I see how you feel with your Peertube song.
Of course, Lemmy is an amazing FOSS tool, just sad many people (if so) are a bit toxic… Of course, I was blamed in the past as troll, bot, pro-putin, pro-china, pro-european, pro-american… and few actually get involved in a insightful conversation. The way i see it, Lemmy (or any of these mediums) are just entertainment and our work should be in the real world, with your neighbors and physical communities.
Let me know if you find a better venue… I am also disappointed in Lemmy. Is it so hard to find a place where people try to understand why things are one way and another before slapping each other.
I’d lived in a very swing state, in a very swing county and thanks to that predicted elections like no pollster did (even Trump in 2016 as he came down a escalator and every media laughed at him)… I saw no more malice in an average Trump voter than a Kamala one, I find a portion of them both as equally racist (some 30% I would say), one just is more vocal and explicit while the other chooses to express the racism passively aggressive… Two black family moved into our street and one Trumper told me that he does not like the “blacks in front” and a long time Democrat neighbor told me instead… that she was going to move to a better school district “because demographics”… what is the difference?
Screw me! I feel bad because instead of welcoming those now disenchanted MAGA, we are shunning them away and pushing them toward Musk’s new party and the like. We did same mistake after Trump’s 1st term too.
The Proton CEO is quite active in twitter and participates in podcasts. Well, one day he praised one action of the Trump administration on antitrust and a whole community attacked him for “praising Trump” when he did only a nomination for Attorney General for the Antitrust division. I highly doubt he is a MAGA supporter and listening to him for 30min on any of the multiple appearances he was on, will confirm you that. Several things concerns me on Proton, the CEO’s ideology ain’t one of them.
Unrelated to this, I wish people was more forgiven of Trump voters, it is not the monolithic the Left tries to portray it is. Trump sold himself as fighting the establishment, being anti-war and pro-antitrust (many small business owners supported him). People voted for him even suspecting he most likely was lying. Many people, both in 2016 and 2024, voted for Trump because Hillary was very pro-war (for instance she say she would attack Russian military directly in Syria) and Kamala proudly said she would not change anything on Biden’s policy in the middle of Gaza’s massacres. MAGA has many racists, many! (Democrats has is share too, but usually quieter but one can notice them at the grocery stores!) But what made Trump win was desperate disfranchised Americans with no other alternatives that promised Change. Europeans should keep quiet too… in the last elections they voted as different as they could demanding change to end up with Ursula von der Leyen for another term. Democracies in both sides of the Atlantlic are heavily ill and people, in desperation, vote for whoever promises change, independently of anything else.
Coming from Windows, OK with a bit of tech journey and into gaming here is my take in no order of preference.
At the end, like many people say, it is likely you will hop… until one day you find that distro hoping is pointless and that all are actually very close to each other and could easily coexist with any of them all. The difficult and uncompromising aspect usually is with the desktop environment like KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon…
Of course… for us normies… GrapheneOS is the way to go. Very high targeted individuals in the West should however consider HarmonyOS. Of Course the Chinese government has eyes on that one but not specifically targeting you… unless they use it to trade intel on someone of high interest for China but no much collaboration between West and China intelligence agencies today…
True, popularity increases the chances someone auditing. But, to a point. Ideally audit should be performed with every single update and on the servers, and there the premise of more eyes does not hold true no more. Then it comes trust. In a company like Tuta, the people behind showed their faces from day one, the same people are there, is a tight team so harder for a bad apple to do something. Considering both Tuta and Proton were good from inception (and I believe it may be the case), it would probably would be easier for an intelligence agency to penetrate Proton than Tuta, just for the structure that appears they have from outside. Now, Tuta made a horrible mistake once! In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, independently of one’s take on it, Tuta made the “Standing with Ukraine” (March 2022); that was a mistake, it may many doubt if privacy still their paramount over any other ideology. Maybe they have change since since no statements on Gaza… or maybe they agree with what is happening… who knows… that is why they should not make any statements at all, or clarify that while they have their ideologies in no case, ever will compromise their stands on privacy. To be fair, Proton did the same… nothing on Ukraine but on Gaza “We unequivocally condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians […] We also condemn violence against civilians in Gaza”; so I guess both are comparable here! My trust for both is slim, as a company, and even their individuals.
Some of those mentioned likely are compromised, but cannot figured out which. The thing, is to diversify our risk and the privacy minded to use different platforms (Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN for instance).
The good news, is that if an agency is compromising something, they will likely won’t use the intel gathered in court cases in order to leave it open to future prey, so that is good for vast majority of users. The very few that are relevant enough should not trust even the genuine privacy tools and resort to enhanced methods and combining methodologies.
My impression, and just impression, is that I would trust **Tuta **more than Proton (and not because Proton’s CEO that many interpreted wrong anyways) On VPN… a tad more trust on Mullvad. Signal, I would not use it for high stakes communication but OK for most people. GrapheneOS seems okay and we know for sure it does not leak info on a daily basics, but we have to be careful, it could have an obscure code dormant waiting for a trigger or could easily send data to an unsuspected server, Ironically, if I were Snoden, I would feel more comfortable using a Huawei Mate with HarmonyOS than a Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS… of course China spies too massively, but it has far less beef with Snoden than the US does, therefore not of much interest to Beijing.
Remember that overwhelming majority of FOSS goes without any audit, let alone a comprehensive one. This is what some trusted party should put AI checking ASAP all the FOSS out there!
I am now with IronFox, I forgot the reason I left Fennec. Does anyone know the advantage of one vs the other?
I am in this path too, but not for everyone. The Firefox (and variants) in Android is ok for normal browsing but would not log into highly sensitive sites nor is recommendable for many users that are not careful with settings and updates. Brave (and others privacy friendly ones), with its flaws, it is better in that arena, so recommended for them.
Also, we may not like it, but if we criticize company attempts to become financial viable, we are doing at disservice to our FOSS community. We should just point what you don’t like from Brave and let our audiences decide for themselves.
I don’t use Brave, still with the more insecure Android Firefox variant (Firefox for Android is subpar in security), but I am glad Brave do want to expand here and for many users it is for sure the best option. No need to insult, whether you agree or not with them. If it is open, it is open and everything else should be secondary and for individual to choose on their own. Go Brave! Hope many more come too.
I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:
Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.
Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.
OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.
There are others but for niches.
China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.
Oh for sure! No doubt, at least makes people conscious of that. Now, the larger companies don’t have any problem bypassing the EU law and the incentives are mainly untouched for them to change.
This is so pathetic now. US companies does " pretend" to storage data in Europe, then, 4 years later a couple of them are found out they did not (others did too but were not found to doing so) and an investigation and lawsuit is brought up and 6 years later found guilty and penalized a maximum of 10% of profits for that year (so effectively 1% profit/yr cost of business). Profits brought by the breach of European safeguards… tens times more than the potential penalties. Any CEO has to, by law, give the maximum profits to their investors, and they are just doing that.
But of course, the EU just won’t do that litigation dance with the Chinese companies, the EU knows well it is just a scam to pretend doing something to protect europeans… to Chinese companies, because US does not like, the EU just ban them. The EU will never ban a US company, no matter how many violations they do.
My entire family is ad free for years… with the exception in podcasts. I am tempted to block them too (is there a way now?) but still not too intrusive… it is a way for me to keep connected to the ad world anyways. Now, the moment they abuse them here tii… I’ll find a way to block these.
First, Naomi and her team are doing a fantastic work in security for masses, easily top 5 worldwide!
AI is capable but we are still failing at program it properly, gosh, even well funded companies are still doing a poor job at it… (just look at the misplaced ads and ineffective we still get.)
What I want, and it is easy to do TODAY, is AI checking our FOSS… so many we use and just a tiny, tiny minority of it goes with some scrutiny. We need AI to go through the FOSS code looking for maliciousness now.
We don’t know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know… Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.
Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.
OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years… I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.
Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won’t be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today
The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross… partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don’t see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.
Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!
Lovely and well researched post… till I see the “tend to be people who also believe that they’re being monitored by the CIA, or that Covid vaccines are implanting mind-control receivers.…”. I find it problematic that both are considered as the same type; there is an incredible abundant evidence that security apparatus of different countries (not necessarily just the CIA that ’ technically’ can only operate in non-Americans) are indeed scrutinizing phone’s data to well beyond what we would consider “the regular suspects”… way beyond! The other, is just people that, while rightly so can be skeptical of government intentions with global mandates, they hide behind that paranoia for their lack of technical and intend knowledge. As the meme says… “we are not the same”.
As for GrapheneOS vs Lineage OS, I am torn. For the majority of people, as of today, LineageOS is just fine… I like that it brings diversity of hardware too since it discourages governments from having to intend to compromise different manufacturers (thing that GOS faults at). Now, more people in GrapheneOS will bring awareness too and more privacy conscious apps. So, for majority of people, do install LineageOS (or their variants), you will be taken good care of… However, for a minority of people, minority but not tiny! you know who you are, you will do better with grapheneOS (hope someone is scrutinizing both GOS and the Pixel hardware though).
And to answer the OP more directly, what do you give up by using a GrapheneOS (besides being forced to buy a Google device), well, no much since you have the option of installing Google services in a second profile or compartmentalized in your main profile. This, of course, would have your device communicating with Google’s servers, but the info it can collect would mostly restricted. MicroG is potentially more private than creating a Google account (even if an anonymous one), but some claim is less secure too so I leave it as equal.
In conclusion, if you can live without installing Google services or juts just need it so sporadically that you only need to install it in a secondary profile, and you tolerate a Google Pixel go with GrapheneOS option. If, however, you are not a fan at all of having a Pixel, or need to have Google services constantly running, I would consider instead iodéOS, /e/, etc.
By the way… some opinions after dealing with their managers:
For the new people on Linux, think of my impression playing with the different OS;
Similarities between Windows 10 and macOS is around 15%.
Similarities between Windows 10 and Linux Mint is around 20%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Ubuntu is around 95%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Fedora\OpenSUSE is around 90%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Arch\CachyOS\Manjaro is around 85%.
And with Flatpaks/Snaps I would even now narrow the difference in the Linus OS as 95, 92 and 90% similarity. For what linux cannot do for you, unless it needs high processing or gaming anticheats, a Virtual Machine with Windows will just cover you without any problem.
What makes look different in Linux is the desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon…), no much the distro per se. Find the distro environment you like after playing 20min with it, and choose the Linux flavor you are ideologically/persuaded with the most… don’t worry about the rest.