Bestie Brave is literally just Chromium again. Not to mention the fact that their CEO is someone who got ousted from Firefox for being a tremendous bigot. It's not a better alternative to Chrome, it's just the same thing again. It you must use a chromium browser, use ungoogled.
I tried it but didn't care to find out if there was a way to stop it from deleting all my tabs and logins, and I'm not relogging into everything just because I needed to close my browser.
An important note to your last one is for some of us we don't get an option. Work does everything with Office 365? Welp, guess you gotta use Microsoft products now 🤷
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
It feels like there needs to be a category in between conservative and paranoid. I'm probably 90% of the way over to tech paranoid but using Tor Browser and Tails is a little much.
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
For some reason, the best word to describe it in my mind is "fun". Just fun to learn and play with, fun to install, fun to configure and customize, and fun to daily drive. Definitely not fun when a random package update breaks your system (looking at you grub), but that hardly ever happens anymore provided you don't enable the testing repo.
Also pacman is the fastest package manager I've ever used.
Apt is very quick as well (with the nala frontend), no complaints there. I've been running Arch for the past 5 years and recently switched to Debian Stable. The "grub event" was certainly notable, but otherwise I don't think Arch is really that unstable or gimmicky. Arch itself is a very solid and dependable platform - the reason I decided to move is because I really don't need the bleeding edge packages from other projects anymore. With Flatpaks and all the rest of the /home-based package managers that are around now, I can keep a stable base system and install a couple bleeding edge packages that I want, instead of being forced to run my entire system as bleeding edge (do my printer drivers really need to make me bleed?).
Overall, I'd say the Arch experience is as high quality as the Debian experience, they just target different usecases. Neither of them is better, it's just up to the user how bloody they want their system to be.
Somehow mkinitcpio broke my initramfs the other day when I installed the latest microcode updates. Took me like an hour to debug the issue and boot from the fallback 😑. That’s the first time I’ve had an issue like that though. I’ve been using arch for a few years now.
Also the middle should be called Tech Centrist or Tech Social Democrat, daring to use the projects from philosophical minorities is not conservative at all.
Conservatives are always trying to make themselves seem "cool and different" like the middle guy in the meme. Being anticonsumerist, pro-privacy and pro individual liberty is far from actual conservative policy goals but they obviously have to pretend otherwise.
He's the kind of guy that looks at a Fairphone and says "if you compare this to a Pixel, the Pixel is faster", talks about how important repairability and sustainability is, vows to mention it in future phone reviews and then proceeds to never mention it ever again but instead keeps on saying how great the new iPhone is.
Hey I watched this video when it came out a year ago, and honestly don't remember a single thing about it, other than I had already "liked" the video. Damn my brain needs an oil change...
And he mostly talks about phones anyway... hardly relevant to the avg pc enthusiast as he only covers macbooks and not their competition, which is silly.
Mullvad browser is a fairly new Firefox fork which aims to reduce fingerprinting potential while also having sane (paranoid) defaults. Developed with the Tor project. Basically the Tor browser but without connecting to the Tor network. Passes coveryourtracks.eff.org.
SimpleX Chat is a fairly new privacy oriented IM platform which seems to address many issues current ones have. Development is very active. E2E, video and voice calls, decentralized, doesn’t have user ID of any kind.
Tor/Mullvad are better for anonymity use cases, but when you go tweaking it (settings, add-ons) you are no longer blending in with the pack. LibreWolf suits a more privacy-oriented use case I think since it’s not aiming to mimic Tor, but just have privacy settings mostly maxed out & you opt into everything you are comfortable with, such as cookies—whereas base Fx you have to opt into more privacy.
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
Not really. People who use the apps are trying to preserve (conserve) the time when privacy wasn't an afterthought. It's not working, but they're sure trying.
It's using the word conservative in its literal definition, rather than the definition it's been given by some that incorrectly use it to describe their beliefs.
Tech paranoid all the way, although not the same type of tech paranoid as Luke Smith. The only good computer is one you have the hardware schematics to (i.e. virtually none of them). Thinkpads are just another brand of overpriced laptop. Besides the occasional steam game, I heavily prefer FOSS only and will flat out refuse almost anything that has drm. My unlocked bootloader android phone is so heavily locked down with privacy stuff that I cause Google to lose money merely by existing.
This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It's such a shame that there's no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.
Assuming the schematic is for repairability, not security.
Seems unlikely that enthusiasts would have the equipment to non-destructivly identify malicious deviations from spec, introduced by competent actors.
From memory you can, but that may have changed, there is a useful page ok their wiki that keeps track of all services that work and refuse to work with them since they use VoIP numbers and some companies refused to accept them
I fit somewhere between normie and conservative. Philosophically, I agree with the tech conservative, but I also have shit to do and when FOSS gets in my way, it's hard to justify it.
I use Firefox because it was an easy switch.
I used Signal until they killed sms support. Sorry, most of the people I know use a default messages app. And the day I force everyone I know to use Signal is the day they stop talking to me.
I dabble in Linux, but I main Windows because I'm not a programmer or IT admin. I know how to use it, for better or worse, and I don't have to memorize terminal commands to perform even basic tasks. Sure, gaming is getting better on linux, but it's still a compromised experience and I still, to this day, have to look up tutorials and terminal command every time I try to do anything on my Linux box.
But...wherever possible, I use FOSS software.
I like to call it the tech pragmatist. I agree with the conservative, but I'm not that smart and I got shit to do.
A lot of us are in this boat. I do daily drive Linux but I am very fortunate in that I'm my own boss so I can use whichever computer I want.
And yeah, there is no way to force people to use Signal. It is what it is. Fortunately here in Europe WhatsApp is the default messaging app. It is at least better than SMS for UA non-iPhone people.
Wish I could just ditch Windows and Whatsapp for something else....... I've tried Linux but every time I quickly wanted to do something it first took me 30/40 minutes to get it working :'( was driving me insane after the cool factor of daily driving Linux went away
Probably 1,5 months ago. I used Fedora 38 - to be fair I was really impressed with how far gaming has gotten. Basically anything I trew at it just worked (big F for Rust). However my audio kept breaking when switching application's which I could only fix by restarting. Besides that I was really annoyed by Fedora somehow not picking up my second display from time to time. No idea what happened but every like 20 restarts my second display wouldn't work, or games suddenly started to display on my second display instead of my main. These where probably the biggest things for me, besides some applications I use for debugging not being supported on Linux. Anyhow I'll probably try Linux again in a couple of months, maybe another distro, since I do really enjoy programming on Linux.
A lot of linux platforms are pretty plug and play now unless you're trying to get a programming running that wasn't built for Linux. That's why I think both Linux and proprietary operating systems have their place. Its just too bad not everyone makes their stuff for linux. It's definitely getting better though.
The fact that the favorite OS of the tech conservative is an Arch based distro and and a Debian based distro instead of pure Arch or Debian makes this meme inaccurate.
Tails is also total ass as a daily driver. I know, I did it for a long time before the lack of persistence was such a pain I had to give in. Like, you can save in your data partition, but having to install/configure everything on each boot sucks, and if you made the system partition writable it would defeat the point of Tails.
I don’t think Tails, backtrack, kali, and similar distros were ever intended to be daily drivers. I’ve only used them as live ISOs to leverage their very specific toolkits.
tbf vscode is a decent, open-source editor with great support for Rust (it's rust-analyzer's primary platform with nvim and Clion on the second place)
(but the official ms packages ship with a custom config with ms telemetry, branding and marketplace)
basically just use code(oss) or vscodium instead of binary vscode releases
Most of the language servers can run with Vim, Neovim, Helix, Kakoune, or Emacs as you noted. You could run VS Codium if you’re the “Tech Conservative”, but ultimately if you’re going all the way to “Tech Paranoid”, you won’t touch VS Code or Codium knowing Microsoft is steering the ship with another EEE plot in mind. It’s all a part of that package with Microsoft™ GitHub® + Codespaces® + Copilot® trying to vendor lock-in the developer experience into the platform.
It's "open source" as a technical matter, but the fact is that plenty of common extensions are still strictly controlled by Microsoft (like say, Live Share) and can't be used with vscodium due to licensing. It's a pretty useless editor without extensions, and the marketplace isn't exactly "open", either.
I watched one HTML video 5 years ago, and now I'm using a De-Googled phone, Linux, and get a more paranoid than I should when I see and Echo Dot. This is not what I signed up for...
Matrix has de-facto centralization around Matrix.org where all metadata floats back through them in one way or another. Due to the expense of all the mirroring required (every message + attachment from every DM & chatroom of every user) as well as the Python back-end being slow, it’s in practice not good to self-host despite in theory Matrix being good. XMPP runs on a potato relatively & has so much feature overlap (with the ability to extend being inherent to the protocol)—the only issue is fragmentation of servers & clients (though Conversations Compliance is close-ish to a minimal standard).
I'm not very knowledgeable, but Matrix is only centralized, if you don't include non-matrix.org instances. You can safely chat locally without matrix.org, AFAIK.
Seconding this, steamos (or whatever is on steam deck) is just arch Linux with steam installed. They may have some extra little goodies in there... But nothing major. When you install steam on Linux, you can change a single option in setting and steam will download proton for you. You can attempt to run any steam game and most will work fine. Battlebit remasted isn't officially supported, but it's worked since day 1 on my arch install and I'm just using that since it's the most recent hugely popular game.
Oh god, this meme. It's not something I've ever seen before, but it's so true.
God, Tor, freaking Tor. Bless it's heart, really, but it's practically unusable. At least for me. I was really getting into it, trying to use it as a daily browser, ran with so much less ram than all the others. But it's practically unusable! All the shitty websites I had to go on daily for School practically didn't work, and half the websites would always take at least 10-15 minutes to get working because they keep thinking I'm a hacker. Or it's just region blocked, and I have to spend SO MUCH TIME making new connections in the hopes it doesn't go to a single blacklisted country. Sometimes even with a phone there to authenticate, it just doesn't work. So I had Firefox anyway, it was literally what Tor was built off of. And because of how unbelievably inconvenient and annoying Tor (Or more accurately, how shitty the Internet in general has got, I really wouldn't mind logging in to every website every time, with a phone authentication every so often) was, I ended up just using Firefox and using Tor for dark web stuff. Essentially, what it's supposed to be used for.
Linux...man, Linux was always one of those things I wanted to get into, but thinking critically, it would be very dumb for me to do. Almost every single thing I do is required by a Windows app. Critical and niche shit, mind you. So essentially, it'd be the Tor situation all over again. I'd be doing effectively everything worthless on Linux while molesting my computer for a VM for windows, which I would be doing on a daily basis for practically as long as I use the computer. So I'm practically stuck being a normie. I try to do everything I can to stop all these companies and shit tracking me and have my machine running faster, like running scripts to debloat windows, but in the end, it doesn't amount to too much. I'm stuck a normie, no matter how much of a poser I act.
Wine and crossover can probably meet the needs of most of your windows app needs at this point, which realistically aren't a lot if you look into it, and keep a windows vm / cloud instance handy. Why not try a vm of Linux on your windows machine (or use WSL) to get your toes in the water to see if your assumptions are still correct today?
I tried. I have very peculiar needs, I'm not joking when I say I use shitty old programs from before the millennium AT LEAST EVERY WEEK. Very specific niches that I have found no solutions for on Linux.
Essentially, I need Windows for it's main selling point. Insane compatibility on software from every field. And until Linux can actually RIVAL windows instead of presenting Fisher price alternatives, I'm forced to stay with the shackles of blasphemy.
I've tried it in the past. The actual UI and the general process of doing things was the least of my issues. I'm not loyal to Windows or anything at all, I can easily get used to that.
Props for even actively thinking about it, that's always the first step! If you want to switch to Linux I recommend first switching to apps that run on both Linux and Windows. They exist for almost every use case, and you can migrate gradually app by app.
That's unfortunately simply untrue. You can't, with a straight face, claim that there is any actual competition to Photoshop, Revit or a myriad of other, non-programming use-cases. It's easy to use Linux when you're a developer, it's almost impossible if you're an architect. Sure, you can use wine. Good luck, half of photoshop builds are borked. All Revit has garbage rating on wine. You just can't professionally escape windows if you're in a wrong profession.
First of all, if you want to get into Linux, DO IT! It's truly awesome, I love it. Just get Mint, throw a Windows skin over it and nobody will notice, trust me. Honestly, it's incredibly rewarding.
When it comes to browsers, I now have the best setup I could think of: LibreWolf. It's a hardened version of Firefox. It doesn't use TOR and all websites are accesible. I use Startpage as a search engine. Granted, it can be a bit slow but it gets great results and there is a button that lets you open websites via a Startpage proxy. LibreWolf by default erases all browser data on exit so for logins I use KeePassXC password manager. It has an awesome addon which automatically fills in login fields, it can do TOTP and autofill that, too. It's pretty great.
Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian "Red Hat is actually good" train.
I feel like WhatsApp should be in the middle. The app is terrible, but the messaging is actually encrypted. We paranoids also appreciate Signal, and Element disappointingly gets no play here.
Also:
*believes not every company is inherently evil*
It's kind of weird, then, how they all end up doing evil stuff, including the guys that explicitly set out with the philosophy "don't be evil".
We can all tell conservative is supposed to be the enlightened one, but unless the creator is using a very malice-driven definition of evil (as opposed to including accidental evil) this line is an own-goal.
Do you think Whatsapp is actually encrypted and isn't a tool to get more information from its users because Meta pinky promised?
Closed source piece of garbage.
Open Whisper did the actual message algorithm, and I understand it's open source. It could be copying your messages at the endpoint, I guess, but nobody has caught it doing that on wireshark to date.
Fuck anything created by Facebook. It wouldn't surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp. Actually, I'd be willing to bet real money that is the case, if there was any way to actually resolve that bet.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp.
Literally not possible, from what I've read of the scheme involved. I haven't looked over it myself but I trust Open Whisper.
I used to watch him a lot as well, especially for the specific Linux content. I got a bit put off by some weirder ideas but mostly forgot about it. Which idea's does he have now and which you particularly don't see yourself in?
I guess I am a cross between “Normie” and “Conservative”. I use macOS and Fedora daily, I watch MKBHD but also watch FOSS YouTubers. I use WhatsApp, but only because, in Netherlands, it’s impossible to live without it. I don’t use any Chromium, and I use Firefox, but I also use Safari.
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
Telegram has open source clients and protocol specifications. Whatsapp is a piece of proprietary bullshit that you can't even use without a phone and zuck will sue you for even trying to decomple it
I am not a big WhatsApp fan, Signal and Matrix are clearly better from a privacy perspective, e.g. because of the meta data.
And while it's true what you wrote, it still doesn't explain my question / counter my argument. WhatsApp is, no matter how much I disliked Facebook / Meta, having better privacy. All messages are end-to-end encrypted and can't be returned to anyone, while most chats in Telegram aren't end-to-end encrypted. Telegram often doesn't give out any chats, but they are capable of doing so and could change their policies at any time.
USA, Germany, Russia, Iran, China, Brazil, and other have tried to or have banned Telegram at various points of time in the past decade because of their concern they can't access Telegram data. You can't say the same for WhatsApp. That suggests WhatsApp isn't as secure as they say.
That logic is bogus. I can't say the same about WhatsApp because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. They can't give you any message data because they literally don't own it.
Telegram, on the other hand, does have all the messages. They just refuse to give it to authorities. But they could change that at any point and just start giving the data, while in WhatsApp, that's not possible by design.
Firmly in camp conservative (yikes)
Fav OS: Fedora
Fav browser: Firefox
Fav apps: Thunder and Element and technically feeder but only because I haven't had the energy to write my own rss feed consumer nervously in dart/flutter
I'm in the process of putting together my own next cloud and moving to proton mail. After that I'll be able to install bridges from a self hosted matrix to discord for people and teams for work. I use edge, outlook, and teams on my work computer but it occasionally connects to my home network so at some point I'll probably put it on an isolated vlan.
I self-host my stuff because it's cheaper, I run Gentoo since the last 15 years and use Chrome because it's just better and friendly. I also have a Xperia android phone and really, really don't like MKBHD.
I honestly have no idea what's going to happen. Most probable outcome is I'll run two different browsers based on what works for me. I stopped acting "ethical" about computing a long time ago, with some small exceptions. I'm not here on Lemmy because ethics, but because I'm fucking pissed at Reddit.
Where does Element/Matrix fit in here? It doesn't really seem like Paranoid like XMPP since people have been using it pretty regularly now, not just paranoid people.
Isn't tor like compromised? And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Most people who got caught on Tor were caught by undercover operatives or one of their friends on there got busted. Just general recklessness on there. I have heard that CIA tries to run a bunch of tor nodes to deanonymize tor but I've also heard that tor checks if those nodes are legit before allowing them on. I don't see strong evidence for tor being compromised.
And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Privacy based solutions is kind of vague, the main privacy and security services I use are Signal, Protonmail, Protonvpn, and Bitwarden. All of these are open source, you can view the source code yourself and see if there's spyware, strangers look at the code all the time so online strangers can see if there's spyware in there, they also are all checked and audited by third parties. So the code you see is what you get and there are no backdoors or spyware running in there. You can build it all from source if you're extra cautious but it's probably done right.
So I have no idea what this guy is saying but it is not true at all.
Internet Relay Chat. Super old school, everyone connects to a server with their own clients. I think with modern encryption though it's one of the more secure ways to chat as long as the server owner is trusted.