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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Depends on what your definition of winning is. If we reach a state where it is literally impossible to run your own software without heavy hardware modification, which would exclude 99.9% of users, that would be like big tech winning in my book. That’s why right to repair is important, and we probably also need laws to prevent OEMs from disallowing the use of alternate OS.





  • Let’s be careful to remember that there are different levels of effort and understanding required for different levels of security and privacy. GrapheneOS has taken the approach of offering harm reduction, with sane defaults and options that allow advanced users to take near-complete control over their device (within the limits of the Pixel hardware). This is obvious by their inclusion of the sandboxed Google Play Store as a major feature of the OS, as it is much better than the situation on Google’s Android. It is also not installed by default, forcing users to at least somewhat educate themselves in order to install it.

    Accrescent is right in line with this philosophy, and is also not installed by default. Of course if your threat model (or desire) is to achieve the highest level of online anonymity and to have a completely FOSS system, you should not use it… of course you probably shouldn’t use FDroid either, in that case, and should build from source. However, you are clearly in a situation where your threat model does not require those lengths, and FDroid is more of a principled choice.

    I think its pointlessly inflammatory to call Accrescent “dangerous” just because it allows for non-FOSS software. Now if you want to criticize whether or not it is fulfilling its stated goals, that is another story.















  • NVIDIA definitely has stability issues, newest drivers still kernel panic on resume from suspend. Only thing more you can do is try to capture debug logs with nvidia-bug-report.sh (I go in during a crash via SSH, usually the system is still responsive for a little while after), and post it to the NVIDIA Linux forums. They do actually seem to use the feedback there, NVIDIA reps respond from time to time and say they’ve submitted bug reports from the feedback. Otherwise, after that yeah you just do what you have to do for a usable system and wait…


  • Because beginners have no idea about OS architecture concepts. If they are a true beginner coming from Windows or MacOS they may not understand things like the Linux boot process. Of course they can read the Arch install procedure which I’ve heard is excellent, but many people are easily intimidated by documentation and often view computers as a tool that should just work out of the box without them needing to understand it. Mint is an attempt at making that happen. Obviously, once you start to modify your Mint install alot you are going to run into issues, and a highly modified or customized system is where distros like Arch and Tumbleweed actually become easier to maintain. I’d argue Mint is a natural first step to the Linux pipeline. People who only need a web browser will probably stop there, while others will continue to explore distros that better fit their needs.