well in some cases they were on the verge of being regulated or in the case of Google being threatened to be broken up. So a lot of this seems like self preservation which is just sad.

Maybe you didn’t get the memo all of big tech has decided to shill for trump. google, facebook, tiktok, amazon, X, they all met with trump and kissed the ring and decided to do what they do in other dictatorship countries like China which is censor anything the administration doesn’t like to get concessions from that administration. Trump has all these companies by the balls.

So easy to just screenshot or something there is no reason to link there.

So I’ve never used Microsoft office because I could never afford it. I went from notepad to wordpad to OpenOffice to libreoffice. I’ve never had a single issue even as a professional not using word. I actually really enjoy writing as a hobby and I just don’t get this copiolet thing. Why would I want something to do the thing I like doing? Screw that.

I moved to Lemmy during the reddut exodus itsjustt become better overtime I don’t miss reddit at all. Also lots of fellow Linux and free software nerds over here and I like that.

Honestly i didn’t even know this was still a thing

Just blow in the cartridge

Idon’t think so seems like whelemed and overwhelmed mean the same thing but whelm is out of usage https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19430/why-do-people-say-over-and-underwhelmed-but-never-just-whelmed

Okay any time I mention this product I get roasted but I don’t care because I like it. There is a program called aptik and basically it backs up all your settings and home folder and then can be restored if you need to reinstall. https://store.teejeetech.com/product/aptik/

It’s a one time purchase. I bought my copy like maybe almost 10 years ago and still use it. I used to have a script that I would maintain manually for this sort of thing but this is much easier. I also like that it will update strings and stuff for you when going from one version of a distro to another or between distros. You can also easily go in and uncheck things if you don’t want them or only revert certain parts of the backup and not others. it has 100% saved my butt a few times especially where I had some weird config on a piece of software and after a restore it worked just like before. In my opinion this is also a better option than a diskimage because of the customization of the restore and the fact that you can do it I guess my biggest issue with it is it’s not free software which is kind of annoying however it’s just one dude and the license is very bare bones so it’s not like he is trying to get away with anything with this tool.

wait you can be whelmed? I had never considered that I had only ever heard people say underwhelmed.

As someone else said its free libre open source software. Not my term I just use it because it tends to piss off the least amount of people.

Its osmc updating on the veroV

I would say 0% to >0%

Starlabels starlite tablet looks really nice. I actually just ordered one the other day. I don’t have it yet so I can’t give you a review but from what I have read it’s pretty nice. It’s an Intel machine, upgradable, running coreboot so the compatibility should be high.

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn’t pay much attention anyway. I’ve just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out “turn everyone into fucking zombies”. People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it’s like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it’s all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like “hmm how can I even be lazier?”. I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was “my thing” the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.

I do want to make this point as well even though I know this thread is old. A lot of the issue comes down to very new hardware that isn’t in the mainline kernel yet but may be in the future. So the case of a 2017 laptop being fully supported is not that surprising. The question is if you could get a 2024 laptop from dell to run on mainline kernel with no extra drivers and the answer is likely mixed. The majority would likely work however things like webcam and the fingerprint reader would likely not work. You might still be able to get the drivers directly from dell and get it to work but it can be a hodgepodge and difficult to support. For instance the dell I had when I wrote this I could run on the latest Ubuntu however I had to download the debs for the webcam and fingerprint reader and screw around with the settings and config files to get them to work. Sometimes I would get an update that would break them and then I would need to mess around again to get them working. It’s linux so many things are “doable” however I wouldn’t say that it was user friendly or simple a lot of times. I am on system76 now and a whole lot happier to be honest.

thank you at the time I posted the link to invidious was not working and I didn’t think to check peertube.

As someone who lives through the height of the mall era I’m sad to see the go personally. However before online shopping it was sort of a pain in the ass. Not only did you have to go to the mall for clothes shopping sometimes you would have to go to more than one. I remember school clothes shopping would be a multi day affair to buy some jeans and shirts and a pair of shoes. If the mall didn’t have the store you needed you would sometimes have to drive really far to go to that store. If the mall didn’t have what you needed you were sort of SOL. So when online shopping started to provide anything you want in a few clicks it was not just the hard to obtain stuff people bought it was everything else too. But it’s sad so many teenage sagas played out in malls for me. Friendships were solidified and dating occured there. It was a place you could hang out for a few hours with no parents and navigate teenage social life. I am sure teens will just do something else but it holds a special place in my memory.

I honestly think it’s everyone’s responsibility to make their job as hard as possible. Use providers that prioritize privacy and that are located outside the US. Don’t ever use telephony or sms always use end to end encrypted services for conversations, leave your phone at home or turn it off, use a rom without Google play services. Really drive them nuts and use cash for most purchases. This by no means stops everything but it makes it harder. You can’t stop all data collection but you can reduce it and every reduction helps.

Not much has changed. It’s really only secure if you are sending emails between addresses within the same local network like gmail to gmail. Thankfull with end to end encryption it can be pretty safe just good luck finding someone that knows how to use it. but thankfully proton makes that pretty seamless.