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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.

    As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.

    what am I missing?

    Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.

    Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.

    Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.

    (Edit: it’s to its)


  • Yes, at the beginning of the pandemic it was discovered that Plex Inc had been tracking, reporting home, and selling user watching habits to advertisers. Basically the exact thing many Plex users were trying to get away from.

    This inspired many developers (who were otherwise stuck at home due to said pandemic) to fork Emby and thus Jellyfin was born.



  • Yes. Absolutely 100%. Canonical has a pretty solid track record of acting like a corporation.

    Can’t speak for @[email protected], but I was happy with Ubuntu when they first started - they took the best of open-source, put it in a nice package and then put money into improving it. It’s just over the years they’ve drifted away from that and slowly have been replacing stuff with their own in-house stuff. At this point, they’re sorta Microsoft light. Maybe harmless today, but only because they want to look better than the competition.

    If that alone weren’t sufficient reason to be skeptically pessimistic, enshitification is trending, all corporations seem to feel that now is the time to turn the screws. Can’t blame a guy for expecting bad news generally in this environment.



  • I think Ubuntu is a for-profit company. I think System76 is a for-profit company. As a rule, companies tend to respect other companies in ways they don’t respect people.

    I think it’s more likely that System76 will rebase to Debian than Ubuntu kick them off, but if Ubuntu really starts pulling out the brass tacks, I don’t think System76 will show any loyalty.

    In other words, I think Ubuntu benefits from counting all the Pop!_OS users as part of the Ubuntu family (at least statistics wise), that they’d be killing a golden goose by trying to evict them, even though they’d obviously prefer them to use Snaps.



  • Ahh, so this isn’t a processing issue it’s a data access issue.

    Frankly, if you can’t access the raw data of your voicemail inbox, probably no third party developer can too. This means that the only way to implement such a tool would to be to work with the voicemail provider. If they’re a for-profit company, they probably have no incentive to make the data available unless there’s a big moneybag involved somewhere in the exchange. That’s probably why no such tool exists.



  • I recommend using Transwiz to zip up your user profile, you can move the .trans.zip file to a neutral location (external drive, network storage, etc). Of course if you have valuable information stored outside the C:\Users folder, back it up as well. Now you should have a system you can safely mangle, destroy and rebuild without worrying about user data. Once you’ve built your new setup, extract the zip folder into /home/[your_name] or ~ and you’re all set.


  • With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).

    Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)


  • Yeah, since most of the public instances only make available creative commons stuff it’s better if you have a mood than particular artists. I suspect if most people switched they could find new artists to meet their tastes within a year.

    My gut suspects that an artist with a good patron following probably has as much take home pay as a similar artist that signed a record deal. If true (and that’s definitely an if), why prop up up an industry that exists to siphon as much value away from artists as possible?



  • There’s a workaround for this issue.

    1. Go to https://open.audio/ or https://funkwhale.audio/#get-started
    2. Register for an account.
    3. Enjoy over 30k hours of creative commons music, freely shared.

    FunkWhale is another decentralized service like Lemmy or Mastodon. (It also runs on ActivityPub under the hood.) Most of the publicly available pods only share creative commons material, simply because it’s the easiest to share, but artists can share under whatever license works for them.

    If you’re technically inclined, you can run your own pod and load whatever music you own onto it, and share it with others (I presume you’ll take care not to share beyond whatever license you have permits). Pods sharing pirated music exist, and they obviously should be avoided. Even if you’re not technically inclined, many pods allow you to upload some amount of music, you’ll want to double check the server’s rules to determine if that can be used for your personal library.