Coming from XP, 7 felt like an upgrade, but I wouldn’t say I was enamoured. Peak Windows for me was 2000, and while it probably lacks more useful modern features than I recall, I definitely still think it’s the best looking, and the visually most well put together version of Windows there has ever been.

I love Linux, and I love how it has managed to bring back, or even surpass, the enjoyment and the sense of wonder and possibilities, that I used to feel in regards to computer use, back then. And I love how it enables me to install, create and customise any graphical elements of the desktop environment to my liking. One of the first things I managed to do, after switching to Linux, was, in fact, to convert my desktop into a very convincing Windows 2000 look-alike - just looking at the desktop, I doubt many people would have been able to tell that it wasn’t actually the real McCoy. Nowadays, though, I wouldn’t want my desktop to look like Windows of any variety. I use a few different styles, depending on mood, that are all either replicas of other, real desktop environments from the 90’s, or they’re imaginary “fantasy desktops” from the 90’s of an alternate reality. I love that can just do that, not just because I love that particular aesthetic, but also because it is SO much more usable for me. The current trends in visual design, aren’t just off putting to me, it’s difficult and straining to parse too, what with the contrasts that are all out of whack, and lines and outlines all but seemingly banned, and with all the drop shadows and the transparency effects, and things fading and sliding around everywhere all the time, it’s just so much visual noise, and it makes my head hurt. The late 90’s is when GUIs and the graphical part of UX were at their peak, in terms of usability and readability, if you ask me. It’s sad to me that almost every type of design since has seemingly been a direct or indirect rejection of that period. I wonder how much better GUIs could be, if they had stuck with all the things that worked well from back then, and had then continued to build off of that.

Sorry I think I went off on a tangent there.

As for 7 being the peak in terms of usability, what with some of the features it had over earlier versions, you may be right. I think 7 was the first version that had indexed searches, or at least had them enabled by default, and I remember how good that felt, experiencing it for the first time. But wasn’t 10, on release, pretty equivalent to 7, really? IIRC, much of its dark patterns, ads, spyware and enshittification was only added gradually over its lifetime, wasn’t it? Going by memory, I think I even appreciated the minor facelift it got, as it seemed essentially like the same thing, but with the Vista-esque/Aero-style glassy, glossy, noisy stuff gone or heavily muted and toned down, which made it much less distracting.

Is she related to Jacob Zuma, I wonder?

A hassle, huh?

Security questions are an idiotic type of “security”, so of course I never enable them if they’re optional, which they almost always are. As I said, I can count on half a hand how often I’ve used them in recent years.

Occasionally, though, they can be the least bad two-factor option available on a service that either requires 2FA or which makes itself, indeed, a hassle to use when you don’t have any 2FA enabled, such as by throwing captchas at you up the wazoo. If such a service only offers 2FA by email, text message or security questions, then hell yeah, I’ll take the latter option any day of the week. Needing an emailed link or code to log in, now that’s a hassle. Same deal with text messages, but with the additional benefit of them being insecure as hell. You know what’s not a hassle, though? Having one extra field auto-filled by your password manager. That’s the hassle-free option.

As for taking things seriously or not - are you really trying to tell me that you don’t have anything that’s important enough to care about keeping secure? And if not, why would you not care about keeping anything that’s important secure? Especially when it’s so easy, and indeed, hassle-free, to have that security fully automated and handled by your password manager. If your gut reaction to security is that it’s a hassle, then I’m sorry to say that you most likely have both poor security, and unnecessarily difficult or annoying-to-use security, too. Do you subject yourself to the mental load of having to remember all of your hundreds of passwords in your head? Talk about a hassle. Or do you just use the same password for everything? Now that would be a hassle, to have not just one random account somewhere compromised, but to have all of your accounts, everywhere at once, compromised.

You had to share your password over the phone? That’s asinine. And you say it was your bank, and a major one, to boot? Wow. If that’s their approach to security, I’d tell them they can just look up my password in their database, which I’d assume to be in plaintext too (and to actually just be a really big Excel sheet).

Anyway, regardless, you need some passphrases in your life! So much easier to deal with, if you ever have to share it out loud, and more importantly, a whole lot easier for you to parse and manually type, on the occasions where it can’t be auto-filled. As I said before, Correct Horse Battery Staple! :)

I wonder if this will be just one in a wave of derivative distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian? I think doing so has been in the cards as a distinct future possibility for many of them, most overtly so with Mint’s LMDE variant - even if it’s ostensibly just an alternative, I think it’s clear to everyone that it’s always been about making sure they have a viable, working alternative, for the day when an Ubuntu base is no longer tenable.

Is anyone aware of whether there have been other distros rebasing from Ubuntu to Debian lately?

As long as you can choose the answer, you can also choose what the question really is. You can just decide that questions about your mum’s maiden name are actually asking you about the last name of the doctor that delivered your first born.

Or, better yet don’t tie security to personal or externally verifiable information about yourself. In the one or two cases, in recent years, where I’ve had to fill out such (in)security questions, I’ve just treated them as additional password fields, where I just create additional fields for them in my password manager, and generate long, random responses as their correct answers. Why yes, my mother’s maiden name is Correct7Horse@Battery!Staple, why do you ask?

Lynx? Hah, I must chortle in your general direction.

Elinks is the powerful, featureful and versatile, yet light, CLI browser of today. If you haven’t tried it, or if it’s been years since you’ve tried it, then I can only recommend taking it for a spin.

It even has a minimal, partial ECMAScript/JavaScipt implementation that’s optionally available, meaning that it can browse and navigate the modern web to a much greater degree than other CLI browsers, but of course with the trade-off that you’re now executing some amount of JavaScript code again, which is probably what you’re trying to escape in the first place when you’re firing up a CLI browser instead of a conventional browser.

Coming from someone also without a car - KDE Itinerary is the best thing I’ve used for that purpose yet, and it’s free and open source too. Perhaps it’ll fulfill your use case too?

The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that’s a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.

This is by design, and it’s what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it’s a trade off.

But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won’t meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.

Many, many places. It’s so strongly regulated here, I think they even have to call it goat drink, too! The cow lobby is bullish, I tell you.

He’s a player, after all. 101010 (I assume that’s binary for 80085).

I swore to that series of mice. I had both a blue and a red MX500, and later the grey, “dented” MX518. I feel like there was an MX510 at some point, too, but I don’t remember it. When my final MX518 finally broke, about a decade ago, I needed to find as close a replacement as possible. I landed on the G402, which I feel comes very close. The shape of the shell is very close, as is the feel of the mouse in your hands. I’ve had no complaints with the sensors. It has the same buttons as the MX518, but the DPI buttons have been shifted a bit, with one of them now being thumb-accessible, and the repositioning is actually a great improvement. I feel like the biggest change is just one of looks, with a pretty big shift in style - but not in feel. A decade on, and I’m still using that mouse, so durability has held up - although, the wheel has started to become slightly unreliable at times, missing a scroll tick now and then. Oh, there’s one other issue I can think of: the stupid built-in “RGB” (in quotes because there’s no RG, only B), can’t actually be turned all the way off - only lowered to a very, very low setting. You probably wont spot that it’s not off in daylight, and in the dark the light is still so dim that you don’t notice it out the corner of your eye, thankfully. Still, should be able to turn it OFF.

Would I recommend it? I’ve been really happy with it overall, and it saved my MX5xx-addicted ass from having to go cold turkey. But don’t go paying some kind of overprice for it - it’s a really solid, MX518-alike older model mouse, but not a literal miracle. I used to swear by Logitech, but reality is that there are other brands that could be just as good fits. The last mouse and keyboard my wife got were from Corsair, and I gotta say, they have been an absolute pleasure to use. Enough so that, even after 25 years of exclusively using Logitech mice and keyboards, if my peripherals broke down today, and I had to get new ones, then I would probably be liable to go for Corsair, and at least consider a variety of options from different brands.

I had that problem, so then I started using https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - it works well.

Try taking a break from this post for the rest of today. Come back tomorrow, and read your own comments while genuinely pretending they were written by someone else. Take stock of the impression you end up with.

Try to honestly ask yourself, if you were a random person passing by, Linux user or otherwise, with as busy a life as anyone, would you feel particularly encouraged to engage with this commenter?

Sounds like Victory Conditions from Civilization to me!

I really just want an encrypted portable linux device with a cellular modem. I don’t even care if it can SMS or VOLTE, I just need it to run a secure chat client, support Bluetooth headphones and last all day on a charge.

Then you’re in luck, because that’s something you can already have by now! Just get yourself one of the more recent-ish phones that are well supported by PostmarketOS. The things Linux phones struggle the most with these days, are the more traditional phone-things, such as text messages or calling, which may not be ready for production, as they say (although, both texts and calls have actually worked well for me as of late). But if all you want is a pocket Linux computer/PDA, and intend to carry another phone for calls and texting, that’s something you can have, for the grand price of an old, second-hand phone. I’ve been loving my (LUKS-encrypted) OnePlus 6T, and I do actually use it for calls and texts as well!

Never fear! I will happily spare you the trouble, and take that old thing off your hands - free of charge! ;D

I loved that controller. Best damn gamepad I ever had. It was a sad day when it finally gave in, and broke, last year.

Yeah, I only ever use:

sudo random numbers

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