Unfortunately, even Debian stable will eventually roll to 590 sometime over its lifecycle.

Either disable the NVIDIA GPU and stick with Intel only, or switch to FreeBSD. It has very good support for old NVIDIA drivers thanks to architectural decisions that were made 25+ years ago.

Maybe eventually the open source “nova” driver will save those of us who want to stay on Linux.

The last DVD burned was a release candidate for Debian buster. The last CD was a full i386 install of OpenBSD 6.4 for a ThinkPad T43p. Both happened in the last decade (2010’s).

I’ve ripped several music CD’s and movie DVD’s since then, but using it as a storage device just isn’t a thing any more.

It would be better to attract people who actually want to use an OS that is different to Windows, rather than ones that just want a Windows that works. Linux is not a version of Windows.

Absolute agreement.

Around the turn of the century, we used to say something like, “Linux is for people who hate Microsoft, BSD is for people who love UNIX.”

Not much has changed in the larger discussion about Desktop Linux. General discussion is driven by how “safe” and “comfortable” Windows users feel installing and using it for the first time. It’s a bullshit discussion.

It’s a weird relationship, like a new girlfriend who is always comparing you to the last boyfriend who beat her. She may even go back to him because he is familiar, without ever recognizing that you are better in every way.

Linux as a desktop is perfectly fine and usable on it’s own, without comparison to Windows. I’ve used it for over a quarter century and had a normal life, from middle school through postgrad and a decade-long career. My kids use it for everything including school and gaming and have no problems making friends and turning in assignments. People need to get out of the poverty mindset that Windows is the standard for a desktop. It’s fucking terrible. Linux has been usable for the desktop for 25 fucking years for those who want it. Windows itself copied many things from the Linux desktop, going all the way back to the first themes on Windows XP, and now there’s an entire Linux subsystem for Windows, all because Linux has been been better at package management and dependency resolution since the Clinton administration. Windows is fucking awful as a desktop.

They’ve also become really, really good at outsourcing R&D to other companies. This lets them outsource the expense of trial and error, and swoop down with a mature product once everyone else has paid for it.

15 years ago they famously patented, and then leaked that they were working on a fingerprint reader authentication method, and then they watched the Android manufacturers bend over backwards to implement it so they could say they did it “first.” In those early days of smartphones, being first to implement something and then claiming Apple copied it was a big deal for people who wanted to be first movers (today they are called “techbros”). Motorola Mobility ate the cost of R&D, was never able to recoup the costs, and ended up being sold to Google for their patent portfolio. By the time Apple released Touch ID two and a half years later, Motorola Mobility was a shell of itself, and ended up being sold a second time to Lenovo.

Foldable phones have been a thing for a while, and Apple just sat back and took notes on what everyone else was doing. Surface Duo killed Microsoft’s last attempt at a mobile device. Now it’s a relatively mature market (we have tri-fold phones for two years now and tablets that fold into a laptop with a bluetooth keyboard) and now Apple will swoop in and bring the rest of the market.

The money isn’t in being a first mover; it’s in making a reliable product that everyone can use. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Apple made a trillion dollars while OpenBSD (upstream for a lot of Apple’s ecosystem) struggled to pay its light bills.

Thunderbird since forever. Before that, Seamonkey and the Mozilla suite.

There are some changes I didn’t like over the years like the tabbed interface for everything, but nothing else ever came along that worked as well and was multi-platform.

Install the apparmor profiles and extra profiles packages from the apt repository. They are sensible restrictions on common apps (web browsers) to prevent anything malicious from happening if they are ever hijacked. Make sure apparmor is enabled. This will do more to keep you secure than an antivirus.

If you insist on an AV, install ClamAV and have it scan weekly. It’s libre software and works well with Linux.

It wasn’t doing anything that Facebook wasn’t already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.

Wonder why?

TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.

Because they are controlled opposition.

The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.

It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.

Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.