there are options to disable TPM in the BIOS if you care, but I don't think any of the DRM stuff works by default.
It's easy to disable, but it's difficult to disable?
EDIT: Apparently people have different definitions of easy. Fair enough
Easy to disable, in that there are some easy to understand and find steps to disable it. Difficult to accidentally disable, meaning its not something that would be disabled as a side effect of some other change, isn't just a single click, isn't poorly labeled or described, etc.
In this case, it is first presented as a check box in the Privacy Settings area. It is titled "Screen security" and says "Prevent screenshots of Signal on this computer for added privacy.". Well documented. Click the check box, and it presents a modal window. The window then says, "Disable screen security? If disabled, this may allow Microsoft Windows to capture screenshots of Signal and use them for features that may not be private." You then have a Cancel or Disable buttons.
Its two steps to change it after navigating to that part of the menu. The positions to click are different between the two steps. It confirms if you're really wanting to disable it, and tells you things may be able to take screenshots of the app.
This reminds me of platforms which require you to type the name of a resource to delete something potentially important. It's easy to do, but one wouldn't accidentally click a button, type the full name of the resource, then click the confirm button.
My electric lawn mower is both easy to start the blade and difficult to accidentally start. You have to hold a button and then pull the start lever. Its two actions that you reasonably have to do with two hands in a particular order. Both actions are easy to do, doing both of them are easy (assuming you have two somewhat functional hands). Once going you just need to continue to hold the lever and just release that to stop the blade.
It's not "difficult to disable" && "easy to disable"
Its "difficult to accidentally disable".
Accidentally. Its another word in the sentence that radically changes the meaning of the phrase.
Read the whole sentence. Each word has meaning, you can't just ignore some of them.
Putting a cover over a button that can still be flipped open is a real-world example of making something difficult to accidentally do while still making it easy to actually do it. You pretty much have to want to press the button, you're not just going to set something down and accidentally trigger the button. Do you really disagree about that? How is it not making it more difficult to do on accident?
Or like my lawn mower example. How would I accidentally start the mower? You can see it would be difficult for me to accidentally start the mower, right? My hand wouldn't just brush against it and have it start going, correct? And it has a few other interlocks, such as the handle needs to be fully extended and locked at the right angle; you can't start it when its folded up. And yet this two-stage motion is still really easy to do for most people with two hands, right? And it's clearly documented on the mower how to do it with obvious glyphs that show it will start the blade.
And with the button cover, I wouldn't just end up leaning against the console and accidentally pressing the button, correct? But one can trivially just flip the cover and press the button still, right? But we made it more difficult to accidentally press it?
Meanwhile, they could have made it significantly easier to accidentally start the lawn mower. They could have made it without those interlocks. They could have just made the handle capacitive and any light brush with a hand would have started it. The button with a cover could have been made bigger and more sensitive and placed exactly next to where people naturally rest their hands or on the corner right at knee level ready to be bumped with no cover and unlabeled. So in these cases, its significantly harder to accidentally do the action than what it could have been, meanwhile still being generally pretty easy to do if you're intending to do it.
You're the one that is looking for an example, you should be able to make that iteration yourself.
Also, as you get into mechanisms like DRM, which treat the owner and user of the device as adversaries, you make it harder to detect when the device or something on it is misbehaving against the interests of the owner/user (such as for secret surveillance).
MSFT is implementing hierarchical control and monitoring on their desktop computers. Executive branch, legal and finance are the drivers. Users are serfs.
But in a pragmatic world, we can't have that level of security. You're reduced to deciding where you are willing to tolerate the security weaknesses. Obviously, no software or hardware will be 100% secure. But absent having an existential state level need to roll your own, you just have to pick from what's out there and accept that none of it is fully secure.
It's just unclear to me if your comment is implying that we should just roll over. If so, I vehemently disagree. If not, I'm actually not sure what you're saying and sorry if I'm misunderstanding.
You absolutely do not control any Apple device from the bottom up. It is Apple software running on Apple hardware, tons of closed off secret stuff in there.
And even then, you probably don't really control whatever Linux you installed from the bottom up. It's filled with code you didn't audit and validate, you're probably getting updates delivered on a regular basis by people you don't know, etc.
And even then, where are you going to run that? On a modern x86 processor running all kinds of UEFI software and microcode with security coprocessors you can't directly interface in but can see all your memory and devices?
At least with Linux, I know there are other people checking. People with expertise I don't have. People not incentivized by their own employer. Certainly this creates higher levels of trust than the closed source setting. If it doesn't, then your argument applies to literally any subject. Medicine, food, whatever. Let's not act like this is a binary setting, it is a spectrum. There are situations that are better than others even if they aren't perfect.
> People not incentivized by their own employer.
Tons of FOSS is written by people paid to write it a a part of their jobs. And I don't know why I'd trust a passion project of an amateur doing it for fun over a paid professional doing it. Maybe the guy doing it for free is better, maybe he isn't. Do you trust the guy giving medical advice over the internet on some random blog over the licensed paid specialist doctor you might otherwise see? Do you trust the pills made by a pharmaceutical company to actually be what it says on the box more than a guy handing out pills at a concert? After all that guy posting on the internet or handing out pills isn't being incentivized by their employer!
And I wouldn't necessarily trust some random open source project over a similar closed source project if I'm not going to take the time to actually audit it myself. Just having the source code over there doesn't do anything for you if you don't read it. And besides, you're probably going to pull compiled binaries and aren't going to actually verify that build are you? And you're building it with what, a compiler you downloaded already compiled? You definitely validated that, right?
You're right, it's a spectrum of choices one makes. But it's not like open source instantly makes something more trustworthy or more secure or something. You have the ability to do more to trust it, but it isn't inherently more trustworthy by just having the source available.
The argument is not: "Having source code makes it trustworthy"
The increase in trust is primarily driven by unaffiliated experts. The open source part makes that easier, but is not what explicitly drives the trust.
***The multi-party verification is what drives trust.***
> practically speaking normal users have just as much "control" over their stuff whether it's running Linux or Mac or Windows in the end.
I brought up the difference in trust by third party due to this. The level of trust is different. While /control/ may be the same /trust/ is not.
It does not matter that FOSS is written by people that are paid. It matters that people that are not paid look at it and investigate it. Or even paid by a different party. Paid or unpaid is not the critical variable here.
Look at it this way:
In a closed source ecosystem, do you trust an organization that has had a 3rd party audit MORE THAN one that hasn't?
Of course you do! It isn't complete trust, and certainly you may wish to (and should) scrutinize the third party auditors to ensure that they aren't just acting as "yes men", but the level of trust objectively increases. Certainly this should continue to increase as the number of parties grows. That's because the likelihood that these parties are "on the dime" decreases.
> Do you trust the pills made by a pharmaceutical company to actually be what it says on the box more than a guy handing out pills at a concert?
Which pills would you trust more to do what they claim to do?:
1) Pills made by a pharmaceutical company and tested by the pharmaceutical company
2) Pills made by a pharmaceutical company and tested by the pharmaceutical company, tested by third party organizations (medical and governmental) from multiple countries and have received recommendations from various organizations with no direct ties to the pharmaceutical company that developed the pills
You'd be insane not to! It'd require a much more complex environment for that to be lest trustworthy with such high amounts of conspiracy that you may as well trust nothing that you can't verify yourself. But in that setting you can't trust your own knowledge because you aren't able to derive everything from scratch either. You literally can't trust the knowledge that you read in a book, on the internet, or anywhere if there is that level of conspiracy. But clearly we don't believe in that ludicrous scenario.
Certainly there are a lot of shit FOSS out there that is no better than the drug dealer in your example, but we're talking about fucking Linux, not a random GitHub project by some uni student. Certainly I don't trust that one! But that one doesn't have multi-party vetting and is far from the type of software we're talking about.
I hope we're on the same page now.
How about allowing us to run it on hardware that we can control: GNU/Linux desktop and phones, without requiring a connection from Android?
edit: Oh you mean the registration that requires a phone
Also:
Apple and Google confirm governments spy on users through push notifications (androidauthority.com)
The latest Android update already introduced screen sharing with Gemini. Their web app has that too.
It wont be long until people complaining here about DRM/Microsoft will have an always on AI watching their screen by their own choice.
Some users - the less privacy-conscious. Many others (who probably frequent this site) actively do (and will) not.
99% of users don't want anything even remotely like this. The thought of a single database (even encrypted) that could contain random login/password information, personal information, etc. and easily exfiltrated by whatever new zero-day of the week is NOT pleasant in the slightest.
Just like they always can put hooks into Windows to do the same thing. And Google can put hooks into Android. And Apple into macOS.
MS can issue an update any day to just copy all drives you currently have attached to Azure, if we're going to put on our tin foil hats.
That's more than enough to make these worries not tinfoil hat.
Full user control is what you’d have if e.g. you were running a FOSS Recall analogue powered by the local LLM of your choice on some flavor of Linux. That setup will only ever do what the user intends it to and barring supply chain exploits, cannot go rogue.
"Free cloud storage for your recalls, we will only scan it for bad thoughts not for good thoughts, we promise!"
So, what legal recourse is left?
The moment you don't build your own device, TEE with provable encrypted executions or FHE is the only way to run reasonably secure apps.
"To use Recall, you will need to opt-in to saving snapshots, which are images of your activity, and enroll in Windows Hello to confirm your presence so only you can access your snapshots."
Constant nagging by the operating system for Windows products (I have enabled onedrive personally, but for some reason it installed two file explorer quick access links, and the workarounds online fail to persist reboots) -- hijacking file extensions, hijacking program aliases (I just had to remove a windows store alias in my env variables for "python" despite having it already installed months prior), the constant cat and mouse to have local account-only possible, inability to remove edge/stop being pestered about it, and now recall (which is not truely opt-in since it gets installed whether you want it or not).
We're only a single Windows Update from silently changing that
Windows has turned itself into spyware. Apple is too expensive and going the same way.
Meanwhile the user experience of Linux has dramatically increased. Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference. You don't need to reply that you can, I know you can. You're on HN. But most people just use their computer for the browser and most people can't tell Chrome from Firefox. Most people get their lockin by their tech friend or child. Really, Microsoft's only lockin remains Office.
It won't be a complete shift but the signs of growing userbase is there. Would be a huge win for open source! If you haven't tried Linux in a few years try giving something like PopOS a go or if you want to say you use Arch then try EndeavourOS. Both are very stable, latter slightly less.
Edit: enfuse was right, I should have suggested EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro.
But even then back in the day I remember Windows applications that would partition and install a Linux distro for dual boot from within Windows.
The core issues existed in 2005 still exist in exact form: how do you make money for the software devs on Linux, how to bring good closed-source software support for decades. If Linux cannot solve those two problems, it will not replace Windows. I think, without changing the software architecture to look more Windows-like, the latter problem cannot be feasibly solved.
This is mostly just venting, but if the “please take my money” pathways of MS’s most popular product work this badly, I don’t even want to think about ever going back to Windows.
Some way to make it ridiculously low friction for existing hardware owners to get into Linux. Like, less friction than downloading an ISO, mounting it, and installing it on your computer.
Or make computers come with it when people buy them. (This is still vanishingly rare.)
**
As a power user... I still have a few issues, some that might be common, and some that might be quite rare/unique to me. For example, post-concussion I really can't stand low refresh rates, and screen brightness is important to me. During my last 2-month Linux experiment, I had issues with controlling those things which was a mix of hardware, drivers, Linux kernel, GPU modes, etc. These sort of issues seem to be less and less common in Linux, and I'm optimistic, but I also am hesitant to sacrifice my own health to make a switch away from Windows. (Mental health aside.)
And some games still don't work right, at least not on launch. Which can make me sad as someone who plays games socially.
As a photographer, I bought and use DxO PhotoLab. I've compared alternatives, and I like it much better. It doesn't mean I couldn't use darktable but I definitely don't like it anywhere near as much. (And no, DxO does not support Linux.)
I am not affliated with them, I am a customer and I like their products.
(also not affiliated with them, just want to support good products/company)
I bought a new one from them this year, still incredible hardware.
My only issue with them, which is a big one, is that they ship only from USA. So as EU customer I have to pay VAT on top!
Fwiw, you can get it preinstalled on System 76, makers of Pop. I'm a bit surprised Framework doesn't do it. But this seems easy to expand
**
I'm not much of a gamer but will play some AAA and a handful of indie games. Occasional issues like Steam not loading the GUI (right click menu bar and directly open library fixes), and occasionally sync issues because VPN, or minor like needing to launch a game twice. But FWIW, past 3 years I've never needed to touch proton. I'm really hoping SteamOS gets a broader release soon. I'm not sure if I can help much here but I do know graphics cards which might help?
I'll definitely agree UI/UX in many apps needs major improvements. I've seen a trend in the right direction though. Alongside the same improvements in OS. We need people to realize that your backend doesn't matter if people can't use it. Design is hard. The magic is the interaction between awesome backend and awesome design. I think this philosophy is growing. Hopefully. Momentum appears to be building
Linux Mint w/ KDE for most of the two month period.
Nowadays like 95% of my gaming is Digital Board Games on Steam which I'm mostly quite sure would run fine on Linux. Anno 1800 was one of the rare instances of LAN multiplayer which is rare in games these days and poorly supported.
When I'm really active sometimes as a group we'll start a new Survival game together, and it's nice when you can be involved. Games like Valheim run awesome on Linux, and I had no issues with Conan, ARK, etc. Occasionally a game isn't supported and that's when it's a bummer.
I think the Windows and MacOS brands have become lifestyle choices. Windows is the "gamer" and "corporate" choice. MacOS is the "student" and "luxury" choice. Linux is the "hacker" choice (they use Arch, by the way). Like iOS vs Android, Xbox vs PlayStation, Toyota vs BMW, and all other brand tribalisms, it seems like most people are emotionally drawn to one or another.
Microsoft knows this, and they will do everything they can to prevent OEMs from shipping anything other than Windows. Apple of course, forget it. Their profit comes from leeching off FOSS and selling it, they would never allow distribution of it directly.
In WA, every school has Microsoft smart boards and laptops running windows. Kids grow up using it and when they buy their own computers they aren’t going to choose a small boutique builder running an unfamiliar OS they won’t know how to use right away.
Apple has a lock on a lot of EDU as well, and the iPhone is so ubiquitous it’s an easy sell to get folk using other products
Those systems look beautiful but it’s a minority of people that will make a large purchase on something like this.
Most of the EDU software is trash, the incentives are all aligned to spend billions on acquiring the contract and close to zero on execution and most of these kids are traumatized from sitting in a classroom with some clueless dope at the front yelling at them to IPad IPad IPad algebra
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...
If you need a PC in 2025, you're probably a fair bit more knowledgeable than someone buying one in 2005. You're also almost certainly buying one online, possibly even directly from the manufacturer or builder, which means the seller can simply give you options and doesn't have to worry about competing for store shelf space.
Which, if you use Android, is ...Linux...
iOS is really just repackaged UINX.
You're right and they effectively licensed XP to Asus for free for use on the Eee PC (which originally only shipped with Linux) when it was shaping up to be a hit.
This is a worthwhile watch if you're interested in this corner of computing history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bVno8dlM3E
It was at the time mobiles were picking up momentum, and just before tablets arrived on the scene (the ipad launched 2010, the tablet focused Android 3 came out in 2011), and a lot of people migrated away from windows for their personal computing needs. There's also been MS's ultimately failed efforts for their own mobile platform. Besides the established huge momentum of gaming and professional/office usage it's difficult to see why consumers would move to windows, or what MS offers to prevent the momentum slowing and linux slowly chipping away at it.
> until laptops sold at Walmart or Best Buy start coming with Linux pre-installed as an option
If you want to see this, make sure your browser agent is broadcasting Linux[0]. Make sure you're using Steam in Linux.
But right now Steam has Linux at <3%[1]. It is more than OSX, but not enough. I do think above 5% and it'll start to be taken seriously, and 10% we'll start seeing moves. Linux doesn't need 90% of the marketshare to dramatically change the world. 10% is more than enough. Even 20% would be momentous and force both Microsoft and Apple to change strategies. Don't feel like there's no hope. Just because it is an unrealistic expectation today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. And your actions today change the odds of what happens tomorrow. So don't give up.
You don't have to change the world overnight. But you do need to make steps in the right direction, even if small, to make the world move.
[0] You can even do this while using Windows! Hell, you can use Chrome and tell people you're using Firefox on Linux if you believe in those things but just are unwilling to make the switch yourself. The signaling still does something (it is better than nothing).
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I think the overwhelming majority of this is Steam Deck usage. While that's certainly a feather in the cap for Linux, I don't think really counts toward Linux momentum as we're using the term here. Nobody is going to start investing in polished desktop Linux software because there are a lot of Steam Deck buyers.
> I think the overwhelming majority of this is Steam Deck usage
MOST POPULAR PERCENTAGE CHANGE
------------------------------------------------------
Linux 2.27% -0.06%
------------------------------------------------------
"Arch Linux" 64 bit 0.21% -0.02%
Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 0.14% +0.02%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 0.10% 0.00%
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.10% 0.00%
"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 0.06% 0.00%
"EndeavourOS Linux" 64 bit 0.06% 0.00%
Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 0.05% 0.00%
But important to note, there's only a 0.05 difference between Arch and Mint. It's important to note because
1) Arch is incredibly popular and we can't guarantee all users in the Arch category are SteamOS users
2) Mint is currently the most popular distro[1]
> Nobody is going to start investing in polished desktop Linux software because there are a lot of Steam Deck buyers.
[0] We can determine it to be true or false.
To get kids using it needs to do lots of cool shit easily
Windows could play games easily when Linux could not even use a USB mouse
The time is right to make Linux do cool shit easily with local generative models that help iteratively create games
Replace all the desktop legacy with some blank canvas and local models that draw on the canvas. Ship some baked in models to generate shells of games to iterate from, boom.
This is exactly the fear of big SaaS and why VCs outside a key handful are done with it.
Apple Silicon is a glimpse of local compute future. Fanless laptops running models that generate entire coherent universes like Marvel and Star Wars. (Don’t need giant models just dense enough to get 80% and let users “zoom and enhance” with their own input)
Show that potential with local models on Linux and it’s over. Three options then; government demands hardware is locked down to preserve Hollywood/gaming/media, open compute wins, or both sides destroy the world over it.
In an interview with IGN during Covid lockdown Gabe Newell was describing generative AI as an existential threat to content creators. It could be temporary as the next gen grows up with a new normal and doesn’t obsess about a career in digital design or web dev, yt video production. It could end humanity as existential dread settles in for millions stuck in some narrative about their existence that no longer holds economic value.
Interesting times.
Our job often involves breaking down big problems into many little problems. So it should be clear that making little steps makes progress towards solving the big problems. It can be easy to feel like that progress isn't happening and it can be frustrating that it isn't happening fast enough. But our experience should also tell us that it all seems to quickly come together towards the end. There was never a magic leap, it was all the small steps put together.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
I think it’s very promising, if you believe in the potential of Linux on the desktop, that gaming used to be the standard “Linux doesn’t do what I need, so I stay on Windows” argument. Thanks to a lot of investment and hard work, particularly by Valve and others contributing to software like Wine/Proton, that is no longer the case. Many games work fine on Linux today, even among the big names. Some even have native versions. It mostly seems to be “anti-cheat” measures that are statistically indistinguishable from malware that still cause trouble.
Another potential sticking point for adoption by home users today is that few, if any, of the big streaming services work well on Linux. This also seems to come down at least partly to DRM. A cynic might suggest that this is because Linux will give a more appropriate response if a copy protection system tries to do invasive things that it has no business doing on someone else’s computer. In any case, it’s another significant barrier, but if we could get to the point where you could at least watch HD content like users of other platforms when you’re paying the same subscription fees, it’s another barrier that could fall.
This latter example is, of course, more than a little ironic given the subject of today’s discussion. But then the behaviour that the DRM system is being subverted to protect against by Signal probably wouldn’t fly for more than five minutes on Linux in the first place, so I don’t think Linux not enabling intrusive/abusive DRM is really the problem here…
EndeavourOS preferred over Manjaro.
There definitely can be some hurdles depending on what your goals are. If you're mainly browser user, don't stress. If gamer, go PopOS (if want to be a bit more, EndeavourOS is a good recommend).
If you do want to learn linux, then I actually suggest doing things "the hard way". That is installing Arch (fastest newbie I've seen is install on the 4th attempt) and try living in the terminal. The failures lead to a lot of learning. But it is a good way to learn because it forces you to get your hands dirty and makes you quick to not be afraid because well... you will have already experienced fucking up and it is less scary once you have haha. It's one of those things where you don't feel like you're making progress but boy do you learn fast this way.
But this of course is not what everyone should do! I just wanted to offer the advice in case you or anyone does. I am being serious about it being the hard way. But it pays off.
You or I can use Linux, because we're the same type of people who visit Hacker News. It's also completely possible to get your great-grandma on Linux, since the web browsers work the same and you can install the specific apps they need to use and they'll never care about anything else. But the middle user is working in an office exchanging Microsoft Office documents all day, making video calls through Teams, and using one out of a zillion business apps developed specifically for Windows.
We need more free and good projects, and the problem is, that costs time, and in between Richard Stallman's heyday and now, the rent's quadrupled.
Other types of usecases have gone very Linux-friendly recently (e.g video games thanks to Valve).
It's not bad for me. "Bad" is subjective.
Sure, it's not a good fit for "normal people". But as long as it's not targetting "normal people", I don't see how this is a problem.
I doubt it. Common people can't interpret GUI and discover features unlike developers who'd prefer dynamic "intuitive" interfaces. They rely more on dumb fixed rote memorization.
Most recent example of failure of this approach is Windows Settings app. Not only a lot of configuration panes started to mimic old Control Panel in both features layouts, even verbiages, many had become a mere shortcut links to old Control Panel applets.
My point is that it's not like there's an objectively good way to do this. That people just get used to doing things one way or another. And frankly, with Linux you can copy those same structures and that's what I mean by "skin". You really can make it feel a lot like Windows or OSX and that really reduces the dissonance.
If year of Linux doesn't arrive by choice, authoritarianism will force the issue one way or another.
- the built in bluetooth and wifi can't be used at the same time; for a while we mitigated this with a USB wifi module, but that eventually broke and so now bluetooth is just disabled.
- it's hard to figure out what apps and app data are shared between users. AFAICT there's one Steam install my kids are sharing, but each one installs their own copy of a game, which is terrible for disk usage.
- a bunch of games don't work, especially from non-steam sources like Epic and Itch.io. I've heard about the Heroic Launcher, and I will try it at some point, but it's just... one more fiddly thing to have to mess with.
- several Minecraft launchers / mod-managers have been tried, but I can't seem to keep my Microsoft account logged in on there, so I eventually just put my password on a sticky note so they could re-auth it whenever needed (fortunately I don't use it for anything else).
- unattended-upgrades pulled a new kernel and the thing just panicked on startup until I went into the grub menu to get the previous one and reverted.
- until 25.04 the power management story was terrible, the machine would chew through the whole (newly replaced) battery in less than an hour.
As a competent nerd I've been ~fine with all this, but it's honestly right on the edge of acceptable. I expect a normal person would immediately give up in the face of most of these— either give up in terms of ditching the machine/OS or give up as in accepting a limitation like it just doesn't play that game or I just can't use my earbuds.
Pi hole is a good example. Do all websites (and other services) still work perfectly but without ads, or am I going to have to endure sighing and eyerolling everytime someone asks me why their site isn't loading (again)?
On a phone it's not a huge deal as you can just momentarily switch to data, click through, and then switch back. But it's more annoying on a computer where you have to figure out where that link was going to go and then get there by an organic path.
Overall absolutely worth the slight pain though.
> Do all websites (and other services) still work perfectly
> but without ads,
You know, when you search for a thing you want to buy and google shopping shows a list of common stores on top of the search results like a bunch of little cards? Yep. Clicking one there causes a failure because that link is a google ad link. Same thing if you tab into "Shopping". All links are broken.
Otherwise, it's been 4 years and no other complaints at all.
I had a faulty keyboard on a thinkpad that was causing a lot of seemingly unrelated problems, like freezes or suspend not working. Replacing the keyboard resolved everything.
Try to switch them to luanti!
The keyboard has already been replaced once, though at the time I just bought whatever was cheapest on eBay, assuming they were all the same, and I think I did get a bit burned with a crappy knockoff— the keys are weirdly clicky and several feel like they're about to pop off at any moment; I have the LiteOn keyboard standing by which I'd like to try out, as that's the one that comes recommended most often online.
If I forgot my charging cable at home, I could do a full day at the office with music and internet on battery.
Or another factor is that I think often the "new" batteries for old devices are in fact themselves old and have just been sitting around on shelves for years. Obviously that doesn't wear them as hard as actual cycling, but it's not nothing, particularly if they're allowed to discharge down to empty.
Some moron at Microsoft decided that if your password is serving its purpose and people aren't able to get in but that there are a bunch of attempts that you should need to reset your password. Because of this, I have to reset my password. Every. Time. I. Want. To. Play.
But that means multiple 2FA codes to both my non-mirosoft account email and to my phone. All in all, it usually takes about 7 or 8 minutes each time I want to play, which is an ABSURD amount of friction for an account I don't want to be using to play the game anyway, given when I bought it it was a Mojang account without all the associated, creepy TOS changes.
Don't be afraid to look around for ways to play without a legitimate account if you've paid. If that's the better experience, it is what it is.
But the Raspberry Pi 500 (keyboard model) is even better and (literally and figuratively) a cool design. You get 8GB RAM, boot from NVME, Debian with Wayland (labwc), and the R.Pi community.
Neither of those user groups are the problem. The problem is the majority of computer users that have real practical skill born from computer use at school, work, while gaming, doing art, etc. They want to do enough with their computer to run up against technical obstacles, but
a) don't have the significant amount of prerequisite knowledge we take for granted to generalize what they know to other operating systems
b) don't have the subject matter interest to inspire them to get that knowledge
and those two things mean
c) view any extra steps required to do something on Linux (e.g. use wine to run software they've been using for a decade) as a needless hassle that prevents them from doing what they really want to do, rather than a satisfying problem to solve because configuring the computer is part of the fun.
So if they hadn't already given up on Linux, they might ask one of the bazillion "Hey I'm a bit of a noob here, but..." questions on reddit or whatnot only to receive a barrage of conceited responses by zealots who make it very clear how put-out they are by their question-- which they didn't have to read, let alone answer-- and how rude it was for them to not read entry 427 on the FAQ which leads to a page of resources that might have addressed part of their problem. If nothing else has already discouraged them from continuing, that sure will.
Unless someone with those users' needs at the forefront of their design practice Bluesky's Linux (some like pop os are making a solid effort), it will never ever work as a general-purpose desktop OS.
There is nothing too expensive about an M series mac mini.
Come on. You can still think they're great while admitting they're over priced. Those aren't in contention.
I agree it’s overpriced, and it bugs me too. But i still recommend mac’s to my less tech savvy family and friends. Why? I’m not interested in being their tech support, and also, it’s trivial to buy a portable 2TB thunderbolt 4 SSD for $200-$300, if the need arises in the future. In fact an external SSD is even easier to replace/upgrade than an internal ssd (generally speaking). i think we’re losing sight of the topic here. CASUAL USERS :)
From what I see, Apple has launched private cloud compute with better privacy safeguards than any other big tech firm. In fact, their personal assistant is the worst one because it is so dumb.
They don’t seem to make money from your data because, as you say, they have already made huge margins on hardware and apps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
> They don’t seem to make money from your data
It's changing:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/19/apple-now-directly-sell...
And finally:
Apple's Software Quality Crisis (eliseomartelli.it)
1196 points by ajdude 79 days ago | 1213 comments
Is it? You can get an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $699 now. That's more than many of the bottom-of-the-barrel Windows machines out there, but it's not an unreasonable price at all. It'll keep away the lowest-end users, but most of those users 1) are not going to care about the security issues, because they don't know anything about computers beyond base utility, and 2) have mostly switched to doing everything on their phone/tablet, and aren't as big of the computer demographic these days anyway.
But software development (for both OS and applications) is continuing in parallel with hardware improvements, so there's a strong implicit demand of you to also continue upgrading, at least if you need to interoperate with any other computer in the world.
If your SSD is near its max-capacity, then any extra wear has a bad affect on its longevity. But modern SSD’s handle excess writes very well if they are not near capacity.
A few extra GB written to disk daily is a drop in the bucket in an SSD’d TBW rating, no??
I’d say for a casual user with low storage needs, it’s perfectly fine. Otherwise it’s a bad idea imo.
For most people that just browse the web, write some stuff and do their email, 8 GB is still enough.
So which is it? lol.
And FYI 8GB is more than enough for a casual desktop/laptop user, at least on the M series macs. I used my wife’s M1 macbook air with 8GB of ram for a week while my new laptop was shipping in the mail. Even if I pushed it with 1 or 2 heavy apps, such as IntelliJ IDE (java development), it performs pretty well, albeit with some paging to disk on large projects. Barely noticeable and the system remained very responsive. For casual usage (zoom, google docs, gmail, instagram) it didn’t fill up the ram.
On literally what metric? Even if you do the most naive comparison of compute and storage, Apple now comes out ahead much of the time, to say nothing of differences around quality, display, controls, etc.
Anyway, I wonder to what distribution should I switch to.
Apple would have had near 100% OS market share if they’d have tossed their hardware restrictions.
Has?
I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...
I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)
I've been reading about the "year of linux" for years now, it's a meme for a reason. People that are not "prosumer" will keep using the preinstalled OS even if it's garbage - assuming they buy a laptop or desktop at all - and the prosumer will probably keep an OSX or a Windows machine close by anyway. Linux is usable as a browser kiosk sure but there is still plenty of friction on everything else. Enshittification will continue, and possibly infect also linux.
> "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard
Quick Google
- 3 free Linux distros that look and feel like Windows: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2532994/3-free-linux-distros-that-look-and-feel-like-windows.html
- 5 Linux Distributions That are Inspired by the Look and Feel of macOS: https://itsfoss.com/macos-like-linux-distros/
> soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line
I don't deny that there are problems with Linux, nor that things need to improve to get better mass appeal. But I do think you should look at your own words. They're highly technical. And we should not forget how this would compare when discussing Windows or OSX. That's the choice! It's that these conversations of "Linux sucks" are not just complaints about Linux, they are also suggestions of using Windows or OSX. The context of our conversation is about choosing between these systems, not the existence of problems.
I want to be very clear
Linux is a dumpster fire.
This does not mean Windows isn't!
This does not mean OSX isn't!
These arguments become equivalent to: "You don't want to eat that, the chef sneezed in it. Here, eat this cake instead. The chef only took a shit in it."
Idk about you, but give the choice, I'd rather take the sneeze than the shit. I'd (strongly) prefer neither, but frankly that isn't an option now, is it?
And let's be honest, if you want to get more resources to put out more fires, the only way that's going to happen is if there are more users.
Just keep in mind that widespread Linux adoption means it will lose something special it has had from being relatively small on the desktop. This would be another Eternal September ... including a massive influx of entitled users and all that.
Because of that effect, I think there needs to be one or more for-profit Linux OS vendors prepared to absorb all the support and feedback needs (and contribute upstream, of course), and OEMs should only use it/them for anyone besides "advanced users and developers" or similar verbage.
SteamOS maybe?
If they could work with system 76 or something maybe yeah
Enterprises is where the money is, that is also why a company like Cisco do not make consumer devices
Not sure.
I don't want people who want Windows to come to Linux because Windows has become a spyware. The result will be a bunch of entitled users asking for Linux to look more like Windows.
Anyone who has maintained an open source project knows how consumers of open source suck. "Your free project that you develop in your free time sucks" or "I won't make you the honour to use your project if you don't spend 2 weeks adding this feature I want". A mass influx of Windows people who want Windows-without-the-spyware would probably make this worse for Linux.
"I want BSplayer, how do I make it work?", and no other player will ever be good enough as BSplayer. And sometimes it's not even a good piece of software, but some stupid windows only thing that not even windows users use anymore.
Many of my friends don't even have a computer: they do everything on their phone. If they could plug their phone to a dock station for the few times they need a keyboard and a bigger screen, they would be fine.
The year of desktop Linux on the other hand? It will never happen. It is a value like ∞ that you can never reach.
We could get to 30% in just 60 years!
I know it's a running joke, but we had a decade (+) of Linux in many other consumer use cases, such as smartphones. The problem is that if you're selling a consumer computing platform, you're subject to the same exact incentives as Microsoft. You want to be Microsoft! You want their revenue, their profit margins, their nice offices, their talented engineers.
Android is Linux, but your typical Android phone ships with invasive AI features, has a locked bootloader, a variety of components that collect data about you... and unless you jump through hoops, it only lets you install apps from the company store.
Out of curiosity, have you had any experience managing 100s or 1000s of users/workstations?
As someone who spends time using MacOS, Windows, and Linux ... even if you managed to make them look pixel perfect identical, everyone would notice something is off immediately. MacOS, Windows, and Linux desktop environments all feel distinctly different.
MacOS feels like you're waist deep in the shallow end of the pool trying to run. You feel like you're being held back in terms of speed but never out of control. Window max/min is easy, want to resize a window? That'll be 5 minutes of your life you'll never get back.
Windows is like an overeager dog, it's fast and nimble but don't blink or you'll loose your mouse cursor. Max/min/resize? Sure it's effortlessly easy right up until your mouse hits a zone and then it snaps the window exactly how you didn't want.
Linux gives you the freedom to do whatever you want, and that's exactly what every single app developer has done with their app experience. Will a click of the scroll wheel move at light speed or a glacial crawl? You never know, but what you can count on is that it will be entirely different if you use a touch pad. Want to resize a window? The mouse cursor might change to the resize icon, but damned if it doesn't activate the window beneath when you try to click and drag.
M4 Minis are like, $500.
However, if an attacker has the ability to directly query the Recall database, they almost certainly have access to read all your Signal messages on your device. The locations where Recall files live are even more protected and isolated than your %APPDATA%\Roaming\Signal directory is.
Everything running as you on your computer has full control of all your Signal messages and your identity assigned to the device. This is untrue of your Recall data, which from last I saw required a lot of finagling to get the permissions right for you to access it raw.
All the messages you've previously synced to the device exist in that Signal AppData directory and can be trivially searched and read by any application running as your user account. And all attachments are also just sitting there.
For example:
* They have a message retention setting, 'Disappearing messages'; it works on message correspondents' devices too (if Ali sets Disappearing messages' to '1 day' for the chat with Barry, and then texts Barry, 1 day later Signal deletes the message on both Ali's and Barry's devices).
However, 'Disappearing messages' applies only to text messages. For every voice and video call, Signal retains a record of the date and time and the participants, and Signal saves it on the devices of each participant. Beyond a doubt, Signal's developers are well aware of the value of such metadata - as valuable as call content, in different ways - and the need for confidentiality (if you aren't familiar with that particular issue, I promise that every security professional is).
I'm shocked that they do it. What about a human rights dissident who is arrested - or whose phone is stolen - their phone won't show any sign of the text messages but it shows everyone they called and when, implicating all those other people and putting them at risk, and also evidence against the phone's owner. And even if they are disciplined and manually delete each of those records - afaik you can delete each call record one at a time - the other call participants' phones still retain the records. There is nothing someone can do to protect themself.
Better security here doesn't seem hard to implement. Also, I think having different settings for text messages and for voice/video calls makes retention settings more confusing for users. Many will believe they are safe without realizing the risk of this metadata - they trust the experts at Signal to understand these things and keep them safe - and many will assume everything disappears. Just have one setting for all data and metadata in the chat.
* Also, afaik if you delete the entire correpondence with someone - delete their entire chat history and delete them from the Signal address book - Signal retains information on them, such as settings for that chat. It seems that an attacker could identify all the deleted correspondents; again, there's no way to protect yourself.
You seem to assume it would be very simple to implement this — how do you come to this conclusion? My priors would suggest that the vast amount of effort that went into the Signal protocol renders low-hanging fruit regarding privacy fairly unlikely.
If it requires protocol development, I'd agree. I expect - knowing no more than Signal's blog posts - that it has two components:
* Local database: These records need a retention period column, somehow - however they implement it with text messages. That seems straightforward.
* 'Distributed retention' - implementing the retention period setting on the remote devices of other call participants. I expect they would do it the same way they do with text messages, and I would guess it's just a field in a packet somewhere; e.g., establish a secure connection and then in the call's initial packet,
time = 2025-05-21T22:13:11Z
call.from = lblume
call.to = mmooss
retention.period = 1440 minutesIt's weird to see a bunch of messages, a call, more messages, and a day later the messages around are gone, but the call remains in the history. They could have just applied the disappearing messages settings to the call entries too, as it would be natural to do, and this problem wouldn't exist.
I don't think it's malicious, because what the server knows is independent of what the UI shows, but it's a very odd UI issue that does reduce privacy.
Do you mean in the UI or do you mean in the underlying database, or in both?
iOS <-> Android account migration would also be good.
I last used Windows in the Windows 8 days. That was when they added the telemetry "feature" that lets MS engineers copy files off your box without your permission (and without notifying you).
At the time, they claimed it's only for debugging software failures, and even then, only with managerial approval. My reading of the US CLOUD Act says they're obligated to let the US gov't copy arbitrary data off your machine, regardless of what country it's in.
I'm not sure if they still do it. The documentation of this stuff is well-buried.
Microsoft can simply change Recall to capture DRM-marked content too. And to avoid copyright issues, it will store some kind of visual summary (or whaterer the neural network can use) instead of plain screenshots like it is doing now.
(saying this as a Signal fan)
To nitpick, that doesn't tell me why you're only implementing this now. That tells me why it's more important now, but it doesn't tell me why it wasn't good before now. But the word "only" suggests that there was a reason you didn't do this before now.
> "If you're wondering why we're [not implementing this on other platforms right now] [...]"
Meanwhile, Signal still requires a phone number to register and use. It's terrible: phone numbers are easy to lose, and not everyone has a phone number.
I like the ideas behind the Session[0] messenger: create an account with no authentication (no phone number, no email, no nothing), get a list-of-words-to-note-down, which allows you to access your account from any device. You get a UUID or something as your user id. Share that with a QR code or send a link over an existing channel to connect to someone.
To me this seems way ahead of Signal. I'm not affiliated with Session and haven't actually persuaded anyone to start using it just yet, so I don't really know how it is in practice. But the UX of creating an account made me weep tears of joy and hope <3
At least in the US they're nearly impossible to lose because of phone number portability.
>and not everyone has a phone number
Most people do, not least because plenty of other services (eg. banks) require a phone number.
If you miss a few payments, you'll be at risk of losing your phone number.
It's just so weird to require a paid service to access a free service. Why not just a free service like email that can be accessed via free wifi.
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ https://soatok.blog/2025/01/20/session-round-2/
Begone, fed.
For the last two decades or so I've been running Linux for everything (personal and work) except for gaming. I'm to the point of being sufficiently annoyed with Windows that I'm going to set up a Linux disk for gaming to see how that goes. I've used Wine etc. for gaming sporadically throughout the years. Recently that landscape has improved quite a bit thanks to Valve.
People have actually written apparmour configs to prevent that: https://sergei.nz/stop-google-chrome-from-hijacking-mimes/
No, actual AI is smarter than Microsoft managers, it seems:
Here are some ideas for adding an arbitrary AI feature to your operating system quickly to make investors happy:
- AI File Search: NLP for file/setting search (search files by NLP querying)
- Auto Window Layouts: AI-suggested window organization ("coding mode", "research mode" depending on detected usage patterns)
- Smart Notifications: automatic notification condensing to reduce clutter
- AI Clipboard: Keeping a categorized clipboard paste based on content
- Predictive App Launcher: Suggests apps based on daytime, usage, recently opened files
- AI Wallpaper/Theme: Smart visual suggestions, i.e. wallpaper based on current weather, mood, etc.
- Voice Quick Commands: AI-based voice OS control ("Open browser")
- AI System optimization: for example, content-based disk space cleanup
Any of the above are better than this nonsense.
Second, Apple is doing something similar except they send all your data to the cloud (yes I know Apple says private cloud, but there's no such thing). What's Signal's take on that?
I respect their stance on privacy, but this doesn't feel like a rational decision to me.
They do? Since when?
> Draws on your personal context without allowing anyone else to access your personal data — not even Apple.
Personal context === privacy sensitive data.
> Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing. So it’s aware of your personal information without collecting your personal information. And with groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.
They can use nice sounding words such as "privacy at every step" and "protecting your privacy", but that's marketing. The facts are that Apple Intelligence is baked into the core of your iPhone for analyzing personal data and they send the data to the cloud.
I originally got it for it's main advertised function--making it easy to record hours for contract billing--but once I had it running I was hooked.
It's just incredibly useful to be able to pull up what you were doing at any given moment, or how you did a particular thing, a few months after the fact.
I haven't used Recall yet but hooking it up to a multimodal LLM seems like an obviously useful thing.
1. You can disable that feature in the Signal settings (they say it in the post)
2. They don't have another way because of Microsoft (they say it in the post)
Did you read the post?
The same is true for spyware installed on employee computers. Google laptops will snitch on you if you even attempt to attach USB drive. While there is HDMI and KVMs, there is no point of having these restrictions.
It's not to stop the people from screenshotting. It's to stop the accidental exposure via some screenshot or some other mechanism.
because it sounds like Windows is the problem here, doing this screenshotting at all. And Signal allows you to disable the anti-screenshotting measure
How many hours a day does Zoom/Google Meet/etc record many users' screens? I'd suggest that it unbelievably common for a screen to get recorded many hours every day already. I had always (incorrectly) assumed Signal required a desktop app so that they could block screen capture like they finally do now.
If Microsoft decides spying on you and inflicting DRM or whatever or any of the other companies they should be liable in criminal prosecution
At least some of these you could plausibly argue even violate the CFAA and is about on the same level of some lone black hat hackers
What's the crime? What's the damage? Nobody is forcing you to use Windows, in fact most developers I know are on a Mac
What's the crime? What's the damage? Nobody is forcing you to use Windows, in fact most people I know are on Mac
contact9879•6h ago
baby_souffle•5h ago
15 years ago, DRM was all about the DVD restricting where and when it could be played. Now it seems like we're using DRM to reassert our own rights?
This timeline is cursed.
gruez•3h ago
contextfree•2h ago
Party A sends information to party B intended for use in a specific context, but wants to limit the risk of it being stored or forwarded for use by other parties or in other contexts.
DRM typically connotes that party A is a media company and the information is a movie or something, but - as in the case the article is about - party A could also just be a regular person and the information could be private personal info.
kristofferR•4h ago
Windows Recall would be a pretty good feature if it somehow only worked for real personal computers.
lenkite•4h ago
AI has made people idiots in more ways than expected.
xp84•1h ago
mmcnl•3h ago
TiredOfLife•1h ago