As of audacity 3.0.3 (or was it 3.1.3? Shit it’s been a while…) it includes telemetry from the russian company that bought it. It was forked to oblivion and Tenacity is the best replacement fork.

Just to add for new users, find this info easily by typing “what to do after installing Fedora” into your search engine of choice, there’s many articles about it (and all of them have the same information for the most part).

Honestly the thing that helped me most with that sort of stuff was just subbing to r/linux (now would be c/linux but this was like 4y ago now I guess…fucking hell time flies huh?) and reading up on stuff/asking questions for a few months before I switched. There’s also linux4noobs (both c/ and r/) for asking specific questions, it’s slower on lemmy but still can offer help and honestly I should probably make a post here about it again to drum up awarwness. Finally I’d like to add that many times communities related to specific distros will be more help than general communities, if you have a question about Fedora for example it can be helpful to ask in c/fedora over c/linux sometimes.

Now as to your questions here, just to kinda boil it down, the main difference between distros is the prepackaged stuff that comes with it, and the package manager. Package Managers are basically your “app store,” this is where you’ll get most of the stuff you need, for the rest, Flatpak is a package manager available for all linux distros, and some things will have .deb or .rpm files on their website. The ones you listed are indeed distros, Lubuntu is too however.

DEs are basically your UI. If you ever changed the launcher on an android phone back when that was a thing, it’s basically the same concept. Fedora and FedoraKDE are the same distro with much of the same stuff under the hood, but Fedora (Gnome) is more maclike and FedoraKDE is more windowslike in terms of user interface. For this reason Ubuntu (Gnome) and Fedora (Gnome) almost feel more similar than Fedora (Gnome) and FedoraKDE. You can install any DE on any distro for the most part, but in the beginning I recommend picking a distro by considering the DE first and the package manager second, and everything else (long time stable vs bleeding edge updates for instance) third. You can always switch later for free, the only investment is time and maybe an external hdd/ssd for backups.

Someone will 100% come correct me and argue this lol, but I’m just trying to kinda explain it in “doesn’t already know about linux” terms (so hopefully I effectively did that at least lol). If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask here or on linux4noobs, and of course you can always try these distros out for yourself before installing them! You can use a USB drive and a program like Balena Etcher, Fedora Media Writer (iirc available on windows), or Rufus to create a live boot disk, boot into it instead of your OS, and play around. There’s typically no persistent memory so everything you do will be reverted when you shut down (and all saved files will be lost), but it’s just for trying it out before you “buy” it so to speak (just don’t click install unless you want to install, of course). There are plenty of guides for that out there, it’s actually a step in the installation process for most distros.

Holy shit that’s a blast from the past lmao.

Fwiw, I’d say put him on FedoraKDE or Mint. Mint is the classic beginner distro now that Ubuntu has lost favor, and I just have a thing for Fedora, but it’s a popular distro with plenty of help available and KDE feels pretty windows-y (or windows stole from KDE but who’s counting.)

Eh, you’ve already dual booted and “used linux more and more,” unless you can think of a reason why you’d really need windows, and since you’re already comfortable with linux, you might as well switch fully if you think you’re ready.

Don’t get me started on dispo vapes, the absolute worst. The juice is all bad, and the single use sucks. Much better to get a refillable pod system, even better to make your own juice but even if not, the stuff in the bottles is better than the stuff in the dispos.

No worries!

It’s definitely not impossible. Whatever it is I hope dude is ok. And I still encourage the use of FOSS whenever possible.

Did he travel to Russia? I thought you said he traveled to China. If so aaah “because he’s there?” If he was in Russia I’d be inclined to agree regardless of his nationality that Russia would be the be the bigger threat, in my opinion “the country he’s in” would be a step above “a separate country that is at war with another separate country.”

What country did the guy travel to? I thought they said it was China, if not then my mistake, but if so, “yes it does.”

If there was an american national dev in a country where america couldn’t touch them, and they suddenly traveled to the US and dropped contact, it would certainly be suspicious that the NSA or CIA could be involved.

Very true, but we can’t just not criticise a government because the people involved checks notes “aren’t white.” What would make them above criticism? In my view the only possible answer is because (and it’s usually applied to children or the mentally disabled,) “they don’t understand what they’re doing.” In my personal opinion “Nonwhite people” are just as capable as “white people” of knowing what they’re doing, as they are not by default children or mentally disabled (though they do also have both categories, and those categories should get a little more leeway). They know spying is wrong whether they’re “chinese” or “american.”

Exactly, but being that this thread involves the country known as China, the reason to distrust those proprietary blobs is the CCP. If this thread were about an american dev, the threat would be NSA/CIA, if Russian FSB, on and on, as such.

No he wasn’t, he was saying never trust Chinese proprietary code (blobs), because they can compel citizens. If you can audit the code you can audit the code, the country becomes irrelevant.

Furthermore in this instance even if he was saying “don’t trust chinese devs,” not because they’re bad people, but “because they live under an oppressive regime that can force them to do the bad thing,” that’s still not racist, it’s still a criticism of the regime itself that very well could be rectified (well good luck.)

The claims are neither irrational nor hysterical, they’re totally grounded and based in reality, and we should be just as suspicious of them as we are of The West™®©. What’s more, being critical of china in a context where it’s relevant while not mentioning The West™®© doesn’t mean you never criticise anyone other than China and Russia, it means the current conversation is regarding China. If this were a story of an American dev being sketchy and including proprietary blobs, me and you, probably would be in here wondering if the NSA or CIA is involved rather than saying “but the CCP.” I remain critical of proprietary software regardless of it’s origin.

No, I do that on threads about american devs. You can’t just hand wave any criticisms of a government away with “racism” or “but whatabout this other government you also complain about?!”

I notice you haven’t told me that homophobia is bad too while you’re calling me racist, I guess that means you like homophobia? No? That’s just as ridiculous as “if you criticise one government you have to criticise them all in the same comment.” This isn’t “did you bring enough criticism for the whole class” time.

None of this should be news to anyone here, lemmy is highly privacy focused and that doesn’t go away simply because the proprietary blobs in question could be doing sketchy things for the CCP instead of the NSA, either way it’s bad to normal people who aren’t blindly allegiant to the CCP or the NSA.

My car was Hecho en Mexico so long ago they didn’t know cars could even connect to anything other than OBD2, phone was wiped for graphene, and my light switches don’t have proprietary blobs that can phone home, they have screws and wires and absolutely no (internet) connectivity. Hell even my computer is Taiwanese, and runs Fedora anyway, though I am already bitching about Intel ME and AMD PSP.

Honestly, the concern around privacy is nothing new for lemmy, the only problem is that instead of worrying about corporate or US GOV spying in this case the worry is the CCP, and that’s bad because criticising anyone but “western propagandists блять” is a no-no here.

Yeah, sure would be if anyone had done that, but that assumption was an invention of your own not contained within the statement you replied to. “The belief” is that the Chinese government can coerce any citizens within it’s borders (and some outside it’s borders no less), stop putting words in other’s mouths yourself then.

Mmhmm “canned meme response” yes. Totally not employed to curtail criticisms of the government you’re defending, I can tell by the originality.

Hang on, it’s racist to call out totalitarian dictatorships that put muslims in concentration camps and have secret police in other countries to enforce their draconian laws abroad on other sovereign state’s soil?

Fuck that, the chinese government is sketchy as hell, and so are you for trying to downplay the distrust said government has earned quite well as “racism.” Do you work directly for them or is it more of a 3rd party contractor situation?

Hell I’d probably just make “comics-list.txt” and just manually list them. Not individually probably, but like

Action Comics - #1 CGC 9.9
Batman (2nd) - 404-407
Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees - A (complete), B (complete), ashcan.
Creepshow (1st) - 1D, 2-5A
Creepshow (2nd) - 1-2A, 3C, 4-5A
Creepshow (3rd) - 1A 
Earthworm Jim - #1

Or something to that effect.