First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).

I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.

About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.

I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).

20xx

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Some people like to rag onto Canonicals bad decisions. These include:

1. Putting ads in the terminal
2. Use of Affiliate links in the DE
3. The forceful use of Snap
4. The proprietary Snap infrastructure
5. The feeling of being abandoned, in favour of the server market (lack of desktop innovation)
6. Lens search, that allows company (eg: Amazon) tracking.
7. Anti-privacy settings enabled, by default.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Yeah, YT is the last holdout for me. It’s literally the only Google service I willingly sign up for. I’ve tried Piped/Invidious, but they don’t match YTs quality.

any technical solution short of DRM is provably impractical and unworkable.

Don’t give them ideas.

I think we are constantly progressing in that field. One issue for latency was that controllers used to contact your device, and then the server. Now they can connect directly to the server. Things will improve, like it or not.

For right now, I think the biggest hurdle is with ISPs.

1. Data caps can be quite common, in many countries. Essentially creating a huge limit on how much you can (if at all) play.
2. Most people’s router, and access point hardware needs upgrading. A lot of the stock router AIOs from ISPs are really bad. Creating a bottleneck before the data even reaches the servers.

Another hurdle I can see is companies profit sharing. Everyone wants a large cut, so I’d expect multiple streaming options… and many failures, like what we’re seeing on the movies/series streaming model… just with games it’ll be soooo much worse.

For all those who’ve lost their jobs, I’m sorry, and hope you land on your feet. For Epic…

Too much work, for so little gain. I’d expect it if they ever release a Tf3, though.

They’re Evil Arseholes, what’d you expect.

Other than the FairPhone, which you already mentioned, nothing really matches all criteria.

I’d give a nod to the Pixel line, though. Google already offers 5 years of software updates, and the next line is rumoured to get 7. Plus Google allows Custom ROM support, which makes it a fan favourite in the privacy community. Granted it’s not as repairable as the FairPhone, and it’s not as eco-friendly, but it’s decent enough.

Games that just come out could be an issue regardless of distro. Sometimes Wine/Proton needs to fix a few things… no distro is going to help, in that regard. I suppose a more regularly updated distro COULD help with getting updates faster… but it’s usually nothing you cannot already solve with Pop. ProtonUp-QT is a great tool to help get you the latest Proton versions, including the Eggroll fork. It’s available as a Flatpak, so it’ll work on most modern distros (including Pop).

If you must switch to a more regularly updated distro, you have a couple of options. Nobara (based on Fedora) will give you a nice middle ground between your current setup and Arch. Speaking of which, Arch is a great distribution, with fantastic documentation. That being said, it IS NOT new user friendly. It WILL break, and you WILL need to look stuff up. You’re on the literal bleeding edge, of Linux. The Arch forums can also be quite toxic, in comparison to what’s available on both Pop/Ubuntu and Nobara/Fedora. If neither is appealing to you, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s very up to date, but I often find it more stable than Arch.

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine

The only thing that comes to mind is PeerTube. I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen it suggested a few times in the privacy community.

What she didn’t see is me whispering in her mothers ear “I run Arch, by the way”. Then giving her a quick wink.

There’s a couple of ways to block it.

1. Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.

2. If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.

3. If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.

There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.

Lying about collecting that data, because they do (and I block it). Not lying, but backtracking on everything else.

Just gota get it up. Might be harder than it looks, though.