Prove_your_argument

What companies have you worked for that provide linux laptops and linux desktops to common users? Not developers, not as servers.

I’ve worked in multiple industries. Macs are not rare, but they aren’t prevalent. Windows still has ultramajority market share.

On the server side, tons of things run linux. Maybe if you work for a tech company or are on a development team you use linux day to day, but this is generally a small subset of people at a company. This is not a forum for “developers” but for everybody. Someone in HR, Finance, Sales, R&D, etc is not going to be familiar with linux at work typically.

I don’t doubt that there are companies out there that have linux workstations for normal users, I just doubt it’s more than 2% of the workforce in the western world. It’s probably way less than that.

If they can identify the user’s computer, they can cross reference against all the other tracking metadata available. Since they know the browser down to the individual, they also know the predominant IP of said browser and can link your actions from before and after the vpn/proxy account was created.

As long as javascript is running they can track your mouse movement, which is similar to people’s gait when they walk. it’s unique, it’s identifiable. You can probably fuck with them by using a trackball on one profile, but once they link that trackball movement to your profile with other metadatas then the cat is out of the bag and you’re permanently known to Reddit and whoever it sells it’s data to.

As much as people will claim “just disable javascript!” - you’ll find that you practically cannot use the internet without it… and having JS disabled makes your fingerprint even more unique as few disable it carte blanche.

Basically, once they have a shadow profile of who you are it’s just a matter of time for them to link any account created to it. I suspect almost everybody’s shadow profile is quite complete.

Blows my mind that there aren’t common modpacks for Skyrim. Last time I tried getting into it I spent probably a week getting everything together… then launched the game, played a couple of hours, then got distracted by life.

Never went back to it because I didn’t want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.

It also happens from image preview caches created by explorer. I see this get hung up for some time with SMB shares and the like that have images.

Something is still interacting with the photos on your device, and although it may be mundane… do you really know every single service and process running on your device, all the time? Could we ever know? Just takes one dependency for one thing you installed to be bogus… it could even be from a rootkit installed in bios that installs whatever software on bootup so even if you wipe your system it’s there, ever monitoring, ever feeding your data away.

There’s just no user friendly tooling on windows that’s built-in which would ever pick this stuff up. AV doesn’t know what is desired or undesired behavior when it comes to stuff like this either. Sure, it won’t send up stuff protected by UAC from a non-admin request… but thumb drives, CF cards, SD cards etc all have no restrictions.

I have power toys… well on my windows dual boot anyway. Do normal users? Probably not.

I’ve used unlocker tools in the past as well, but this is not something provided in the OS and as such not something a typical user is even aware of, let alone has available.

You’ve never, ever plugged in a thumbdrive and then used the “safely remove hardware” tray to try and eject… only to receive an error that says “unable to remove, in use” or similar?

I guess i’ve never seen it happen when I was using a thumb drive to image a machine well over a decade ago.

There are a few people on the internet who seem to have reported this though:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/12t8pwo/i_cant_eject_any_storage_even_if_nothing_obvious/

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/pnbfcf/this_device_is_currently_in_use_when_trying_to/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4212072/cant-eject-external-hard-drive

https://www.reddit.com/r/LenovoLegion/comments/uv5uag/cant_safely_eject_usb_drives_on_legion_716achg6/

There are thousands of results of this. I have encountered this dozens of times personally across dozens of different systems.

How do you know that the latest version of a piece of software that auto updated on your computer doesn’t have anything snooping on your hard drive and uploading whatever it wants somewhere?

Think about it. How would you know? Let’s assume it’s not using a bug, exploit or vulnerability.

Windows hasn’t been my main os for a while but I’m fairly certain you can mount/unmount drives without rebooting.

I work in IT for a living. Sometimes something keeps your drive locked. Windows does not confess. I wasn’t talking about linux user experience because most people don’t use linux like we do.

Imagine if you were a malicious actor and you wanted a copy of all photos someone plugged into a computer that were not things like browser cache, just good honest to god OC.

All you have to do is listen on drive letters D, E, F, G and when one is plugged in with a DCIM directory… silently upload the data contents to a server over the internet when a drive is detected with that subdirectory.

Have you ever wondered why you couldn’t eject a drive without rebooting? It’s not like it’s going to tell you what process is keeping it locked… Encryption wouldn’t even matter, because you’re gonna need to decrypt/unlock it to access it, and windows doesn’t care what service or application is trying to access it, it is glad to allow any kind of file action without even admin rights.

Anywho, actor has your photo, AI trivially builds facial recognition models, pulls in timestamps, geolocation metadata, camera metadata… and now those photos you never intended to upload anywhere are in a database of PII that will be shared to god-knows-who.

Cool. Pop_OS is working quite well over here.

It’s never been a better time to convert to Linux. The best part is that if one distro turns to shit you can just move over to another.

Yeah, I know. It’s too bad there is no economic incentive to keep quality high.

Instead sysco, the people who supply something like 90% of us restaurants keeps on making more and more money y/y by adding soybean filler and other shit to their meat. They always find a way to make the change with an excuse like “prices are high right now” - and then they never, EVER go back to how it was unless it’s cheaper. Soybeans never get cheaper, we just keep subsidizing them so sysco can keep using them as filler.

Anyway…

I wish they would just raise prices rather than making everything shittier.

Year after year we eat more disgusting filler laden crap because it’s cheaper than the real mccoy. Sometimes, rarely, the alternative is actually better. Most of the time it’s just depressing and ruins the taste leaving us with just fond memories of how it used to be.

Looking at you, Cadbury.

If game performance is what makes games better then consoles will never reach the heights of PCs.

I wish there was a browser addon which would create bogus ai slop comments and just save them as drafts.

Admittedly I wish this was built into RES and just happened randomly across reddit. The ai misinformation war needs to start to punish the companies selling user data imo.

I got bans for checks notes using an anonymizer and deleting an account, then on a new account being told I broke rules for using an anonymizer on a linked account and getting sitewide banned for it because I was “evading bans.”

Can’t wait to anonymize my new throwaway and then request deletion through the california privacy law enabling it.

Is anyone actually using glorious eggroll exclusively?

I usually swap between this, a cachyos version, and newer proton versions - but i’ve been finding more and more that GE doesn’t support things and cachyos versions typically just work. Not sure if it’s just my unique build or what others are going with in general.

Instructions unclear

It’s better than Diet Pepsi, but so is dying of dehydration.

it doesn’t make any sense to have a centralized distributor acting as a middleman. The current implementation requires bringing your own game files either manually or via a steam connection. There’s only two games, the minecraft clone mentioned is just a web browser game and not actually minecraft.

Since most browser games simply “just work” when you go to the website i’d just create a profile launcher firefox link, and then in that profile build out each game you want as one of your homepage links, which would just be a grid of bookmarks basically. It’s entirely overkill for exactly two games imo, and if you’re on a desktop that can run these games you’re better off running them natively.

If you’re on mobile you’re currently SOL it looks.

So browser games are games that run in a browser. The browser is the app.

Are you saying you want some silly 3rd party wrapper “application” that simply loads a page in whatever browser without the typical URL controls like so many android and apple “apps” are? because that’s just silly.

If you want to click an icon to open, create a hyperlink shortcut and click that to launch it… you could even create a separate profile that launches JUST for games, so that it doesn’t show up in your normal profile or interact with other cached files or cookies or even have the same addons.