Yozul

That’s all true, but also completely irrelevant to the point I was making. Gene expression isn’t in that 99.9% of the DNA that is the same. All of the individually identifiable genetic information in the genome is in the other 0.1%. This is a privacy community. A complete understanding of how genetics works is neat and all, but it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. I didn’t say that all humans 99.9% identical to each other. That’s obviously not true. I said that there’s no point in storing duplicate copies of identical genetic sequences, and that saying they store less than 0.1% of your genome only says they’re not doing that.

For the record, 5-10% is way plenty to narrow things down to a very tiny number of people. Probably one in most cases, and it contains a lot of important medical information. That’s not some trivial unimportant thing.

99.9% of your genome is exactly identical to every other human on Earth. <0.1% just means they aren’t storing things that don’t change between people, because why would they?

It’s not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn’t get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It’s not bad, but it’s a testing branch. It’s not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.

The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto, you’re better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.

My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven’t changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn’t always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I’ve never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

It’s true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the “last” version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they’re still in the “oh, this is what we’ll probably do when we release GTK5” phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don’t have good Wayland support. I wouldn’t stress out about it too much.

XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.

No, a single dumb tweet doesn’t make you a fascist. Running a company that people are supposed to trust with their privacy and security and doubling down on praise for a political party that has been using state surveillance to hunt down people for choices they make with their own bodies as the party of the “little guy” does mean I’m never going to trust you again, though.

Well, it’s certainly true that it varies by where you are, but I’m pretty sure Graphene isn’t going to protect you from an APC any better than /e/OS, and the county sheriff where I live wouldn’t know a stingray from an Xbox, but maybe I just live too far out into the middle of nowhere to be typical.

They’re actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don’t do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It’s just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.

I also think you’re overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn’t just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn’t even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you’re not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.

It’s dangerous to get too obsessed with trying to secure everything against state actor level threats. It’s not that hard to dramatically increase your privacy if you’re currently using a regular android phone. Sure, yes, more security is better, but a single individual’s private information isn’t actually that valuable. It only becomes valuable to exploit people at a massive scale. Even just putting up minor speedbumps to data collection can massively increase your privacy as long as you aren’t being individually targeted, and more people getting into caring about their privacy is a good thing. Any de-googled android rom is already a big step in that direction. Lets not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Hey, if you don’t think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don’t notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do myself.

Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

Not counting the time a lady popped her clutch pulling out of her driveway and hit me, since I guess that’s not “almost” an accident, probably the time I got caught out by a snowstorm, and on the way home I did a 360 on the freeway before regaining control. Thankfully there was no one else around, so it didn’t hurt anything other than my pride.

Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.

One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.

There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.

I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.

This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?

Uh huh. You think that some cloud computing processor just randomly can’t run a bash script? What, does the uname command not work on their processors or something? That would cause problems a lot worse than just Neofetch not working. I obviously don’t have one laying around to check, but I find that highly unlikely.

I have a Raspberry Pi. It works just fine.

Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.