• 3 Posts
  • 242 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • To be fair, if something is open by default or very easy to enable without informing about the risks, tons of people will have it exposed without thinking.

    It isn’t that “tons of people do it so it is normal and perfectly fine” but more “people don’t realize.” It also uses some nontrivial amount of resources to process and block those attempts, even if they never have a chance of getting in.

    There is yet a reason I can find to have it forwarded for home use. Need to ssh into a machine to fix it? VPN.

    There are plenty of secure web-based tools to manage your server without a VPN also.




  • Depends. If someone is gaming with new hardware, don’t use a distro that doesn’t update the kernel quickly and regularly.

    Almost every problem with hardware on mint is solved by going through the process of updating the kernel or switching to a distro with up to date libraries.

    It’s fine for a lot of people, but it doesn’t “just work” outside of the use case of only browsing the internet and word documents.

    This is coming from someone who used mint for 4 years. There was about a dozen times where the software on the software center was so out of date that it simply didn’t work and I had to resort often to using random ppa’s which often broke other things. Definitely not user friendly.

    That being said, Cinnamon is probably one of the most user friendly DEs for people switching from window. It is very nice.


  • People have hit on most of them here, but here is another big one:

    Fitness apps. Mainly calorie tracking, workout tracking and heart rate tracking

    Health app

    Sleep as Android

    (No, gadget bridge is not a replacement for 99% of cases and doesn’t even support the gold standard for heart rate tracking, polar H10)

    For calorie tracking, the massive food databases required, barcode scanning, and crowd sourcing are generally not compatible with the open source community’s privacy ideals. OpenNutriTracker has promise though!

    For workout tracking, none of them have any device support and most of them are dead and abandoned. Not to mention heart rate zones, stats and training trends, etc… FitoTrack and Opentracks are good starts though.

    And then a google fit alternative. Something that can integrate sleeping, workouts, heart rates, sensors, etc… Data all in one aggregates place. It is a huge task and it makes sense that there is no open source alternative for it. Especially when the components aren’t individually there to aggregate.




  • I will go out on a limb and say FreeCAD and KiCAD specifically in examples. Right now you have to search forum posts and videos to find out how to make something work and it is always an older version completely irrelevant to the current version.

    For other things that need note basic general and setup documentation:

    Traefik: It is only decodable to experienced people right now. I tried about 15 tutorials a few years ago and SmartHomeBeginner was the only one that actually was able to connect to the internet and didn’t “rest of the fucking owl” it

    Authelia could also use some documentation updates specifically around the area of integrations.

    Libopencm3 also could use some more complete documentation instead of basic API descriptions, but the project is not very active anymore

    Opensuse Aeon and Kalpa could also use some documentation love, especially Kalpa.





  • True, meanwhile my HP printer had a hell of a time trying to work on windows much less finding an actual downlosd for the scanner tool on HP’s websitr for a printer ovrr 5 years old and on Linux I typed yay HP, 1, then I was ready to print and scan.

    Plus KDE discover is the convenience if the Microsoft store was actually good.

    Settings are ACTUALLY in setting instead of being split between settings, control panel, individual tool auto diagnoses, powershell, and registry edits.

    KDEconnect works seamlessly and I can also locate my phone if I lost it in the house.


  • It’s funny, because there actually is 0 price reduction in most cases.

    It is literally even more expensive cars and the corporations double dipping to make extra profit.

    Except for maybe some lesser-known Chinese brands that I have no point of reference for, I don’t believe there is a single corporation that has made their “smart” cars with tracking on-par or cheaper than their counterparts.


  • And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn’t consent)

    We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.

    Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.

    They use the argument “your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please”. If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.

    They can’t use the argument but say “no no no, it doesn’t apply to things WE put out”

    They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.



  • Facebook marketplace is literally a shit show full of scams and it is hard to find anything, a bad UI, and no good filtering. The only thing holding it up is the algorithm to show you products (based on your browsing and advertising data). It is a step up from Craigslist, but it is mediocre at its absolute best. There are just no used alternatives in many places

    We have an app here called 2dehands which has a similar scam problem, but is easier to filter out. However, the UX is 10x better with robust filtering, setting up pre-specced searches based on location, price, text strings, quality, categories, etc… with email and/or app notifications for new items added and everything surrounding bidding and favorite item status.