European. Liberal. Insufferable fundamentalist green. I never downvote opinions: jeering at people is poor form. Comments with insulting language, or snark, or gotchas, or other effort-free content, will simply be ignored.

  • 1 Post
  • 171 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

    But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

    For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.




  • 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.





  • 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.

    PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.


  • 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.