All the hardware in my life is Linux or FreeBSD . . . with one embarrassing exception. For years I’ve kept an Acer laptop on Win10 for a single task - running a windows application to update the firmware on a Garmin satellite SMS device (we do long distance hiking well off grid in Scotland). Micro$oft’s ongoing bullshit shamed me into finally sorting out even that one edge use case. After several hours of playing . . I was able to overwrite Win10 with . . . ReactOS!
If you’ve never heard of it . . and most people in the FOSS community never have . . it’s an attempt at reverse engineering Windows NT, using a combination of WINE plus a written from scratch open source Windows like kernel. It will never be “done” and it’s FAR from ready to be anyone’s daily driver . . but still a fun project to follow.
And yes, after hours more of tweaking, I was able to get the Garmin app to update on React!
i wish reactos worked with the android bootloader unlocking & rom installers software that some phone makers like redmi & xiaomi require for their phones.
it’s also bizarre that a linux based device requires a windows system to enable customization when it’s the opposite in every other arena.
it’s even stranger that chinese brands are more common in requiring proprietary means for products while its gov’t is so gung ho about open source that it’s open sourced industries critical to future like ai & chip development.
It’s pretty clear to me that Microsoft wants your PC to be just like your phone: closed-source vendor-only hardware and software with all user data cryptographically linked to your identity. Coupled with social media and internet mass surveillance, device level surveillance will fully enable the fascist takeover of the United States, and other countries. There are untold riches in selling your device-level actions to an authoritarian government so they can eliminate electoral opposition, and to advertisers who will advertise and capture insights at the OS level.
We have been building the surveillance state for decades, and now there is a federal power that is willing to use it not just extra-judicially, but against its own citizens to suppress their constitutional rights. ICE is already using this power to arrest and disappear lawful citizens without trial. Protesting in a city where the national guard is illegally deployed? Better not bring your phone or speak about it online or do anything on your phone relating to it, really. Hell, eventually you won’t be able to safely speak out loud anywhere even near a mobile phone. The Great Eye is ever watchful.
Imagine no more covert device interception, no more packet-level analysis from expensive secret rooms at your ISP, and no more digging through phone records and social media posts - just organized, searchable, chatbot queryable information updated hourly and purchased from Apple, Microsoft, and Google with your tax dollars about what you think, where you go, what you buy, what you do, and who you talk to every minute of every day, with an integrated secret police ready to arrest you at a moments notice of thought-crime or an attempt to exercise your rights. In the end, an AI agent will just tell them where to go and who to arrest. An authoritarian’s dream.
All the attention you’ve paid and all the work you’ve done preserving your privacy is about to come to fruition. And it still won’t be enough to save us.
Recent Ubuntu convert here. Haven’t looked back yet
I remember there being a case about Ubuntu spying on users via the integrated Amazon search feature years ago. They include non-free software by default, such as the Snap store, and Ubuntu is also owned by Canonical.
I’d recommend switching to Debian. It’s community-based and entirely free and open source (except for non-free firmware packages, but those are not much to worry about, and you can easily remove them if you like). A new major release of Debian came out recently with many upgrades. You should check it out!
Welp, I know what im staying up way too late doing tonight!
I also recommend Debian over Ubuntu but Ubuntu will still be a massive improvement over windows or mac and probably a bit easier for beginners to get set up. If you’ve only just installed Ubuntu then I’d say have a go with Debian but if you’ve already moved your files over and installed/configured all your software I’d probably just stick with Ubuntu for a while and turn off whatever telemetry it has.
I killed windows with Linux
same.
i overwrote the entire disk with linux. (i was really worried that my computer will go kaboom at the time. thanks to installing arch, the wonderful archwiki and the … adjective not found community.)
no matter what circumstance, I’M NEVER TOUCHING WINDOWS EVER AGAIN.
For many years I’ve had at least one Windows machine and at least one OSX machine (and then everything else runs linux). As MS started pushing this (and as Proton and Lutris got good enough to support almost any Windows software I would need to run, mostly games) I finally made the jump to zero Windows machines about a year and a half ago. Don’t miss it.
I just last month tried out Bazzite for fun and haven’t switched back. I feel like an idiot for sticking with Windows as long as I did. I was the metaphorical frog in the pot of water not realizing how shitty it had become. I guess I should be grateful there isn’t any program I need that’s Windows only because Bazzite is better than Windows in every way I can think of.
If you’re not familiar with wine, it can be your friend. Run Windows applications in Linux if you can’t find an alternative application
Thanks, I’m still learning but so far there hasn’t been any application I need that there isn’t some equivalent of.
Buy x86 hardware and install Linux on it.
What’s wrong with x64 hardware?
Not with x86 (short-form of the “traditional” architecture) but with ARM: no universal drivers for whole series possible; which is why Linux ARM-hardware support is spotty.
they will never be able to stop
pacman -S linux.I use arch, btw
Oh no… Anyway, anyone got a fix for dual audio on Linux Mint.
I wanna output to 2 devices (one is HDMI TV and the other is Bluetooth) at once and pipewire isn’t accommodating me. I’m hesitant to go screwing around with pulseaudio cause I tried that on a previous build and things went badly.
I managed to get an all devices audio output inserted into the pipewire.conf but the only sound that comes out is from the TV and not the bluetooth speaker.
I don’t really expect an answer here but if you could point me to the forum or instance that might have answers would be appreciated.
I used this page to do the code insert.
~~https://thecodeninja.net/2024/06/pipewire-combined-sink/~~ nevermind, the site seems to have 404’d itself in the last minute or so.
Check out qpwgraph: https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.rncbc.qpwgraph
It’s like Helvum but it can save patchbays and restore them on boot.
The easiest solution is to create a virtual audio device through your Pipewire config and then use qpwgraph to link them up to your physical device on boot.
I can copy my Pipewire virtual device config if you need it.
I have used this setup to separate game audio from voice audio when streaming for years.
Yeah, if you could post your setup that would be great. I think it would give me a better idea of how things work. Though, my goal is to consolidate sources to multiple outputs not to separate them.
Combining Bluetooth with other output types is quite challenging because the audio buffers are not just huge for Bluetooth, they are actually dynamically resized depending on signal depending on the implementation.
If outputting separate programs to separate outputs: install Pavucontrol (yes, for Pipewire); change outputs per-program in the first tab.
If trying to output the same stream(s) to both: install Helvum; drag lines around to connect to additional outputs.
Oooo, Helvum looks like what I’m trying for. Thanks! Do you know if i can use flatpak on an Ubuntu/Debian based system? Or does it only work on Arch based?
“Are we being an asshole corporation that’s about to lose what little customer respect we still have?”
“No, it’s the users who feel entitled to be able to use their computer without signing up who are wrong.”
They know exactly what they’re doing and how people feel about it.
They haven’t made money on Windows in years. Nobody has been willing to pay for a new version of Windows since XP. What they do make money on is cloud services. So Windows is a loss leader.
Just like the cheap rotisserie chicken at Costco is there to make you walk past and look at everything else they’re selling, the modern role of Windows is to funnel people towards Microsoft cloud services, which is what makes them money. Step 1 of that process is to make sure you create a Microsoft account.
I’m on Graphene and deleted Windows for ParotOS home edition with a secure router. I’ve just about halted all of my data collection.
just register a dummy microsoft account to do the initial install for your root account so your license and your bitlocker keys get saved and create local accounts after that.
BASH killed the PowerShell star.
I’ve had zero Windows physical computers in my life for something like seven years now. If I do for some strange reason need Windows for something, I’m perfectly capable of putting it into a virtual machine and running it for as long as needed.
With that said, I have not had to do that for quite a while.
Same here; IIRC it was about the time M$ started backporting “telemetry” to Windows 7 that I switched and never looked back.
Haven’t felt the need for a Windows VM, either.
Yet more for the mountainous pile of proof proprietary software cannot be trusted and is therefore fundamentally not fit for purpose.
I’ve never looked at it as one OS vs another. I think they all have their place. I still maintain a very locked down W10, and I run Linux and Mac. I was wondering tho, if MS would ‘patch’ the ability to log in to a local account because that’s the only way I’d log in to Windows.
