Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It's maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
Edit: Opting for Mint.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it's common even for 'experienced' folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn't play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I'm on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out
It really isn't, though
as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn't notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
Not gonna bother with the rest of your comment if the start is that weak, tbh
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It's a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop's components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the "USA bad, so product bad" rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
They can still sanction your country and then you can't get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It's just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
FOSS has no country lines.
I've wanted to switch to OpenSUSE for quite some time now from Fedora for the same reason. Should really do it now
Its so beautifully stable, without giving you ancient software like Debian. Never had an issue using it n its got a grandma level installation.
What exactly in the privacy agreements is this person worried about? All I’m seeing is PANIC but without a reason given…