It is but creeping privatisation may change that, as does legislation becoming more hostile to unionisation since the 1980s.

The broader point is that individuals can try all they want to preserve their privacy, but then friends, family and organisations spy on them, often unwittingly, eg when we share with them calendar events or email messages. The only way forward is collective resistance, building alliances and influencing public policy. But it’s always been like that with systemic issues.

And resistance can only be collective. Another reason unionisation is as important as it’s ever been.

The one thing holding me back from switching from Windows to Linux was the very poor PDF support in Linux. Every time I raised this several people told me I use PDF wrong. Others would tell me to use Inkscape, Draw, Okular etc.

Office workers, publishers, academics and many more are expected to edit several PDFs every day. It may be simply crossing things out in a draft, adding/deleting/extracting/converting pages, OCRing or dewarping images. Telling colleagues, clients and line managers they shouldn’t do it is not an option. Adobe does all this and more very well. This workflow is so common and important in so many contexts, I am surprised it’s not a separate application in the LibreOffice suite. What is more surprising is some of the attitudes.

I have now switched to Linux anyway, but I had to create scripts to do things with Ghostscript. Not very user-friendly and I wouldn’t recommend Linux to people who rely heavily on PDF handling.

Same situation here. For heavier editing I now use local Stirling PDF and BentoPDF. As I say above, both run in docker, but Stirling PDF also comes as Appimage. They are powerful but don’t feel like integrated applications.

But there is a surprising gap in Linux for PDF editing. Available tools are like toys for the task or geared towards techies. I would expect a PDF reader/editor to be a separate application in the LibreOffice suite. (No, Draw or Inkscape won’t cut it, sorry)

I stopped recommending Master PDF Editor when I realised they were trying to lock me in with letting me know after the event that watermarks would be added.

PDF4QT is aekward in many ways but the latest version has the best compression, even allowing you to select one-by-one which images will be compressed and how.

Other options for editing are local Stirling PDF and BentoPDF. Both run in docker, but Stirling PDF also comes as Appimage. They are powerful but don’t feel like integrated applications.

I agree it’s great but I had issues running it under Wine. An alternative is Xodo for Linux which apparently is Qoppa PDF Studio revamped. These three look strangely very similar. But Xodo has other issues, including crashes.

The implication is that sending links to encrypted files with the decryption key added to the URL (eg Thunderbird Send, Mega etc) is not zero-trust. Decryption may take place locally and the key part of the URL may not be sent to the file hosting service, but when the recipient clicks on the link and is served one-off code by the web site, that code may be compromised.

As we know, the best way to be sure is to do your own separate encryption but without secure-by-design most people will think you are very odd demanding that decryption is done separately and keys are shared through a different channel. Speaking from experience, no matter how much training they are given at work, most people, including HR, would rather you sent them sensitive documents (like passport scans) in the clear as email attachments or at least in a way that involves a single click (Wetransfer etc).

I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.

Yes, and you might also say that time-starved humans just reviewing LLM output may generate more accurate reports than having to write them from scratch in a rush. That’s until humans get complacent or are expected to do even more per minute. But there is a fundamental difference. Unlike humans, LLMs don’t understand context and don’t do sanity checks. When they hallucinate they can do so wildly, without a sense of implications, but always with confidence.

A policy I saw coming out of an NHS (UK) department mandated ‘human-in-the-loop’ which is essentially what the article mentions in the end. The risk is that over time clinicians may become complacent with ‘good enough’ and don’t bother to review thoroughly. And it may be easy to spot mistakes, but not necessarily omissions unless you keep your own notes. More so after a long session, although medical appointments are typically short and focused.

On a positive note, in my experience clinicians using LLMs do indeed spend more time engaging with service users. In an ideal world, they would be given time to engage and take notes, but this is not going to happen.

EEA and UK apparently.

In addition to wifi, Bluetooth beacons would be good too.

Seeing the same SSIDs (eg in a cinema) might also mean you are not moving, but then how can you tell you are not sitting near another train passenger with their hotspot on?

Jepster on Google Play was good but from v8.0 it won’t start if, like me, you have Google Play Store disabled. Presumably, they need that for the optional in-app purchases but they never replied to my email so I don’t know.

From FLOSS, I am experimenting with FitoTrack which looks promising. Another one is AAT.

Colota is great for general self-tracking.

I’ve been using this for a few weeks and it’s great. In addition to offline-first, it would be nice to be able to ask Colota: List my trips between date1 and date2 when I was near (ie within x meters from) point y.

I am planning to use this for a long time too, so an export/import data for when I change my phone would be nice. I see Export but not Import.

Also, being able to delete trips between date1 and date2 would be useful. Currently, you can delete 1-by-1 or recent trips only.

I run a Tor proxy on my raspberry pi and all my browsers across all my household devices have foxyproxy installed. This way we access defined websites through Tor as standard eg when we query search engines and wikipedia. I try not to overburden Tor though. Never had a problem.

Windows refugee here. I installed Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my main machine four months ago and I am still ironing out issues. Eg CUPS was asking me to login all the time and didn’t accept my credentials. After some days researching I discovered I had to log in as root. Then, I discovered I didn’t have root credentials for some reason. I had to create them and then add my local user to a group! Just to be able to use my home printer.

Or suddenly my clock was 62 minutes off. I discovered the NTP service was never set up properly and I had to install chrony.

I don’t see how I could have avoided using the terminal. These are only a couple of examples. No deal-breakers and on this occasion I had the time and determination to resolve them. I could have easily given up.

My understanding is that sandboxing is not mandatory for Snaps, but it is for flatpaks. Some of the Snap code not being open source, and generally the technology being centralised around Canonical apparently is off-putting for some.

This ranking is very close to how I see this. Anything after Docker/Podman is out unless I absolutely need an application in which case keeping a record of dependencies is a good idea. But I want to know the work system will absolutely start in the morning hours from a deadline. Avoiding single points of failure is another way of course (ie multiple systems, OSes, backups, password managers etc).

I agree with the popular view that Debian Stable + KDE Plasma + Flatpaks (or Appimage, Docker) strikes a balance between system reliability and freshness in selected applications when that counts. I may be missing updates for KDE Plasma but v6 is quite mature so I don’t mind. I know storage is cheap but I am instinctively uneasy with containerisation as it’s done by Flatpaks etc because of the duplication you get with all-in. But if that’s the price of reliability, so be it. It’s just that sometimes there is only a PPA or a .deb, which is why I asked.

EDIT: I just tried distrobox for the first time. It is amazing how efficient it is. I ran Firefox on Arch and I couldn’t tell the difference in resources. Amazing really.

I have been preparing the move to Linux for years, switching to FOSS cross-platform applications on Windows and installing Linux on my secondary machines. A few weeks ago I made my work machine dual boot with the intention to remove Windows completely. I find that I never log into Windows at all already, and my Debian Trixie + KDE Plasma experience is the same in many areas (mainly because I use the same applications as before) and vastly better in others.

There were issues I had to solve but nothing major. It is true that Windows has been very stable and efficient for me, but people forget that when this happens it is the result of many years of learning, fine-tuning, decluttering and getting used to Windows. You get to that stage with Linux very quickly, and it feels much better.