Bro doesn’t need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn’t need DE to do anything.

Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible

If by “most” you mean only the ones over 500 bucks. Chromebooks have almost completely taken over the bottom end of the market (which is more than adequate if you’re not gaming) and Chromebooks are not compatible with Linux unless you enjoy getting your hands very dirty.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

The fact that you’re even saying such things as “time constraints” or “to learn new software” suggests an attitude to computing shared by about 0.01% of the population. It cannot be re-stressed enough to the (sadly shrinking) bubble that frequents this community: the vast majority of people in the world have never touched a laptop let alone a desktop computer. Literally everything now happens on mobile, where FOSS is vanishingly insignificant, and soon AI is going to add a whole new layer of dystopia. But that is slightly offtopic.

It’s a good question IMO. Choosing software freedom - to the small extent that you still can - should not just be about the freedom to tinker, it should also just be easy.

The answer is Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora.

Not quite. XML came several years after HTML! Both are descendants of SGML.

Yeah I know all that, but for whatever reason this dumbass domain seems to be the only one I ever see. Personally I’m all in favor of having a respectable ,canonical domain for newbies and occasional users, but this one is not going to cut it.

Slightly tangential but PeerTube is never going to compete with the Big Red Play Button if people use juvenile domain names like “peertube.wtf”

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Ha, good analogy.

This sounds like an elaborate way of saying you want to blog.

Or, as the kids call it these days, “to post on my Substack”. The two things being identical except that the latter sounds cooler and allows them to indulge their corporate Stockholm syndrome.

Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.

Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it’s your own personal computer. Personally, if it’s SAAS then I’m not much bothered what they’re running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.

Sure, but my script only gets rid of the second and later parameters, i.e. ones with & not ?. Personally I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single site where an & param is critical. These days there few where the ? matters either, but yes YT is a holdout.

automatically modify a YT link to a designated invidious instance or whatever

Surely that’s the link that should be posted, then?

using your GitHub

It’s not yours, it’s Microsoft’s.

This is a really good question. I’ve also been wondering why there seems to be no obvious go-to service for blogging, i.e. full-form authored text, in the same way there are for photos (Pixelfed), video (PeerTube), and of course microblogging and discussion forums like this one. Seems like an oversight.

Yes, there’s WordPress. But IMO WordPress is just overkill for most use cases, with its massive database backend. Text is text, the web was designed for text and it worked before databases existed. A static site generator will generate a flat text site just fine (I’ve used them) but you need to host it.

Someday I’ll try self hosting but for now, I’ll pay for decent services.

Maybe you shouldn’t even need to try?

I’ve changed my mind on this one. I used to believe in the utopian internet dream of everyone hosting their own stuff on their own domains. But managing domains and hosting are both a PITA. They require money, technical expertise (because security), and commitment (or else your site goes away). The URL of a blog article posted, say, right here is probably going to be more permanent that it would be on the average private site. And Archive.org is recording the content either way. I’ve come to the view that sites should be left to organisations, and individuals should do themselves a favor and just affiliate themselves to one of those sites. Against payment if appropriate.

Which leaves the question of which site?