If you put Linux Mint on the average persons PC and set it up with the same desktop icons as their windows pc they wouldn’t know it wasn’t windows.

The only area I could really see this taking off is with internal company stuff. Like forcing employees to use a very specific and weird way to do 2FA is already a thing in a lot of companies. They won’t let you just use any old authenticator app. You need the “special” one that sucks ass. So maybe they’ll do the same to passkeys, but for normal users I don’t think they’d do that. Users are way too bad at doing things. It would cause too much of a tech support burden or just user bleed.

I actually spent a good amount of time trying to remove title bars from gnome the other day and on the version im currently on it seems impossible. Unless I want to potentially break a bunch of stuff to do it anyway.

Yeah the Debian Project’s position makes a lot of sense to me. They’re basically saying that they won’t be wasting a bunch of resources trying to seek out LLM generated code and purge it and will instead just focus on making sure ALL the code is up to their quality standards. This will likely mean they spend a lot of time sifting out slop anyway, and will allow them to keep just focusing on making the project do what it’s always done. Ship a stable, usable, and free distro.

You probably know a lot of the stuff just not the terms for it. If you are interested in like tiling or scrolling window managers you can look up videos on those terms and see them. The difference between them and a DE is that they are literally JUST a window manager. They don’t come with the other features of a DE. You basically won’t have a GUI unless you build one out. This gets you into the realm of like Linux ricing. Where people spend tons of effort and time making their computers look and function in a unique way.

With Gnome it’s the default to not have one on the desktop view. Then to remove the topbar you just use an extension. Just Perfection gives you a lot of UI tweak options.

I see what you mean. You get rid of the buttons so you can click and drag the window bar without accidentally clicking them right? I’ve got everything so smushed into one bar it’s like the opposite. Altho I really don’t USE the buttons since I have it in fullscreen all the time and just close things from the Gnome task switcher. So maybe I’ll remove my buttons too. Might be a good idea.

This is what I mean by the bar being all smushed together:

That’s the entire screen. I messed with the browser settings to make it so I had more screen space for the actual webpage.

Do you use the terminal for launching other programs or are you doing things from inside the terminal itself?

You seem to have a ton of screen real estate to work with. Is your monitor really big? I feel like using a small laptop influences what I do a lot since I’m trying to maximize my screen space.

lol thanks

Was anyone hiding being a “tankie”? I mean I don’t really use the term I just call it Marxist-Leninist but if that’s what you want to call it I’m fine with that. I mean I’m clearly not trying to hide my political views if you look at my username. Not sure what you needed “evidence” for. But more power to ya i guess.

Well I can’t speak to what its like in places I’ve never been.

without telling me you’re from the US.

I… mentioned the US in my comment?

Oh for sure I just wouldn’t want anyone having my face scan personally. I’d love to have a law passed that designated biometric data as personal property requiring a warrant or explicit consent to collect.

Sadly if you want to travel these days face scans are unavoidable. I still avoid them for commercial services, but yeah. Fly to europe or any major US city and you are going to be made to submit to a face scan to get through security.

I hate the phrase “X$ in compute” so much. What does that even mean? It could mean a 1.5 million dollar value worth of donated time on one of their servers, or it could mean a hardware donation, or it could be a cash donation that is earmarked for server upgrades/chip purchases. Ever since AI took off it’s become such a common turn of phrase to use “compute” like this. As if the amount of money spent tells you anything useful about the amount of things they can “compute” now. Costs are so variable and spread out across many different areas that it changes day by day, and by which vendor you use, or what part of the world you are in, or all kinds of other things.

Maybe I’m just behind the times and it has some specific meaning now I’m not aware of. Either way it annoys me.

Right? I wish we had the Great Firewall ffs.

If it weren’t in a US jurisdiction this would matter to me, but since it is it’s irrelevant. US law basically makes privacy on any server within the US an illusion. Because they can issue a gag and log order to the server operator and you’d never know as they’d be legally barred from speaking on it.

Agreed if you read through the forum posts of the founder a lot of it is him bending over backwards to justify this very thing. But I figured most people wouldn’t be as convinced by the technical aspect, and I’m not qualified enough on it to like fully break it down myself either so just didn’t speak on it.

I do think that it seems a bit worse than just an extra layer tho. It is literally moving your actual Identifying data (payment info and IP) into the hands of a US based company and out of the hands of Mullvad. It is protecting you from Mullvad, and exposing you to the massive fucking Five Eyes surveillance state, and US jurisdiction which is one of the most draconian in the world in regards to digital privacy.

Is this just a money grab? Maybe. Does the founder believe in what he’s doing? Maybe. But does this also look exactly like what I would expect a US Government backed Honey Pot service to look like? Yes.

Also, if you don’t trust Mullvad, use TOR.