Eyedust

Sleep/hibernate has been a pretty big problem for a while. As for the gpu, have you checked out NixOS? There’s ways to enforce your integrated card to handle everything and change states for certain apps to the discreet card.

It takes a bit to learn, but nixlang is pretty simple. I’ve heard it referred to as “JSON with functions”. It also has the largest package repository of any OS and is atomic, so its hard as hell to break. You can even make separate, containerized dev environments with flakes.

I have heard about the IoT version. I’d have to look more into it, but I doubt I’m going back now that I’ve learned so much about Linux. I can troubleshoot most of Arch without touching the docs or asking online now, so it really defeats the purpose of switching back.

I also enjoy putting in a little effort to get things working. That’s the thing about Linux. Most people that daily drive it get a dopamine release from tinkering with it and fixing things, and I’m one of those people.

I know there has been a big “its for everyone” push these days, but its really not. So I’m glad the IoT version exists for those that want or need it.

Rufus is great and I still keep a copy around, but I haven’t gone back since I found Ventoy. You just run Ventoy on your stick, and then drag and drop any and all bootable ISOs into it. When you boot it, you get a list of all the ISOs to work with.

The only caveat is that you absolutely have to eject the USB, or else Ventoy probably will corrupt. That’s a small price to pay to have Arch, Mint, Fedora, NixOS, and Win11 all on one OS ISO toolkit drive, plus I always eject my drives as a rule of thumb. Then all I have to do is update them every couple months.

Takes a lot more to fully deshittify it, though. I’ve been down that road. So much registry diving, so many third party apps, strongarming uninstallations of bloatware through brute force, and just all around weeks of work.

When the screenshot shit was announced the first time, I just got tired of looking for workarounds to disable or remove Microsoft’s active attempts of policing, spying, and triple-dip profiting off it’s paying customers.

Lol, I just mention it because I have no other experience with Ladybird. There’s an Ubuntu/Debian section and a Choco for Windows. I would assume macOS uses homebrew, but I didn’t read that far into it. I can only confirm that I got the Arch version working after a bit of compiling.

You can already test it out in very early alpha, but I can tell you now that it’s just a portal with very basic browser controls. You’ll have to build it through the Python script.

I built it through Arch already and its a working browser is about all I can really say about it. The little I tried of it works.

The instructions to build the early alpha are on the github page here.

It wasn’t supposed to stay Apple exclusive. In fact, when I last used Windows there was a beta build out for Arc. However, there were also multiple Firefox styles in the CSS Store that made Firefox into Arc.

Then Zen Browser came out, and I’m currently watching it get very popular. I don’t doubt that Zen Browser is one of the reasons Arc is shutting down. It’s nearly an exact copy, but now with more features (and is constantly coming out with even more faster than Arc can think of them).

I’m excited for Ladybird as well, but I’m not expecting anything crazy when it comes out of alpha and beta. I fully expect to wait a bit, maybe download to contribute some troubleshooting, but it may not be viable as a main use browser for a long time yet.

It happens to layouts. Some people add some small changes to make an alternate layout which makes more sense to them. For example, Colemak and Colemak-DH. DH only changes 3 keys, shifts 3, and swaps 2.

Using topgrade without realizing what I was doing. Seemed okay for a few days until my headphones suddenly jacked to 1000 and began some sort of alarm-like buzzing. Thankfully they were not on my head, because it was so loud my gf and I thought there was some sort of fire alarm going off. This was on EndeavourOS.

I tried topgrade again, not knowing that the app was what had done it. This time on vanilla Arch. I was not so fortunate this round and I took the sound full blast into my earholes. I reacted in milliseconds and Hulk-smash threw them halfway across the room. No lasting damage since I was so quick, but fuck me wearing headphones is more dangerous than I thought.

Luckily I’ve learned from past mistakes and made Timeshift restore points before every update. I reverted to before the topgrade changes and my distro has still been holding strong since then. I think I’ll make my own alias for full upgrade and call it updawg.

This is good to know. I hadn’t read the fine print, because I abandoned Telegram and never looked back. I hope its true and I agree, I also wouldn’t think they’d do this and then renege into a possible lawsuit.

This. The second Premium landed I was out, and it was slipping long before that.

Ah no, I mean the government backdoor. Last we knew, Telegram was threatened, then it suddenly quiet and Premium launches. Fishy. So potentially the federal government has access.

Sorry, I’m bad at providing context. When it comes to another user accessing your messages, you should be right. However, when it comes to the US and Russian governments, its probably getting read already. And we all know what ties and connections Elon has there. So Grok can probably read them.

Your secret chats are already being read. Hell, secret chats are probably the first to be read.

A secret chat is only for local privacy, meaning if someone got access to your device they can’t find them, nor will you get notifications (in case your partner is watching your screen).

Back when we just had SMS and MMS, they had secret chats, too. They were blatantly marketed as tools to cheat on your partner. GO SMS was one of the first to use them. Its not so blatant anymore, but its still the primary use for “secret” chats.

I remember reading an article that someone figured out everyone’s GO SMS images (even secret ones) were uploaded online without any security whatsoever. You could put in the url and some random numbers and get any pictures and voice clips ever sent. And they never fixed it even after it was leaked.

So yeah, not so secret. You want secure.

Edit: Context: Sorry, my ADHD gets the better of me. I mean that there’s more likely than not a government backdoor. Other users are unlikely reading your messages, but your messages are more than likely being scanned. Just be careful if you use TG.

If you want something more like the fediverse itself, then Matrix. If you want something closer to Telegram out of the box without setup, then Signal or SimpleX.

Federal government threatened Telegram and demanded a backdoor a while back, iirc.

I predicted this years and years ago when the internet was still young. I’m probably already well scanned and filed away like the rest of us, but as a rule of thumb I always come up with new usernames for everything just to be safe. I’m never the same on more than two platforms max. I’ve never connected my usernames to my identity, I’ve just always been paranoid about it since dial up was a thing.

Plus, I like the change. You get infinite new starts and it really gives you time to think and build on your first impressions. I highly recommend it. Not even my MMO accounts use the same character names from any other MMO. I have many abandoned emails, and never name them anything similar.

If you’re going to be online, always keep moving. Keep changing, keep remaking yourself, and do it often. The same goes for avatars. Change them often and try not to use too many from actual hobbies you like. AI slop is out there, just generate something locally or pick something random that looks cool.

It’s not impossible to still fingerprint someone like this, but that doesn’t mean make it easy for big corp to file you away and monetize your existence.