Ha, good choice. After all these years it’s still among the more creative and fun.

Wise words, Bil.

Best way I know is to observe them being unable to comply with legal demands to supply data when they receive them. From what I’ve heard Mullvad has passed that test, but I’ve never tried to follow up and find details.

I’ve never used Arch, so someone may give a better explanation, but an analogy would be - Arch is like getting a box of LEGO, SteamOS is like getting a pre built model made from LEGO.

And yeah, immutability is usually considered more beginner friendly because you’re less able to break your system accidentally, and it’s lots more straightforward to roll back to a previously working system, too, when things do break.

As for installing stuff on Steam Deck, I think that’s by design, not an incidental flaw. It’s a big contributor to stability. On Bazzite, which is similar, you can install whatever you like…into a container. Only a subset of software is supported for more direct installation. Keeping everything else isolated in containers keeps the system stable.

I use these too. The “team sports” nature of it all is really deeply engrained, like a “water is invisible to a fish” kind of way. You can use that to surprise them and build some genuine curiosity sometimes.

It’s really disarming and opens up convo when I seem to disagree with them on everything… but then just agree and help them attack whichever hideous Democrat they go after during a given conversation. Same for news, the conversation shifts in useful ways when they learn I dislike “their” (Fox and worse) news, as well as what they think of as “mine”.

It’s not enough to magically deprogram anyone, but it can start the gears turning. In my experience it usually takes the situation from two people standing across from each other fussing at one another, to two people standing together fussing at everything else. It’s a start.

Honestly, with some tweaks, sounds like not a bad way to start getting your random corporate social media enjoyers to care about privacy.

Idk, being locked in to using only communication protocols that are known to be roughly wide open seems like kind of a privacy non-starter, right? Sort of fails the attempt before you even start, no?

Edit: a wiser person than me reads the rest of the thread before a comment like the above, but I’m not them sadly. (AKA, plenty of good points made by others)

They also just steal data from their clients. At least one US military branch is suing them over doing exactly that during one of their contracts.

Disclaimer: Below is only parroting what I’ve heard elsewhere on Lemmy.

To add on, I believe they are one of very few that have been served legal demands to provide customer data and were unable to provide it. From what I understand that’s basically the only evidence that can credibly validate claims of “we don’t retain your data”, which is pretty important.

It’s okay, if Coldplay is a honeypot to lure execs onto camera to self-own

Happy to add another data point, I have a Flint 2 and it’s awesome. Whole-house VPN via Mullvad supplied config file, just uploaded to the router using the given config interface…I’d buy it again for the convenience of that alone, and that only scratches the surface of what this thing does out of the box (via the trusted OpenWRT, to boot).

Just be careful if you get to tinkering, if privacy is your focus, wouldn’t want to accidentally misconfigure some random capability it has that you’re just playing around with.

Feel like saying more about what ya like?

Just in the name of completeness, I wouldn’t say that’s the only downside. I definitely have some stability issues with Bazzite, only when gaming though. But game crashes, occasional OS crashes, that hasn’t been exactly rare for me. But I will say, gaming is about the one thing in my life I’m almost unwilling to troubleshoot these days. Could be something specific to my setup that is uncommon for others, making my data point unhelpful.

And by and large, I’d absolutely recommend it for any Windows user who wants an easily transferable user experience and broadly fantastic gaming support with minimal fuss.

Would you be willing to say more about what you know / experienced about the removal of Discover? Preferences included? I only noticed it recently, been away from things for a bit, and you sound like your brief info would probably be at least as fruitful as the reading I was gonna look for :)

I’ve never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I’ve been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I’ve met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).

It’s expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).

Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t just glibly strait-jacket language, you’re part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.

Been using whatbox for a bit on recommendation from a friend who has used it for a decade or so. I could be crazy but I seem to remember them offering hosting right in the Netherlands in particular.

You could actually do it! If you founded a small dynasty of humans willing to type relentlessly for many hundreds of years, in succession.

I should definitely have not been left unsupervised as a teenager either lol. And yet, my mom wasn’t even in the same state some of the time lmao

Yep I’m this way and have recently come to realize that at my core I just don’t actually believe any other human has the right to tell me what to do. Full stop. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I should be allowed to do whatever I want, I understand my responsibilities, to my loved ones and society, better than most honestly. I just really can’t tolerate being told what to do.

And oddly it makes me a productive employee, a thoughtful partner, a good friend…largely to avoid scenarios where someone feels like they need to tell me what’s up.

But yeah, all the time society feels more and more like a constricting, stifling set of agreements…which I never actually agreed to.