Also, no, this is not an ideal way to do this. Ideally every package you want is in your distro’s repos so you’d just need to do “apt install [package]”.

The reason this one isn’t is because mullvad wants to make sure you use their tested, secure, and updated version and they don’t want to maintain that for every distro. So they have you configure your package manager to use their repos.

This is relatively uncommon to come across in Debian. You’ll normally only find it in security applications or very niche ones. The Debian repos aren’t the most comprehensive but they’ll contain the vast majority of common softwares.

Been trying to think of a term for this issue. It’s not quite chicken or egg. But both sides need the other side to incentivize them. If one gets going the other will follow, but they’re waiting for each other. Like some sort of collaborative standoff.

They don’t. I’ve been on the same Debian install on laptop and desktop for years. It’ll make some odd decisions with packages sometimes, but it hasn’t bricked.

I don’t have hard data, but you don’t see these kinds of posts about Debian, Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora.

Not at all. I use a tiling WM, and most of my time is spent in text editors or a browser. I just like having everything visible and spaced out automatically for me.

I think tiling WMs just have a lot of overlap with the terminal-heavy crowd. They tend to require some manual set up, and they tend to be very keyboard shortcut heavy. Both things also popular with people that tend to like using terminals.

Also keep in mind most screenshots advertising someone’s set up are to show off, not their regular workflow. It’s like looking at someone’s professional head-shots and wondering if they usually dress like that.

But that’s exactly the problem. If the company is kind about it, or forced to play nice by effective regulation, there’s no issue. But if there’s no regulation and the company wants to, it tends towards monopolistic tendencies. And there’s nothing that incentivizes a company to play nice forever, in fact they’re incentivized to maximize profit. So Vertical Integration is bad without being checked.

A real transition will happen in bursts. I’d love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there’s no budge.

Oh,my info is old then! Exciting

The main issue nowadays is anticheat. If you play esports (league of legends,apex legend, fortnite), you will have trouble. Pretty much everything else will be good to go.

I mean google’s whims as in they’re making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I’d rather these problems were solved collectively.

I think it’s a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I’m not sure how things would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP’s failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.

To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.

They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.

Are XMPP or Matrix really any more seachable? I’m all in on FOSS, clearly, but do they fix that complaint? I feel like the real solution is separating chat and longer term info, and putting the longer term info on a wiki or other public and indexable format.

You’re talking about real privacy, the critiques above are all about exposure reduction (incorrectly framed as privacy). Good retention policies are still important for situations like trying to delete something that you regret posting.

An example I could think of from the other site is the very common occurrence of posting some relationship questions and then deleting them later so that the person they’re about can’t stumble onto them. In that case you want finding the thing you deleted to be nontrivial enough that it can’t accidentally be found. Someone with both the skills and knowledge about what they’re looking for may still find it, because it was once public, but that’s a different threat.