At some point we need to start welcoming people to the Light, instead of demonizing them for having been in the Dark. It's pretty difficult for me not to dunk on people as they wake up to the nightmare that they voted for, but a lot them ARE actually otherwise decent folks. Making America Great is going to involve deprogramming a lot of people.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a choice in who they work for in end-stage-capitalism. Work is about survival, not ideology. The majority of Americans are not far-right capitalists, but the vast majority of CEOs are, and it's not really possible to survive long enough to start a small business in most of the US without investment from a far-right capitalist or inheritance (usually also from a far-right capitalist family member).

People gotta earn money to survive, I don't blame the employees for this. And this is not just a case of Meta's privacy being bad. This is close government involvement with potentially serious impacts and implications across all US based platforms.

"Are we the baddies?!"

"I'm only following orders!"

I think the be careful what you do on Facebook is implied. He's highlighting something that's less expected, where you may need to be careful what you do on Windows systems.

They mentioned Microsoft updating privacy agreements at the same time as other companies, and OP mentioned that the context was a discussion of a Windows ultra-keylogger type of feature, the implication is they're in on this shit too, and Linux is a way to not use Windows.

It can't. Its just a kernel. Maybe with the right gnu core utils...

Things have changed. Before, the worst Facebook could do to its critics was ban them and those that they knew. Now Facebook can have ICE turnover your house without a warrant for a troll post. A private company is now working to suppress a specific kind of conversation that questions the judgement and actions of those in power. It's a subtle but very dangerous difference in why a bad EULA may not have previously caused concern but the new one is.

He is kinda whistle-blowing about the next level of evil. Up and coming.

And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.

Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you're somehow immune to surveillance because you're using the same software as Amazon's EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn't cracked Linux Mint yet?

Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?

Yeah OSINT existing is proof that no backdoor is secure, not even mentioning what you can buy from data brokers, something authorities wouldn't need warrants for.

I think what they are getting at is that Meta does this and they find it likely Microsoft might be doing something similar.

It's called the Cassandra Complex, named after Cassandra/Kassandra of Troy.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”.

Bruh, it's not game of thrones. People just need to work.

According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.