Clickbaity titles on videos or news sites is the new standard. I watched it. The point he’s making is basically that music was harder to make/produce some 50 years ago, so there was more incentive to “make it worth the effort”, compared to today. And the 2nd point he makes is that music consumption is now so easy as well (listen to whatever you want instantly) compared to when you could only listen to something when you bought the physical album, that there’s also less incentive for the listener to really get involved into some albums.

Personally I think these are valid points on the surface but they are not “the answer” to this kind of multi-faceted question. They’re at best a factor but we don’t know how big these factors are. Also I think one big reason he thinks that way is because he grew up in that environment and so he has a bias for “owning physical copies of albums”.

I also think music hasn’t gotten worse, the market is just simply over-saturated because there’s just way too much music, you’ll never be able to listen to it all. And there are absolutely hidden gems or really good bands/artists forming even today, it’s just much harder to find them. Generally a problem of today’s age: it’s likely that what you’re looking for already exists, you just have to find it within a whole ocean of content.

If you’re looking for innovative or non-standard stuff, you can always look at smaller artists or the indie scene, same is true for movies, games, music. The big producers always have a tendency to stick to what works and what’s proven to be popular so everything becomes similar. But smaller artists do not have to care about such things, they are ready to risk much more and in doing so, you might just create a real gem or something that was never or almost never tried before.

Yes. It’s basically about a ban or circumvention of E2EE, as usual. And as usual, this is not an option. Do not throw away your rights to strong, working encryption. Never.

• Closed source (has always been bad for an OS, a 1-US-company controlled blackbox at the heart of your “personal” computer)
• Privacy nightmares (and getting worse)
• Forced cloud integrations (and getting worse)
• Forced AI integrations (and getting worse)
• More bloat and ads (and getting worse)
• More restrictions (e.g. local user accounts) (and getting worse)
• More dark patterns to try to annoy the user and get him/her to accept something that MS wants (and getting worse)
• More opt-out, on-by-default bad stuff being added (and getting worse)
• There’s probably more…

The question is wrong: it’s not why do you “still” hate Windows. I did like Windows 7. It was the last Windows I liked. After that, it’s just a downhill enshittification spiral. The only real question is: at which point will it be too oppressive for the common user that even the most common user will try to avoid it entirely. And I fear that there’s still more than enough room for MS to make Windows worse before enough people migrate away from it.

The “opposite” was just referring to those 2 aspects - Mullvad has stronger anti-fingerprinting which leads to more breakage. Librewolf has that aspect reversed. Of course, both browsers are similar overall. That’s just one detail where they prioritize differently.

Not generally, however you might want to avoid any early dot-zero releases (e.g. 6.0.x). These tend to be a bit buggy with KDE Plasma, but the bugs get fixed soon. NVidia drivers should be better with the very latest updates, they are supposed to work well on Wayland now. But I don’t buy Nvidia, just AMD, so I’m not following this stuff closely.

Both are good. Librewolf is more like vanilla Firefox, just configured way better by default. Mullvad Browser is like a port of the Tor Browser (also based on Firefox) for the clear web (or for use with Mullvad’s VPN, or whatever). Also configured very well by default. Mullvad Browser has better anti fingerprinting stuff built-in but as a result of its unusual configuration some sites might be broken. Librewolf is kind of the opposite in that regard - sites won’t be broken but you’ll be easier to fingerprint. In any case, they both are at the top of the best Firefox variants I’d say.

That doesn’t surprise me, and yes it was always because of anti-competitive practices, so I’m all for more neutrality, I’ll just add 2 shower thoughts:

1. Seeing that Brave is at the top of the browser list, I wonder how many selected Brave just because it’s at the top of the list and thought that this must be a good choice then, not because they actually like Brave.
2. It’s nice to have such a thing for browsers, but it would have to be expanded to other apps as well, e.g. mail client. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years or so.

Discord has a nice UI and lots of neat features, and it’s popular among gamers especially, but it can hardly be recommended. See https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html for a comparison with other communication programs. Yes, Discord has approximately the most red flags there can be. Discord is essentially spyware, it supports the least amount of encryption, security and privacy techniques out of them all, and everything you type, write, say and show on it is being processed and analyzed by the Discord server and probably in turn sold to 3rd parties. Discord can’t make a living from selling paid features only, they have to sell tons of user data, and since all data is basically unencrypted, everything’s free for the taking. Discord doesn’t even try to hide it in the terms of service or so. They just plainly state they’re collecting everything. Well, at least they’re honest about it. It’s a minor plus. If I had to use Discord, I’d only ever use the web browser version, and I’d at least block its API endpoints for collecting random telemetry and typing data (it doesn’t only collect what you sent, it also collects what you started typing).

Matrix, on the other hand, is a protocol. Element is a well-known Matrix client implementing the protocol. On Matrix, everything is encrypted using quite state of the art encryption. It’s technologically much more advanced than Discord is. It’s also similar, but it won’t reach feature parity with Discord. Discord is a much faster moving target, and it’s much easier for the Discord devs because they need to, oh, take care of exactly nothing while developing it further. While adding a new feature to Matrix is much more complicated because almost everything has to be encrypted and still work for the users inside the chat channels.

This is just broadly written for context. The two are similar, and you should prefer Matrix whenever possible, but I do get that Discord is popular and as is the case with popular social media or communication tools, at some point you have to bite the bullet when you don’t want to be left out of something. I’m just urging everyone to keep their communication and usage on Discord to an absolute minimum, never install any locally running software from them (maybe using sandboxing), and when you’re chatting or talking on Discord, try to restrict yourself to the topics at hand (probably gaming) and don’t discuss anything else there. Discord is, by all measurements I know, the worst privacy offender I can think about. Even worse than Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and such stuff, because they at least have some form of data protection implemented, even if they also collect a lot of stuff, especially all metadata.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary funding evidence.”

Choice of distro isn’t as important anymore as it used to be in the past. There’s containerization and distro-independent packaging like Flatpak or AppImage. Also, most somewhat popular distors can be made to run anything, even things packaged for other distros. Sure, you can make things easier for yourself choosing the right distro for the right use case, but that’s unfortunately a process you need to go through yourself.

Generally, there’s 3 main “lines” of popular Linux distros: RedHat/SuSE (counting them together because they use the same packaging format RPM), Debian/Ubuntu, and Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSE are derived from RedHat and SuSE respectively, Ubuntu is derived from Debian but also stands on its own feet nowadays (although both will always be very similar), Mint and Pop!OS are both derived from Ubuntu so will always be similar to Ubuntu and Debian as well), and Endeavour is derived from Arch.

I’d recommend using Fedora if you don’t like to tinker much, otherwise use Arch or Debian. You can’t go wrong with any of those three, they’ve been around forever and they are rock solid with either strong community backing or both strong community and company backing in the case of Fedora. Debian is, depending on edition, less up to date than the other two, but still a rock solid distro that can be made more current by using either the testing or unstable edition and/or by installing backports and community-made up to date packages. It’s more work to keep it updated of course. Don’t be misled by Debian’s labels - Debian testing at least is as stable as any other distro.

Ubuntu is decent, just suffers from some questionable Canonical decisions which make it less popular among veterans. Still a great alternative to Debian, if you’re hesitant about Debian because of its software version issues, but still want something very much alike Debian. It’s more current than Debian, but not as current as a rolling or semi-rolling release distro such as Arch or Fedora.

OpenSuSE is probably similar in spirit and background to Fedora, but less popular overall, and that’s a minus because you’ll find less distro-specific help for it then. Still maybe a “hidden gem” - whenever I read about it, it’s always positive.

Endeavour is an alternative to Arch, if pure Arch is too “hard” or too much work. It’s probably the best “Easy Arch-based” distro out of all of them. Not counting some niche stuff like Arco etc.

Mint is generally also very solid and very easy, like Ubuntu, but probably better. If you want to go the Ubuntu route but don’t like Ubuntu that much, check out Mint. It’s one of the best newbie-friendly distros because it’s very easy to use and has GUI programs for everything.

Pop!OS is another Ubuntu/Mint-like alternative, very current as well.

For gaming and new-ish hardware support, I’d say Arch, Fedora or Pop!OS (and more generally, rolling / semi-rolling release distros) are best suited.

Well that’s about it for the most popular distros.

Let’s say you want to compile and install a program for yourself from its source code form. There’s generally a lot of choice here:

You could (theoretically) use / as its installation prefix, meaning its binaries would then probably go underneath /bin, its libraries underneath /lib, its asset files underneath /share, and so on. But that would be terrible because it would go against all conventions. Conventions (FHS etc.) state that the more “important” a program is, the closer it should be to the root of the filesystem (“/”). Meaning, /bin would be reserved for core system utilities, not any graphical end user applications.

You could also use /usr as installation prefix, in which case it would go into /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share, etc… but that’s also a terrible idea, because your package manager respectively the package maintainers of the packages you install from your distribution use that as their installation prefix. Everything underneath /usr (except /usr/local) is under the “administration” of your distro’s packages and package manager and so you should never put other stuff there.

/usr/local is the exception. It’s where it’s safe to put any other stuff. Then there’s also /opt. Both are similar. Underneath /usr/local, a program would be traditionally split up based on file type - binaries would go into /usr/local/bin, etc. - everything’s split up. But as long as you made a package out of the installation, your package manager knows what files belong to this program, so not a big deal. It would be a big deal if you installed it without a package manager though - then you’d probably be unable to find any of the installed files when you want to remove them. /opt is different in that regard - here, everything is underneath /opt/<programname>/, so all files belonging to a program can easily be found. As a downside, you’d always have to add /opt/<programname>/ to your $PATH if you want to run the program’s executable directly from the commandline. So /opt behaves similar to C:\Program Files\ on Windows. The other locations are meant to be more Unix-style and split up each program’s files. But everything in the filesystem is a convention, not a hard and fast rule, you could always change everything. But it’s not recommended.

Another option altogether is to just install it on a per-user basis into your $HOME somewhere, probably underneath ~/.local/ as an installation prefix. Then you’d have binaries in ~/.local/bin/ (which is also where I place any self-writtten scripts and small single scripts/executables), etc. Using a hidden directory like .local also means you won’t clutter your home directory visually so much. Also, ~/.local/share, ~/.local/state and so on are already defined by the XDG FreeDesktop standards anyway, so using ~/.local is a great idea for installing stuff for your user only.

Hope that helps clear up some confusion. But it’s still confusing overall because the FHS is a historically grown standard and the Unix filesystem tree isn’t really 100% rational or well-thought out. It’s a historically grown thing. Modern Linux applications and packaging strategies do mitigate some of its problems and try to make things more consistent (e.g. by symlinking /bin to /usr/bin and so on), but there are still several issues left over. And then you have 3rd party applications installed via standalone scripts doing what they want anyway. It’s a bit messy but if you follow some basic conventions and sane advice then it’s only slightly messy. Always try to find and prefer packages built for your distribution for installing new software, or distro-independent packages like Flatpaks. Only as a last resort you should run “installer scripts” which do random things without your package manager knowing about anything they install. Such installer scripts are the usual reason why things become messy or even break. And if you build software yourself, always try to create a package out of it for your distribution, and then install that package using your package manager, so that your package manager knows about it and you can easily remove or update it later.

1. False promises early on

We desktop Linux users are partly to blame for this. In ~1998 there was massive hype and media attention towards Linux being this viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. A lot of magazines and websites claimed that. Well, in 1998 I can safely say that Linux could be seen as an alternative, but not a mainstream compatible one. 25 years later, it’s much easier to argue that it is, because it truly is easy to use nowadays, but back then, it certainly wasn’t yet. The sad thing is, that we Linux users kind of caused a lot of people to think negatively about desktop Linux, just because we tried pushing them towards it too early on. A common problem in tech I think, where tech which isn’t quite ready yet is being hyped as ready. Which leads to the second point:

2. FUD / lack of information / lack of access to good, up to date information

People see low adoption rates, hear about “problems” or think it’s a “toy for nerds”, or still have an outdated view on desktop Linux. These things stick, and probably also cause people to think “oh yeah I’ve heard about that, it’s probably nothing for me”

3. Preinstallations / OEM partnerships

MS has a huge advantage here, and a lot of the like really casual ordinary users out there will just use whatever comes preinstalled on their devices, which is in almost 100% of all cases Windows.

4. Schools / education

They still sometimes or even often(?) teach MS product usage, to “better prepare the students for their later work life where they almost certainly use ‘industry standard’ software like MS Office”. This gets them used to the combo MS Windows+Office at an early age. A massive problem, and a huge failure of the education system to not be neutral in that regard.

5. Hardware and software devs ALWAYS ensure that their stuff is compatible with Windows due to its market share, but don’t often ensure this for Linux, and whether 3rd party drivers are 100% feature complete or even working at all, is not sure

So you still need to be a bit careful about what you use (hardware & software) on Linux, while for Windows it’s pretty much “turn your brain off, pick anything, it’ll work”. Just a problem of adoption rate though, as Linux grew, its compatibility grew as well, so this problem decreased by a lot already, but of course until everything will also automatically work on Linux, and until most devs will port their stuff to Linux as well as Windows and OS X, it will still need even more market share for desktop Linux. Since this is a known chicken-egg-effect (Linux has low adoption because software isn’t available, but for software to become available, Linux marketshare needs to grow), we need to do it anyway, just to get out of that “dilemma”. Just like Valve did when they said one day “ok f*ck this, we might have problems for our main business model when Microsoft becomes a direct competitor to Steam, so we must push towards neutral technologies, which is Linux”. And then they did, and it worked out well for them, and the Linux community as a whole benefited from this due to having more choice now on which platforms their stuff can run. Even if we’re talking about a proprietary application here, it’s still a big milestone when you can run so many more applications/games suddenly on Linux, than before, and it drives adoption rates higher as well. So there you have a company who just did it, despite market share dictating that they shouldn’t have done that. More companies need to follow, because that will also automatically increase desktop Linux marketshare, and this is all inter-connected. More marketshare, more devs, more compatibility, more apps available, and so on. Just start doing it, goddamnit. Staying on Windows means supporting the status quo and not helping to make any positive progress.

6. Either the general public needs to become more familiar with CLI usage (I’d prefer that), or Linux desktop applications need to become more feature-complete so that almost everything a regular user needs can be done via GUI as well

This is still not the case yet, but it’s gotten better. Generally speaking: If you’re afraid of the CLI, Linux is not something for you probably. But you shouldn’t be afraid of it. You also aren’t afraid of chat prompts. Most commands are easy to understand.

7. The amount of choice the user is confronted with (multiple distros, desktop environments, and so on) can lead to option paralysis

So people think they either have to research each option (extra effort required), or are likely to “choose wrong”, and then don’t choose at all. This is just an education issue though. People need to realize that this choice isn’t bad, but actually good, and a consequence of an open environment where multiple projects “compete” for the same spot. Often, there are only a few viable options anyway. So it’s not like you have to check out a lot. But we have to make sure that potential new users know which options are a great starting point for them, and not have them get lost in researching some niche distros/projects which they shouldn’t start out with generally.

8. “Convenience is a drug”

Which means a lot of people, even smart ones, will not care about any negatives as long as the stuff they’re using works without any perceived user-relevant issues. Which means: they’ll continue to use Windows even after it comes bundled with spyware, because they value the stuff “working” more than things like user control/agency, privacy, security and other more abstract things. This is problematic, because they position themselves in an absolute dependency where they can’t get out of anymore and where all sorts of data about their work, private life, behavior, and so on is being leaked to external 3rd parties. This also presents a high barrier of convincing them to start becoming more technically independent: why should they make an effort to switch away from something that works in their eyes? This is a huge problem. It’s the same with Twitter/X or Reddit, not enough people switch away from those, even though it’s easy to do nowadays. Even after so much negative press lately most still stick around. It’s so hard to get the general population moving to something better once they’ve kind of stuck with one thing already. But thankfully, at least on Windows, the process of “enshittification” (forced spyware, bloatware, adware, cloud integrations, MS accounts) continues at a fast pace, which means many users won’t need to be convinced to use Linux, but rather they will at some point be annoyed by Windows/Microsoft itself. Linux becoming easier to use and Windows becoming more annoying and user-hostile at the same time will thankfully accelerate the “organic” Linux growth process, but it’ll still take a couple of years.

9. “Peer pressure” / feeling of being left alone

As a desktop Linux user, chances are high that you’re an “outsider” among your peers who probably use Windows. Not everyone can feel comfortable in such a role over a longer period of time. Just a matter of market share, again, but still can pose a psychological issue maybe in some cases. Or it can lead to peer pressure, like when some Windows game or something isn’t working fully for the Linux guy, that there will be peer pressure to move to Windows just to get that one working. As one example.

10. Following the hype of new software releases and thinking that you always need the most features or that you need the “industry standard” when you don’t really need it.

A lot of users probably prefer something like MS Office with its massive feature set and “industry standard” label over the libre/free office suites. Because something that has less features could be interpreted as being worse. But here it’s important to educate such users that it really only matters whether all features they NEED are present. And if so, it wouldn’t matter for them which they use. MS Office for example has a multi-year lead in development (it was already dominating the office suite market world-wide when Linux was still being born so to say) so of course it has more features accumulated over this long time, but most users actually don’t need them. Sure, everyone uses a different subset of features, but it’s at least likely that the libre office suites contain everything most users need. So it’s just about getting used to them. Which is also hard, to make a switch, to change your workflows, etc., so it would be better if MS Office could work on Linux so that people could at least be able to continue to use that even though it’s not recommended to do so (proprietary, spyware, MS cloud integrations). But since I’m all for having more options, it would at least be better in general for it to be available as well. But until that happens, we need to tell potential new users that they probably can also live with the alternatives just fine.

Yes. Even though not using all this crap may sometimes feel like you’re missing out on certain stuff, it is still the right thing to do. I don’t support abusive behavior, bloatware and spyware, so companies doing that will not receive any money from me if I can help it.

We’re basically just one step ahead of the general population, who basically (still) eats up anything that’s being served by big tech corporations, without any second thoughts or hesitations. The general population IMHO is currently at the stage that nerds were like 25 years ago, in that they tend to be naively enthusiastic about every new piece of tech. But nowadays, tech can be abusive towards their users, and so it’s important to choose the right tech. The general population hasn’t made that realization yet (or they don’t care, which also must change).

The media is also partly to blame for this, for example almost every new review of any Samsung or Apple phone is usually very positive, usually just reporting about the advancements in hardware and UI, without even mentioning any of the downsides these have on the software side. And so when reviews don’t even mention downsides anymore, there’s a lack of information available.

And it’s not even that regular users don’t like the alternatives. For example I convinced a friend to move from a regular spyware-infested Samsung Galaxy phone (which he was using all the time, and he even wanted to buy a new one) to a Pixel with GrapheneOS. He’s not missing anything, even though his transition wasn’t super smooth, overall he’s happier now, and he mentioned that he likes the OS being so clean and unencumbered. He doesn’t particularly care about the privacy and security improvements which he now also enjoys, which is a bit sad, but at least he’s happy with the lean and unmodified Android (open source) experience.

So, as usual, information/knowledge is power. People need to know that alternatives exist and that some alternatives are actually really, really good. And they need to know what the problems are with the “default stuff everyone uses”, so that they can make better informed decisions in the future. They also need to become less dependent on big tech companies. The alternatives have little to no PR and thus little public visibility in comparison, except via word of mouth, so we need to make the most out of that.

Looks healthy. There was activity and new releases in 2021, 2022 and June 2023. Also, the app might be near feature complete, and if that’s the case there will only be sporadic work left like keeping it updated/compatible or fixing security ssues.

NetGuard Pro - Allows you to see and control traffic from all apps, so you can prevent data flows to 3rd party hosts like the ones from Google or Facebook. The pro edition is paid and necessary, but it’s all open source, just not gratis

Aegis Authenticator - open source 2FA authenticator

LibreTube - alternative, privacy-respecting, open source YouTube frontend using the Piped API