"A such simpler time"

I love having Amazon dot com glued onto my screen

Love having the power button be so small, it helps my clicking reflexes

context

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the last release with Canonical's unity desktop on top of xserver before they came to their senses and went with GNOME.

Linux is still for nerds but I hate windows 11 more than I hate being uncool so I'm just going to have to step down my rizz and learn more computer stuff.

1. My 3 concerns are, in order, gaming (mostly through steam or fitgirl), playing TTRPGs through Foundry Virtual Tabletop and Discord, and image editing (but really simple image editing. more paint.net than GIMP). What distro would be best for this? What are the actual differences in distros beyond appearances? Is it worth installing the Steam OS, or is that still really only useable with handhelds?

2. Can I just shove all the data I want to save on an external drive, install my chosen distro, and transfer stuff back on? Will the external drive need to be formatted in a specific way first? can I just slot stuff like program settings back in the new system or will I have to convert them to a different file format?

3. Do I have to buy the thigh highs or do they just appear? Will it still work if I don't wear them? I don't like wearing socks so I'd prefer a distro without them if possible.

If it helps I'm running a Ryzen 5 2600 and RX 7600, and my favourite colour is purple.

Edit: Thanks for the answers everyone, I'm going to do a bit more reading on distros before choosing one, but I have a better idea what I'm looking at now.

What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities who share content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to the software have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.
...
Number 5 [making sure that all the accessibility-related work is in the public, and stays in the public.] is especially important to me. I personally go as far as to refuse to contribute to projects under a permissive license, and/or that utilize a contributor license agreement, and/or that utilize anything riskily similar to these two, because I am of the opinion that no amount of code for accessibility should either be put under a paywall or be obscured and proprietary.
...
KDE hired a legally blind contractor to work on accessibility throughout the KDE ecosystem, including complying with the EU Directive to allow selling hardware with Plasma.

GNOME’s new executive director, Steven Deobald, is partially blind.

The GNOME Foundation has been investing a lot of money to improve accessibility on Linux, for example funding Newton, a Wayland accessibility project and AccessKit integration into GNOME technologies. Around 250,000€ (1/4) of the STF budget was spent solely on accessibility. And get this: literally everybody managing these contracts and communication with funders are volunteers; they’re ensuring people with disabilities earn a living, but aren’t receiving anything in return. These are the real heroes who deserve endless praise.
...
To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.
...
Any content related to accessibility that doesn’t dunk on GNOME doesn’t foresee as many engagement, activity, and reaction as content that actively attacks GNOME, regardless of whether the criticism is fair. Many of these people don’t even use these accessibility features; they’re just looking for every opportunity to say “GNOME bad” and will 🪄 magically 🪄 start caring about accessibility.

In short, stop making your shitty "rice" [sic] and suckless-style gadgets and then go on to slander organizations like GNOME and KDE. What we need in freedesktop are people who care deeply about solving problems and raising up others.

Even if you're not a programmer with the required expertise, keep the conversation around accessibility going. Fund development by word of mouth or direct monetary support. Keep following these developments and be informed rather than spreading vague folk wisdom.

And speaking personally here (rant), if you don't use KDE, GNOME or intended-equivalent (cinnamon, mate, etc) on up-to-date, widely-used distributions, you don't inhabit the same community as us who do.

There's a tendency to name drop "Linux" community as if it's a catch all. Well RMS's writing was right, not in the pedantic way that people interpreted it to be (or that RMS may have intended), but in the fact that the all-consuming "Linux OS" does not exist. Android is not "Linux," WSL is not "Linux," they are Android and WSL. Fedora is not Linux, Ubuntu is not Linux, they are Fedora and Ubuntu.

The thing that holds this thing together is GNU or in other words, libre computing and copyleft, a way to use computers that stands against coercive control, malware, abandonment, waste and of course, capitalism which is the root cause of these issues.

The fact that there are people using "Linux" who are uninformed about GNU's history, free software, or who say that GNOME looks like a MacOS clone or that KDE is like a "Linux windows" will frustrate me to no end.

(end-rant)

As the sun continues to set on the X11 display protocol, X.Org - the premier implementation - has been forked by a former developer who accuses its maintainers of "abandoning the project, and letting it rot forever."

He's not exactly wrong. X.Org is essentially mothballed. It is an enormous, complicated piece of deprecated infrastructure, with a very limited amount of resources and experienced maintainers. The corporations which sponsor Free Software development don't particularly care about desktop end-users, and the resources which are being spent on desktop experience are largely being spent on Wayland compositors. On the other hand, it appears many of his commits on X.Org were reverted for sloppy management of licensing / attribution, as well as some regressions which were introduced.

It is worth noting that when Wayland was introduced in 2008, X.Org developers were among its biggest advocates and contributors. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now, and the work of building an alternative is mostly complete.

That said, Wayland is not at all a 1 to 1 replacement for X, and like with the introduction of Systemd, there are a lot of people with strong feelings about this, a lot of conspiracy mongers cranking out YouTube slop. People throwing out accusations about how "they" are trying to ruin Linux yet again.

I personally have fond memories of X. Especially in the later days when the whole "unix porn" phenomenon bloomed and there was a sort of renaissance of customization. I miss herbstluftwm terribly. That said, I've been running Wayland for something like 6 years now and I do not really get why people hate it. It works fine, and it actually has a future.

Update:

It's also worth noting the author of this fork is a chud. Some excerpts from the README

This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.

This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.

Together we'll make X great again!

This started as a post to ask a question I was stumped with. But in the process of writing the question, I solved the problem. rubber ducked myself without realizing it.

Anyway, GNU Emacs is cool, and I'm deep in the hole now. I might be able to make the transition to using it as my IDE at some point, but that seems to be involved, with language servers and all that.

One thing that was driving me a little crazy was the window behavior. I was able to solve that with a plugin called window-purpose which allows you to assign modes and buffers to a specific "purpose" and then lock the window into only showing new buffers based on that information. So I can have a main editing window where all editable file buffers appear, and a sidebar with some specific buffers locked into place. It can also save that window configuration and load it later. Which I use to standardize the window configuration every time I open Emacs.

Sadly, the Emacs community on Reddit is rife with AI content for some reason, and thus it is a pretty useless source of information. I don't really understand the subs fascination with running LLMs inside of Emacs. But I digress.

Org-Mode is pretty dope, and Org-Roam is even doper. I've used things like Logseq pretty extensively, but I eventually stopped using it as much, mainly because you're locked into using their interface/editor for the whole thing. It's nice being able to use Emacs for other text editing, and then jumping into an Org file and gaining all that functionality automatically.

I also wasn't a huge fan of the way the markdown files were generated in Logseq, where every file is just a massive unordered list on the backend. Now, I get that Org-Mode and Org-Roam are effectively the same thing, using a header hierarchy, but it feels a lot more deliberate, and you can enter text outside that hierarchy since you get to decide when to use the hierarchy or not.

In Logseq you're always working inside the hierarchy, which can be annoying when working externally and creating markdown files outside the Logseq application, intending them to be loaded by the system. What makes Emacs different is that I have access to all the underlying functions right inside the editor. I could use Emacs to extend Emacs' own functionality, life, while I'm using Emacs.

If I wanted to interact with an API endpoint and take it's output and feed it through an Org-Mode capture template, it likely wouldn't hard. Doing that in Logseq requires writing a plugin using its Javascript API in an external editor, and packaging it up, loading it into the software, testing within the software in developer mode, then going back to my code editor to address errors and refine the tool. The development loop is just way more cumbersome.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Is anyone else using Emacs here?

I haven't tried this yet but I hope it's good. I've been wanting to find a way to sync saved posts and comments to a file and this could be a good way. If the API is good, you could pull saved comments and posts into org-roam cards, using communities, users, and instances as tags or other properties.

I have been gifted a few ancient laptops from the stone age (2005-2014). Any ideas on what I can do with them? Are there any modern Linux distros that would run on old hardware like this? I'll take any suggestions this wonderful community has to offer.

Edit: The laptops are:

• HP 2133 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2133_Mini-Note_PC
• Dell Inspiron 1545 https://www.itechguides.com/product-specs/dell-inspiron-1545-specs/
• Dell Inspiron 15 3537 https://www.productindetail.com/pn/dell-inspiron-15-3537
• Toshiba C55-A5286 https://www.productindetail.com/pn/toshiba-satellite-c55-a-1n4

I didn't realise just how much better it would be. Like holy shit everything works. I have had very few problems that weren't very easily fixed.

Everything that windows did, this thing can usually do better. And the things it can't do better, it can do just as good.

Things I've noticed:

Mint and Linux in general use a logic that gels with me way more than modern Windows. Even though Mint is technically a very simple distro, it's still waaaay better than what I was used to. Terminal commands are easy to learn and the way Mint is organised is great for example (how do I word this?) if I want to do something I don't have to guess which submenu the OS is hiding it behind like in Windows. Like if I want to look at the health of my disc, it's right there under "discs" and it tells me everything about it from the temperature to how many bad partitions it has. If I want to flash something to a USB its a fucking built in option when you right click, something I had to download a program for in Windows. If I want to use a printer, Mint just connects and prints, on windows HP or whatever company will ask you to download their personal software suite and do it that way. There are soooo many unnecessary programs companies push on Windows owners.

What brought this home is recently I bought my parents a new mouse as a gift because they complained theirs wasn't working well anymore. I got them a blutooth Logitech mouse, nothing crazy, and I try to connect it to their laptop for them. Windows makes you go though a couple of menus to do this but whatever it's not too bad. A popup comes up after like 10 minutes after I was about to walk away because this is a slow old computer. Logitech wants me to download and log into their software suite for a fucking mouse. Lmao. So anyway, after week I get a call from the parent that owns the laptop, the mouse isn't working anymore. I take a look at it next time I visit and sure enough it doesn't work. I take out my laptop. I right click the Bluetooth icon and click search. It finds the mouse, I tell it to connect. It works fine.

Now I disconnect it from my Bluetooth try to reconnect it to the parents Windows laptop, no Bluetooth icon in the system tray, weird. Also if you hover over the system tray Windows now slides up a bunch of clickbait articles for some reason, lol. I go into settings, look for blutooth, it's not there. Remember that Windows 10 hides its blutooth shit under a devices submenu. Go to that submenu. It says the mouse is connected and the little tab to turn on or off Bluetooth is missing. I restart the computer. No change. I look up if anyone else has had this problem. I find a Reddit post complaining about the same thing. For some reason the solution is restart the laptop with its actual power chord unplugged. Confusing, but I try it. It works for some reason. I am suddenly way more thankful than ever that I no longer use Windows. When something goes wrong on Linux, it makes sense, as opposed to this where I have no idea what Windows did to cause this.

I'm just so surprised at how much better Linux is. It absolutely destroys the idea that profit motive makes for better products, or that the richest companies are rich and popular because they're better. Here this thing is, funded by collaboration and donations, and it's leagues better than something produced by one of the richest companies in the world that has near infinite funding.

There is no way in hell am ever going back.

So, Im currently on Windows 10, on my desktop but Im seriously considering switching to Linux instead of upgrading to Windows 11. I already have Kubuntu (the customization looked cool ^^) installed on my laptop, which I want to experiment with as soon as I have more time.

The distros Im looking into for my desktop are Nobara and Pop! OS. I own a modern NVIDIA GPU and mostly care about gaming. Other than that, I will just be using the desktop to browse the internet and watch some videos.

I have a friend who does IT and he swears by the mainline distros like Fedora. Im not as technically savvy and just want something that does the couple of things I need it to do which are gaming and watching funny cat videos on YouTube. I assume one advantage of big distros is that you have large comms that can help you if you run into a problem....

I would be especially interested to hear from folks that used Nobara or Pop OS but also those who do modern gaming on Linux.

Thanks. Any input is appreciated.

Reasons to switch:

1. It's waaaaay cheaper
   • A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
2. No ads, no spying
   • Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
3. Good for the planet
   • Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
4. Community support
   • If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
5. User control
   • You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.

Hexbear-related reasons to switch:

1. Still can use hexbear
   • Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
2. Don't have to pay for it.
   • You'll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better (better yet non computer related things)
3. using Windows for Windows's sake or Apple for Apple's sake is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
   • TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
4. Makes you smarter (it's like reading theory but with computers)
   • Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/27852459

It allows to launch exported activities from various apps and helps to create useful shortcuts

2 examples where I find it to be quite useful:
1. Quick Record shortcut for Audio Recorder

It currently does not have a quick recording shortcut.

Audio Recorder Gitlab issue where a user requests the feature. Maybe attention from someone here would be helpful?

You can directy search for the app in Activity manager, open it and create a a shortcut for the Recording activity.

2. Shortcut to open Android/data folder in the native Files app

Context for the folder location I use here

For Android 11 & onwards, you can't access the Android/data folder(without root) from regular file manager apps like Material files(awesome opensource file manager).
The Telegram X app stores it's downloaded files in a folder there.
Material files calls the native Android Files(not GFiles, documentsui.files) app to open the Android/data folder.
Activity manager can be used to create a shortcut for that

1. Search for and open the Files app in Activity Manager and choose the Launch with parameters option for the FilesActivity
2. Action, choose ACTION_VIEW
3. Data = content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/document/primary%3AAndroid%2Fdata%2Forg.thunderdog.challegram%2Ffiles%2Fdocuments or any other directory you like
4. Mime type, choose vnd.android.document/directory

You can then launch the activity with the parameter.
This will be recorded in History(the clock sign). You can long-press the entry and create a Shortcut.

---

Do you have any other cases or ideas where this would be usedul? Please do share them here.

---

On a tangent, Material files allows making shortcuts to files and folders. Markor, text editor app, allows the same too.

I think I've finally found it: The elusive Firefox fork for my day-to-day needs. It needed to have sane defaults like Librewolf but also as user empowering as Vivaldi (as well as not being proprietary which is cringe).

Zen I believe accomplishes both of that. It's a relatively new project but it does have active development with new changes added every release. Here's the rundown:

• Licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same as Firefox. So enjoy that warm feeling you get when using open source software that won't pull the rug from under you.
• Follows Firefox release cycles: If a new Firefox version comes out, Zen is not behind.
• Instead of horizontal tabs, Zen only uses vertical tabs for navigation. If this is a deal breaker, then Zen isn't for you :(
• Supports split view, workspaces, browser profiles, side panels, tab unloading (saving memory by deactivating a tab), theming, mods and everything else that base Firefox supports (like firefox sync).
• Cannot play DRM-protected content as of yet on Windows and MacOS (rare Linux W?) due to license fees. This is your netflix, your disney+, your spotify.
• No mobile version (nor does it seem to be planned), though firefox sync is still supported.
• Looks GORGEOUS. I never realized how ugly Firefox looks by default, esp on desktops like GNOME and KDE where it tries to integrate itself into the system theme.
• Performs FABULOUSLY: Optimizations from the firefox level to even providing an optimized binary executable for modern CPUs.
• SANE defaults like HTTPS everywhere, no link prefetching (where the browser loads links that it thinks you're going to go to), uncluttered Firefox home.
• Probably more I'm not listing

Download here: https://zen-browser.app/download

How do I use Zen?

Well firstly, Zen doesn't come with any extensions by default. So I made sure to chuck in my Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs, LibRedirect, etc. It also uses secure DNS by default with Cloudflare so you might want to turn that off (I have a DNS homeserver that does encrypted DNS through other means).

I also really like using the side panel to put my wiki sites and dictionaries in. I've only been using Zen for a week now and it seems to be my forever browser of choice.

If you want to play it, go find the torrent there. I can't say for certain its safe, so at your own risk.

And FFS use a VPN, you know what Nintendo is like.

Please let me know if it's any good! I'm going to wait till I'm on holiday so I won't be playing it until release.

It all started because he was shitting on the NY Times for being an ad-ridden mess where you have to call a human in order to cancel your subscription. Someone called NY Times woke communist propaganda and Linus went nerd rage on them.

original post

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media. We are pursuing this in two ways:

TL;DR this is an EU petition aimed at making sure that companies are obligated to distribute binaries of the server code of their multiplayer and live service games. Currently, video game companies of online/live service games use a form of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) model where the "game" someone has purchased is simply a license to run the game in only the way the company sees fit (their servers, their platform, their rules). If a company were to go under or simply not run the servers required for the full game to function, then the user is out of luck as they've effectively had the game taken away from them.

This is just another example of why ALL leftists must strive to fight for free software. If we don't consider software which respects your freedom an important endeavor to uphold, then we make ourselves vulnerable for further and further exploitation. If you're reading this, this includes you as well.

We first need to obtain a blocklist of all possible Israeli ip addresses. This can be obtained from two sources.

1. https://www.ip2location.com/free/visitor-blocker (choose peer guardian format)
2. https://www.iblocklist.com/

Due to the nature of how IP addresses are distributed, these blocklists have to be updated, but that isn't a huge concern for us right now.

When you downloaded the file for Israel from either site, it should look something like this:

Israel:2.16.36.0-2.16.36.255
Israel:2.22.233.0-2.22.233.255
Israel:2.52.0.0-2.55.255.255
Israel:2.57.228.0-2.57.231.255
Israel:2.58.33.0-2.58.33.255
Israel:3.2.42.0-3.2.42.63
Israel:3.5.56.0-3.5.59.255
Israel:5.22.128.0-5.22.135.255
Israel:5.28.128.0-5.28.191.255
Israel:5.29.0.0-5.29.255.255
Israel:5.100.248.0-5.100.255.255

If you wish to add more nations to the list such as TERF island or the 4th Reich, then you can append the files on top of each other into one file.

Once you have the file, rename it with the .p2p extension so that qbittorrent will use it. Then, in your qbittorrent client, go to Preferences -> Connection. At the very bottom you should see a section labeled IP Filtering. In the Filter Path checkbox, select your .p2p file. You may also check the box to block trackers as well.

In other bittorrent software (hopefully you're using one that's libre) there should be a similar option for ip filtering.

There you go! You have effectively banned Israel from being your peer while you're doing p2p transfers. This won't stop Zionists from peering with you using a VPN or other undetected server, but this has done wonders for my mood.

Always remember to port forward and seed when torrenting (A non-Zionist VPN like AirVPN or ProtonVPN can allow you to do that). Only a Zionist does a download and run.

Resources

1. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/discussions/17457

From the discussion post:

I was talking on my part, don't know about others. I'm a constant seeder (7+ years) and monitor peers from time to time or when downloading something. During these years I've never seen a single Israeli seed on a rare torrent, or high download traffic from them. I'm being completely honest, the only time I see them is when they are downloading something from me.

What's the point of this post?

We all love to dunk on M$ for repeatedly fucking up Windows, and we all love to recommend installing the superior OS, but there hasn’t been a guide on how to actually do so. My aim is to create a guide on how to actually install Linux so that every time M$ fucks up, people can link to this guide (or any other successive guide) on top of the usual dunking.

Note: This guide is tailored towards people who are using Windows devices.

Why Linux Mint?

• Linux Mint has a well-deserved reputation as the “newbie distro for people who came from Windows.”
• Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, and all three distros combined have a wealth of information online owning to their popularity, meaning that there’s less obstacles in troubleshooting.
• Linux Mint owning to its Debian heritage isn’t cutting edge or bleeding edge, meaning there’s a greater focus on using what currently works.

Which version of Linux Mint?

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Linux Mint comes in three main editions:

• Cinnamon (←pick this one)
• MATE
• Xfce

Pick Cinnamon since this edition is more modern and closely imitates the Windows desktop environment (DE) the most. The other two use DEs that consume less resources, but don’t mimic the look of Windows as much.

How to create a USB boot drive?

There are various ways of creating a USB boot drive:

• Rufus (easy and fooproof): https://rufus.ie/en/
• Ventoy (takes more work but you can add multiple ISO images to the boot drive): https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Live session:

After creating your USB boot disk with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, you need to boot from your flash drive. The exact steps vary, but you essentially have to go to your BIOS and either change the boot order or specifically boot from your flash drive. Once there, you’ll come across a couple of screens before arriving at the Linux Mint desktop.

There’s a desktop icon that tells you to install Linux Mint, but you don’t have to do it yet. In fact, nothing’s stopping you from just running Linux Mint like this through the flash drive (there are entire Linux distro designed to be run from a flash drive like, but Linux Mint isn’t one of those). The live session is also good to catch any hardware issues like your wifi not working.

Actually installing Linux Mint:

It’s honestly pretty straightforward.

Pick the language you want, which will mostly likely be English.

Pick the keyboard, which will mostly be what you’re already using.

Connect online so Linux Mint will install the latest programs. You can skip connecting online, and Linux Mint will install the version of the programs that are in the iso image, but you’ll have to upgrade all those programs at once later.

Check Install multimedia codecs. The codecs allow you to watch videos.

Unless you have some weird logical partition set up for your drive, just choose Erase disk and install Linux Mint, and let Linux Mint handle the partitioning. If your PC has multiple drives, I would suggest physically disconnecting the drives that you don’t want the installation to touch as a precaution. Obviously, do this while the PC is off.

Pick the time zone you live in.

Set up your username, hostname, and password. It doesn’t have annoying password complexity restrictions on what password you want to use. Just pick any password.

This is a slideshow while installation is taking place.

Once installation is complete, Linux Mint will prompt you to reboot your PC. When you reboot your PC through that window, you will eventually get to a black screen with a prompt asking you to remove the USB boot drive and press Enter. Do so, and your PC will reboot to a fresh installation of Linux Mint.

I heard the last update for the 3DS fucked peoples homebrew consoles, so I haven't even connected to the internet since then.

But now I want to transfer a bunch of my old Pokemon to Pokemon Bank so I can get them onto Home and then my Switch, but Pokemon Bank needs an update...

Whats the safest way to do this? Can I just update it or will that fuck my homebrew?

I'd like to share a fun page from the GNU Project's essays on free software in other languages. It's always good to remember that the free software movement was and is always an international effort to defend our freedoms. Free software will always aid leftist organizations in breaking away from surveillance and creating our own technological independence.

You should always advocate for breaking away from proprietary software in your advocacy. For example, if you're in a leftist Discord chatroom, try building a bridge to Matrix or even moving to chatroom entirely to Matrix. If you talk to your friends using Messenger, Whatsapp or Zoom, try suggesting that y'all use something like Signal, GNU Jami, Jitsi Meet etc.

Free software is praxis! Never take your computing for granted!

day 6 of libreposting

TL;DR

RSS doesn't actually stand for "Really Simple Software", it stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is an internet standard dating back to 1999. It allows websites to create RSS feeds that users can copy into their RSS Feed Reader to avoid connecting to the website over and over again just to see updates.

Why you should use RSS

RSS allows one to organize their internet activity into one cohesive, accessible program. Instead of leaving large digital footprints like subscribing to a newsletter via email or using a social media site, RSS allows one to safely preview web content right as it is updated. If you're creating a blog, making an RSS feed will greatly benefit your readers.

Using RSS is as simple as looking for the RSS Icon and copying the link into your feed reader, no extra steps required. Many feed readers also come with the ability to tag and organize your feeds into different sections for different topics. Invidious instances also come with RSS built in so you can replicate a YouTube subscriptions page without the stinging you'd usually get from Alphabet Inc for example.

In less eloquent terms: The modern web browser is bloat and you want to avoid using it as much as possible. RSS helps you do that.

Libre RSS Feed Readers

On Linux distributions with Flathub enabled, you have these options:

• GNOME: NewsFlash,
• KDE: Akgregator
• QT: RSS Guard
• Flutter: Fluent Reader
• GNU Emacs: Elfeed
• Terminal: Newsboat

Most web browsers either have extensions for RSS or have RSS built into them, I have only used one called Smart RSS. I don't recommend using web application RSS feed readers that require an account to use.

Examples

NewsFlash

Now I can enjoy all my JT content right as it's hot off the press (using invidious)

Lemmy

RSS Feeds are available at every comm. (little rightmost rss icon)

Day 5 of libreposting

i tried piped for a while, but many times i tried to watch videos and they didn't start loading until i reloaded it what felt like hundreds of times. any reccomendations?

edit: Dear comrades reading this, i am not sure if it will work the same for people outside of amerikkka, but puffyan.us worked really well for me. i decided not to go with yewtu.be, as i wanted to be able to find content using my subscriptions rather than searching for topics. if that doesn't bother you, go with yewtube but puffyan worked well for me. thank you for all of the advice!

A libre program is a program that fulfills these 4 basic freedoms.

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• Bonus points if it is cross-platform (can run on Windows or MacOS) or replaces a proprietary program

Jitsi Meet

Jitsi Meet is a free software program that allows users to create video calls with each other. Licensed under Apache 2.0, anyone is able to launch their own Jitsi Meet instance and be able to talk to their friends and family without having their freedoms revoked.

This application can be used to replace proprietary video conferencing apps like Zoom and Google Meets which in addition to being nonfree, un-auditable programs have also shown time and time again to disrespect its users even further such as forcefully integrating AI anti features and forcing users to be trapped in their cultivated video conferencing garden of stings.

• Read more about the security of Jitsi if you're interested.

Jitsi Meet can be run on any operating system that has access to a web browser. There is also offline binaries for Linux distributions from Flathub. It's also available on mobile operating systems in both F-Droid and proprietary app stores.

How can I use it?

Jitsi Meet can be used gratis on the behalf of Jitsi here, however it requires the user to sign in with either Google, Facebook, or Github; all proprietary platforms.

Luckily, Framasoft still has a fully gratis Jitsi Meet service at Framatalk which does not require a third-party login.

Stop Zoomin' and use Jitsi Meet, self host one if you can to further ensure your freedom and your community.

Share your favorite Free software program here and help others!

Day 4 of libreposting :-)

Context

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked highly classified information on global surveillance ring that the NSA had been building for more than a decade since the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001 as a reaction to 9/11.

The leaks demonstrate that the NSA and other federal agencies have been routinely violating the people's right to privacy via the cooperation of US telecommunications companies. They were able to wiretap people's calls, collect metadata on all sorts of things, and be able to fetch any companies' databases at will.

This is still true today. Anything you put on US servers can be pulled by 3 letter agencies in a variety of ways, none of them taking very long. The 4th amendment is Not For Sale bill demonstrates the fact that these agencies can literally just buy this data from data brokers without any judicial oversight.

And remember They kill even with just metadata

So why does what I mentioned above matter? Well it's because email by itself is a hilariously insecure messaging platform. This is because, by default, emails are sent without End-to-End Encryption (E2EE), meaning that they can be snooped on at will by your email domain provider (which in turn will mean the government). Email are also notorious for being the hotbed of fraud and scamming activity as by default, you can't actually verify the emails you receive (the "from:" section can be spoofed).

EDIT: This article from latacora is a good source on the flaws of email that you should know about. Email has its use case, but encrypting your emails isn't a fix all, having a PGP key is very useful though!

Email Encryption

I highly recommend reading the article linked with this post. It goes over step by step on how to obtain a personal key for your email and how to send encrypted messages to others. If you're looking to sign up for an email account from a company not in PRISM then I recommend this article which lists some email services that you can use. I personally use Runbox btw.

• Webmail systems

Other than encryption, your personal key can be used to digitally sign messages which shows that the email you sent belonged to you and your key. This is especially important when you want to verify the authenticity of something, it's also a great way to show others that you have a PGP key. I also recommend reading up more on GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) in general as it appears a lot especially when you're downloading software over the internet.

Helpful Vocabulary

• "Public Key" is the key you share with others so that they can contact you. Think of it as your phone number.
• "Private Key" is the one you want to keep to yourself at all times. If this key gets compromised or lost, then you have to get a new one and tell others that your old one can't be trusted.
• "Personal Key" is a synonym for private key. It also can reference the private key and your public key together.
• "IMAP" stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and is how one chooses to receive messages from a remote email server.
• "POP3" stands for Post Office Protocol 3 which allows you store all your emails locally on a device.
• "SMTP" stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is how you send emails to others through your email server.
• "Keyserver" is a server whose duty is to host people's public keys. However, the best way to get someone's public key is to simply ask it from them as sometimes key servers can have spoofed public keys.
• "GPG" stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a free software implementation of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). GPG is a must learn program as it is instrumental to any Linux operating system. Frontends to GPG do exist however.
• "Thunderbird" is an email client developed by Mozilla. It's has a lot of a features including a frontend to GPG (it will even let you generate a key for yourself). This is the email client to use on Linux.

Remember! GPG isn't just for emails, but for any file that you want to encrypt!

Day 3 of libreposting hehehe