Soon there are European elections. Voting for the Pirate parties and getting other people to vote for them is a good way to stop this. They are fighting hard against this law. Especially Patrick Patrick Breyer of the German one. Anja Hirschel, who will follow him, will likely continue with the same vigor.

Donations are also a great way to support. Donate to the Pirates, EDRI, or local groups opposing this.

I use it on a Pixel 5 and even there it is fluid while browsing. Only on Youtube there is the slightest stutter for HD Videos. Heavy sites like Discourse fora or Cryptpad or such work flawlessly.

Maybe Kolibri OS?

Its an amazing project, booting from a single floppy disk into a full graphical OS with multiple tools. And that on PCs with almost no RAM.

I sometimes use it to backup ancient PCs.

Example from Networking Hardware:

Cisco has had multiple cases where they likely built exploits for Government spyware into their devices. And they have far to many vulnerabilities which are found. This leaves two options: Either their security is so bad that intelligence always has backdoors ready and governments shouldn’t use them, or at least some are backdoors built in accordance to NSA demands and goverments shouldn’t use them. https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/nsa-hack-exploit.html?m=1

On the other hand Huawei, far less security issues, even offered to open their code for checking of backdoors and to let goverments check all updates. They are shunned by western governments and partially even banned.

This is handled in the modem Firmware. Linux just has to supply “User has dialed number x, go into emergency mode” and then route the audio.

This is solved for all Linux phones as far as I know. From Openmoko over N900 till Librem 5.

Ivanti Connect Secure VPN

So its spreading via a closed source VPN software. Why should you even use that when there is great VPN software available on Linux which works reliable for decades?

Well of course you miss zero trust connections, multi-cloud readiness, award‑winning security and proven secure corporate access …

Interesting. For the Nokia N900 there is Maemo Leste which also uses mainline Linux (+ a few patches they are working to mainline) and there everything works. Mind that works means in this case: Does what I want if I issue a number of console commands. However most of it by now even works via the GUI.

Keep in mind that Leste is a project by a few enthusiasts and writing drivers for undocumented hardware is a monumental task, writing GUI for a whole mobile OS is also complicated. So it is utterly astonishing, how far they got!

The point is, they already did. 99% of webservers run Linux. They are all out in the open and hackers love to get their hand on them as they are likely to have mailservers on them and they have a public IP so they can always be reached.

And most of them do not get hacked. And those that do mostly get hacked due to bad passwords or bad website code. I administer one and see the thousands of attacks running up against it daily (most are just attempts to log in with basic credentials). And of course I see the daily influx of updates from Linux.

If a new security flaw is seen, its often quite difficult to use. And with Linux somebody makes a patch before simple tool for hackers are out. With Microsoft products you wait till the next patch day, in the best case critical exploited bugs are patched in days. Also security flaws in closed source products are often easier to exploit and tools to use them are available fast. (Such flaws are often already discovered in open source products by third eyes and testers before they make it to production systems.)

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, like heartbleed. This was an easy to exploit flaw in an often used Linux service and it caused a big turmoil because many where to slow to patch their systems.

Also of course if Linux gets more popular on the desktop more software will be an attractive target for malicious actors and some software may get popular before many people take a look at the source code. But the situation will still be much better compared to closed source systems.

(Also of course more closed source software will be made for Linux then)

Sure because Error Code 0x8007057 tells you immediately how to solve the problem.

Linux error messages like error: kex_exchange_identification: client sent invalid protocol identifier "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" are completely arcane tough.

I support both systems. And Linux support is so much easier. Mostly in runs out of the box. If it runs I continues to do so and If you have an error you get a specific message like above.

With such a message you either:

• See right away how to solve the problem
• Search it online and get a specific solution for exactly you problem
• Or you can ask Experts for a solution for your specific problem.

With Windows: No systems runs out of the box, I always have to install additional software (7zip, sane browser, …) and also for anybody remotely privacy concerned have to adjust many settings (for which tools exist thankfully)

If an error occurs under Windows and I get a code like above:

• I can sometimes guess by my experience what the reason is and solve it.
• If not I search the error code and circumstances which lead to it online, then apply the 20 solutions presented one by one in hope one works
• Ask experts which ask me to run a bunch of diagnostic utilities because the error message does not tell you anything. (Yes by now I can also guess which utility could provide relevant information, but not because Windows told me)
• In a noticeable amount of cases the solution is: We can not determine the reason for the error, please reset everything (First a restart, then run this cleanup tool and if this doesn’t help just reinstall!)

An SSD really is the solution. You believe it just speeds up boot time, but it does speed up nearly everything else too.

Your Webpage? Your Browser loads it, stores new data into the cache and stalls while waiting for the HDD. Or it knows elements are in the cache and stalls waiting for them.

You click on the application menu? You PC tries to load 20 icons, tiny amounts of data an SSD has ready in a microsecond. Your HDD takes a full second because the seek between the 20 places where the icons are on the HDD takes so long.

I have some very old PCs I manage (mainly for relatives) and one couple uses a Core 2 Duo E6400 which should be quite similar to your PC. This PC is very usable for daily browsing with Ubuntu 22.04, boot time is about 25 seconds, then about 10 seconds to load up ebay. (I admit I optimized boot time quite a bit) The other PC they have is even slower than that, I just do not remember the exact CPU right now. That one is even used for old browser games similar to candy crush.

Of course it is not what I would use given the choice. I want to compile code in seconds, watch videos in glorious 4k and play a 3D game from time to time. But for them it works perfectly well, so well that they deny my offers to upgrade them

I am very happy if you can enlighten me. Granted, I do not install Windows very often (otherwise I would bake all these things into an image), and there may be improvements. So feel free to make your point and save me time.

An no, security updates can’t run in the background. If I sit a user in front of a PC, the PC has to be secure. Which means that the zero day exploits from a few days ago which are already exploited in the wild have to be fixed. Also yes, software for basic tasks and configuration till usability is reached is part of an operating system install. Otherwise you have to compare the time to install a barebones Linux (1 Minute) with a bare Windows install (still 30 minutes).

I currently use chocolatey for automation of software installs. But Libreoffice alone takes minutes to install on Windows even on fast PCs. If you know a better/faster tool I am happy to listen.

For me the 30 minutes to install is about right. After that I have usable Linux and an unusable Windows.

To get Windows to the same state:

• Add 5 Minutes for clicking trough the "Do you want to enable handwriting? ((( We just allow ourselves to collect samples of everything you write to “improve our recognition engine” )))
• Add 20-30 minutes of security updates (thankfully it got much faster with SSDs, before it could have been hours)
• Add 20-30 minutes of installing necessary software like an office suite, PDF Reader with basic functionality, 7zip. This is only 30 minutes because I spent hours automating the downloads and installs trough scripts.
• If it is my system or a company system: Add 20 minutes to go trough the settings of Win10Privacy to at least reduce the phoning home and to enable some necessary settings for working with the system like “Don’t restart at random times”
• Add 10 Minutes to remove the installed bloatware like People, Windows Maps, Windows Experience Host, …

In summary:
Linux requires 5 minutes attention and is ready after 30min.
Windows requires 40 minutes of attention and is somewhat ready after 2h30min. Even if I skip the privacy stuff its still at about 1h20min.

To be fair: On Windows and Linux I immediately install ublock to Firefox afterwards, on Linux I run a single apt command to install some more niche software which takes about 3 minutes on a fast network connection.

I had great experiences with old games on Linux. Mostly they work better than on a modern Windows system. For Example Neverwinter Nights 2. Under Windows movement is jittery on fast CPUs. There is a community patch for that thankfully. Under Linux it just works with WINE (the patch is advisable for other reasons there too). Also loading times are blazingly fast under WINE and Linux. On my HDD PC 1 second vs 50 on Windows. Now with a NVME SSD, Windows also only takes 2 seconds.

Of course Wine/Proton is not perfect, I still have a dualboot system for that. But I boot to Windows very rarely these days. When I do I am hit with so many slow updates, that I don’t get to my game. Maybe I should stop doing them and cut of its network access.

Really old games tend to be more difficult. For a relative I set up a VM with Win98 as the performance impact won’t hurt the games, some even benefit. (I believe the games where Safecracker and Theme Park) Even older than that DosBox and ScummVM work perfectly.

Niche language, but try out PureBasic.

Its IDE is based on Scintilla. And it is very fast, even on an ancient PC it runs. It is specific for the programming language.

And here some advantages it has compared to a simple text editor:

• Autocomplete of all functions and many API functions of the OS
• Hints about parameters
• F1 Help for all functions by just placing the cursor on them
• Jumping to errors in the code
• Automatic backups of all the progress of your codes, no problem to backtrace even if you forgot to save or commit.
• Manage Projects (Groups of source codes and different targets)
• Well integrated debugger

I agree with you in many points. Most other IDEs I am forced to work with are horribly slow. Especially those which rely on electron. Sometimes they lack features every basic editor has by now.

This is to say: Good IDEs can exist and are a great benefit for the programmer. But modern IDEs often chase keyword features and use complex and bloated frameworks to achieve them. Sometimes even forgetting to add basic features which made IDEs a thing initially. An IDE should take almost no time to setup to your needs and should not hinder with complex operations which take seconds to run, it should only support in code creation and aim to make features like autocomplete show suggestions in milliseconds.

I can’t speak for the Nvidia issue. (Only that it is widely know that Nvidia actively works against Open source and only just has begun changing their stance, so Nvidia support is still poor on Linux. Their proprietary drivers aren’t great either. I stick to AMD since using Linux, they work great out of the box)

But the audio issue baffles me. Under Kubuntu with KDE I just klick on the Loudspeaker in the systray and choose the device. It even remembers it over unplugging and replugging devices.

Rgarding openssl: Thats the price you pay for freedom, you can change the system how you want, even into non working states ^^ BTW: You can repair such mistakes with a LiveCD even major ones like this.

A little crazy theory:

Maybe they hope that by disabling awards in September there suddenly will be a lot less premium users. Gold and platinum gave a week and a month after all. So there will be a sudden spike in ad revenue just before the planed IPO.