Wow, dude. Get back to your echo chamber. You’re brittle and shrill outside of it.

Well, my ISP doesn’t need to know anything about my posts. And the fediverse doesn’t need to know who I am beyond “growingentropy,” so…

Did you just do the “if you don’t have anything to hide, what’s the big deal” move?

I want privacy. That’s all.

No idea. I installed a VPN on my router to get privacy. That’s all I ask.

I have a router with a VPN. I’m not disabling that just to post on lemmy.world.

I got off lemmy.world because they block VPN connections. Not happening, under any circumstances. I don’t trust anyone that much.

Yes, absolutely. We should all be concerned with the source of our ideas and even our memes, as dumb of a concept as that is.

The repercussion to bad speech and ideas is inherent to the current paradigm of the internet: downvotes and ostracization.

Maybe they will wind up on their own forum saying despicable shit, but they were probably going to do that anyway. Bad ideas love a vacuum away from prying eyes and outsiders.

I’m just going to throw in a bit at the end of this thread here, as I find the conversation fascinating.

This is how fascism starts. “We have to control speech for your own good” becomes “hateful speech comes from [insert group]” becomes “we have to stop them.”

We are all being weaponized by the internet. Free speech is important. You don’t fight fascism with more fascism, you fight it with better ideas.

The last paragraph is vital. Grab a flatpak of any software you need to be more up to date. Flatpaks running on Debian are amazing. Current software running on a stable base.

I have no formal tech background, but I’m pretty damn good with it. And I like Arch and Debian with XFCE.

That’s the least of your worries. Once it reboots, its proprietary spyware…errr…AI…will resume taking screenshots of everything you do.

Yes, absolutely. But I also wouldn’t want to. GUI tools have their issues sometimes. The command line is basically raw compute power.

I can’t wait for some new bargain Linux machines.

My coworker does graphic design, and he paid $8k for his Mac laptop.

I honestly don’t know if there’s anything I could order in a Windows/Linux laptop that would add up to $8k.

I get great performance out of my $90 eBay laptop running Debian, by the way.

Buying a Mac didn’t help.

Been on it for a few years now. It’s great.

The only other one I’d really recommend is Podcast Addict. I only switched to Antennapod because it has a little less busy UI.

Two choices in the end game.

Ready to go out of the box? Mint.

Bare install where you pick your programs? Debian.

And then there’s the secondary question for some of us… the machine you game on?

Ready to go? Fedora, Pop, or several other choices.

Bare install where you pick your programs? Arch.

It’s definitely not as bad as people make out. That said, I only run Arch on my main machine, and Debian on the rest. Just in case, you understand.