FDE requires third-party software (veracrypt)

There’s bitlocker, I think it was added in 7 or Vista. What do you mean?
But other than that, I would rather use VC too.

standard system utilities (think ssh, git etc.) are not available on a fresh install

Hmm, depends. It has a built in openssh client and server, but the “feature” (automatically installing package) is off by default. It can be enabled at install time with the use of the standard windows image modification tools (DISM I think?)

And then you’re supposed to download and install .exe files from the internet? Since microsoft controls what goes in the windows store

I think it’s better that Microsoft does not have that much control over software distribution.

But again, most things you want aren’t there, and you can’t even trust the things that are there.

Of course you can’t, nobody can tell by looking at the store page if it was modified by anyone, including Microsoft.
The amazon app store for android explicitely tells that they are adding tracking code to every uploaded app, and to make this possible they replace the digital signature of apps uploaded. Google with the play store does not tell anything like this afaik, but for a few years now it also basically compromised the digital signatures of developers, by requiring the private keys to be mandatorily handed in for continued app updates.
I don’t trust that these companies that already rely on mass surveillance as a revenue stream, they won’t add tracking code to apps unauthorized by the devs. If not right now, it will happen in the future.

For some reason, a billion dollar company cannot curate a software repository of the same quality as the ones maintained by unpaid volunteers in the Linux world.

Besides quality, I think open source distro’s repository and it’s packagers are largely more trustable. They are not motivated financially to modify the packages in unwanted (by the user) ways, and they are transparent.

So yeah, I think it’s just not there yet. Maybe in a few years windows will be a viable alternative for desktop systems.

I think they are drifting farther and farther away.
It was an option. But the shitshow of 11… thanks that’s too much. I’m not installing that for anyone. And 10 is soon end of life…

I wanted to search for the postman tracker’s address, so went to check on notbob.i2p. website unreachable. Isn’t this a relatively fairly popular site here?

Edit: on a second try it now loaded in ~10 seconds.
This latency is probably not to much of a problem, but two things:

• the instability that it couldn’t even start loading the site, and it’s regularity
• if a text site with few graphics takes this much time to transfer, bittorrent and movies will be even worse because that’s often not compressible

1-2 days is slow but acceptable I think. It’s a compromise.

But for some reason for me it’s much slower, even though I run a router that participates in routing and usually has 50+ or even 3 digit share ratios, with ~80 GB traffic a day in both directions, so it must be integrated well.

Now I realized I have only tried a single I2P torrent yet, and it was just 2 MB, and my experience was coming from both i2p sites and outproxies often being very slow or unreachable with the common tunnel settings.

Ater purchasing and downloading a game from Steam, the Steam client is not actually needed for it to be playable. Of course it will try to start up Steam, and if isn’t installed then it will complain, but if use use a “steam emulator” that can be worked around.
This is useful if you don’t want Steam to track how much and when do you play, when is it that you are online, what achievements you got and such. This is afaik also the only way to say no to forced automatic game updates.

One such emulator is Mr Goldberg’s steam emu.
It has a bunch of configuration options, per-game settings, optionally portable settings, windows+linux support, and I think it’s even open source.

Using the Goldberg emu is not piracy, neither DRM circumvention. The Steam API is not a DRM, most Steam games just make the Steam client a hard dependency, not bothering with making it work without it.
When the game is protected by DRM (this should always be marked on its store page), the steam emu won’t be enough, but you would also need to patch it’s DRM protection. Sometimes that’s easier, sometimes harder.

Steam emus may or may not work with multiplayer games.
The Goldberg emu has a replacement Steam’s own multiplayer network communication system, which works through the local network or a selfhosted wireguard-like VPN, but with big centrally hosted multiplayer games you’ll run into licensing validation problems or such.

I apologize for the confusion

Meta is working to address these concerns

Sure, they are working to solve these concerns by teaching their LLM to lie and obfuscate, and by becoming so big nobody sues them anymore. I’m sick of this.

It’s pretty hard to not use their services when among else even fucking university courses only upload their content there.

Fixed a word, it was supposed to be unavoidable, not unavailable.

Depends on the penalty

I2P and it’s sub 100 kb/s speed? Series, games would never finish downloading, but then also only those torrents are accessible through I2P that are published to an I2P tracker, there is no DHT (yet?). Clearnet torrents and clearnet peers are not accessible through I2P.

Or is it something on my end that makes it that slow? ISP download bandwidth is stable and much higher.

You are allowed to modify a car however you like

I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Like, even if we are not taking about adding a badly welded 4 wheel attachment without the use of a trailer hook, the car will have to go through technical inspection every few years.
If the inspectirs deem that a non-functional such system is a problem, you’ll not be driving your car anywhere.

This is just the usual “nothing to hide” handwaving argument.

This data is not used by some theoretical policeman to laugh at how bad you drive, it is part of commercial datamining present in virtually all devices and services you use.

GPS and such? Great that I have a smartphone that I trust more, and have more control over, than this big blackbox with no access whatsoever.

I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free.

I can’t morally justify anything they are doing, and have been doing for many many years already. Yet I use their public services because they are unavoidable. But I would never give money to such a company.

Ads need to be tailored to the user when delivered

1. It does not. If you install a new browser and open YouTube the first time, they’ll be able to show ads to you
2. They could be tailored based on other factors too, like country, region, or even household by the IP

I think the backend could just generate the ad ridden video feed for the specific user. Most probably it would be very resource intensive, but I can only hope so… but then I also don’t know much about HLS and other fragmented streams so it might not be a performance problem at all.

like a linked list

I think the full list of chunks is (currently) known beforehand. That’s how yt-dlp can download on multiple threads, but also how it can show the number of total fragments relatively quickly on the progress bar

How?

By the way, yes, it is.

The player does not have to be elevated. With an unelevated player the file exploiting such a vuln would be able to execute code with the privileges and access of the player

The way I understood was that it’s not a problem if the system does something bad because the newcomer I directed there won’t know anyway.

Sorry if that is not what you meant, but the comment has read like that.

Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

For programs, that is not a problem.
This is a problem for data.

Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.

That’s a bad point. What that logic introducing someone to windows is not bad because they don’t know about it’s data mining components anyway.

I’m not saying systemd does that. I’m saying that you basically said: “they wouldn’t know even if that was true, so it’s fine!”

Nothing is hidden, it’s all there

Yeah, of course, it’s all there in binary. For programs of course that’s not a problem, but for data that you may need to look at any time, it is. It’s harder to interpret both for humans (significantly) and both for any program that want to make use of it (unless they use the specific library that came up with the format, and by that also pulling in all its libs transitively)

Binary data is not much less obfuscated than the system files of windows. It’s all there, you can read it

I’m not sure I totally agree with him, what I’m sure is that I don’t agree with you, because you clearly haven’t read his comment.

Piracy for privacy!