The short rant:

1. You don’t need to ask which distro, ask which mint version
2. The answer to #1 is MATE or xfce.

The longer rant:

I’ve been using xubuntu a bit, for guest OS in desktop VM, but I don’t really know if I like it enough to recommend it. It’s less rough than Arch, but so is 24 grit sandpaper.

Like others have said, there are many contenders for your use case, but mint stands out. I’m probably gonna go with mint once windows 10 stops getting updates. Mint or parrot. But TBH I don’t want to daily drive parrot either.

Which version of mint then? That’s really the question to ask. And if you ask me then I don’t care for all the bells and whistles, I don’t need animations or semi transparent windows. And when Ubuntu went with unity back in the day I walked. So I guess I want my GUI to stay the same. So I’d go with MATE or xfce.

No, I’m married, I don’t do offline pron

DownThemAll is one of those extensions which get installed immediately for me. If I didn’t have DownThemAll and uBlock origin, I’d might as well just use edge smh

I like the fairphone idea, I really do, and I realize that maintaining the fairphone ecosystem is expensive… But! 550€ on sale for a 128GB storage and 6GB RAM phone? GTFO. Update promises are great, but a small company promising 7 years? I hope that the fairphone company survives that long, and even longer, but I wouldn’t be basing my phone purchase on that promise.

For my usage I can get comparable phones for the same cost per day, but with less of an initial investment, and without the risk of time.

deleted by creator

From what I can gather, the proposed battery will have a capacity of 8.5GWh with a nominal output of 85MW. But it can store 85MW (not MWh) for 100 hours? Either that article is written by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re relaying, or that’s some serious standby power dissipation.

Anybody here who passed high school physics and have some insights?

Sorry for letting you hang, I’ve been swamped.

I believe he was going to LATAM and he couldn’t continue while transiting through russia.

That’s what I recall, too. That he was going to Latin America from Hong Kong through Sheremetyevo. But then on the Wikipedia page it said that Russian authorities have claimed that Snowden applied for asylum before departing Hong Kong. But again, probably propaganda.

Why is his collaborating with the russians not a fair circumstance to take in account? If he is being forced to work with them, then shouldn’t we disregard what he says as being suspect? Aren’t there better spokespersons for the FOSS/digital privacy movement that can be promoted instead?

Disregarding any statements that originates within Russia’s sphere of influence should be default. But on account of what Snowden did more than 10 years ago, he’s still given a voice in tech media.

He is almost certainly trying to leverage his fame and influence to promote russian security services goals; i.e. try to sow discord in the US.

I agree that Snowden’s fame is being leveraged, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily done on Snowden’s initiative. As you said it yourself, Snowden is a tool in the Russian propaganda toolkit.

for example in europe they were involved with green organizations in order to counteract the possibility of a rise in shale gas production in Europe.

Yeah, a Russian woman, who had received 45k EUR from the SVR run Pravfond, was just arrested in Denmark. She had run a legal counseling service for Russians in Denmark and ran for municipal elections for the socialist communists. I wonder how many people Russia has planted to run these low intensity operations around the world.

I would even speculate that he has internalized a lot of their goals (he is a russian citizen after all).

He definitely could have internalized the Russian state’s goals. But I don’t think that him being a Russian citizen should be an indication. That’s probably more of a middle finger from Putin in the direction of the US. Sorta like “Congratulations, that application for citizenship you didn’t fill out, has been approved. Go say your lines little puppet”

In 2013 we all still believed that Putin wasn’t the madman that he has turned out to be. I remember thinking that our biggest threats were right wing terrorists, Iranian nukes, and maybe North Korea. Sure we had seen what happened to Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, but I don’t think anybody in the NATO countries saw that as the test it turned out to be. My point being that when Snowden flew to Russia in 2013, intent on seeking asylum, it may not have been his first choice, but it was as crazy an idea as it would be today…

With that said, I’d like to relate to some your post:

What I am saying is it is legitimate to criticize him and highlight his collaboration with the russians.

Sure, it’s legitimate to criticize anything. But without taking all the circumstances into account, the critique loses relevance. At least for me it does, and that’s what I’m arguing.

Well let me tell you as someone living in Ukraine (and was born in Donbas with my hometown being occupied in 2014 and relatives having to leave everything because of the russian occupation);

This is on a completely unrelated note. I’d like to apologize to you and every other Ukrainian, for the incompetence of my country’s politicians. We promised you +100 leopard 1 tanks, but due to the ineptitude of our politicians, their investments, and the resulting organization, we haven’t been able to deliver a single working tank. Whenever our politicians “donate” equipment it is blown out of proportions by our media. But when it comes to delivering useful kit, it fails over and over again. Rest assured that our present government is not going to be reelected. Their replacement will not be competent either though. Anyway, I wish we would do more than ship you our outdated equipment like it was some sort of humanitarian mission. It’s not a humanitarian mission, it’s fucking war and half assing war is stupid… Slava Ukraini! And death to Russian orks.

You full well know that there are real consequences from Snowden’s collaboration with the russians.

And we’re back in the discussion at hand :) the only consequences I can think of, that comes from Snowden collaboration is the propaganda tool he is now, and the intelligence he had to offer 11 years ago. Disregard him to mitigate the propaganda consequences.

I hope that whatever intel Snowden gave the Russians, it was limited. I think that a person with Snowden’s background would be able to encrypt the information he traveled with properly.

I’d like to know if I’ve missed something here. I really don’t mean to troll you. If you believe that I’m misinformed, please inform me.

Trying to survive is fair. But putting him on the pedestal and labelling him as “untouchable saviour who can do wrong” is not normal.

I don’t think that I’m putting Snowden on a pedestal. All I’m saying is that, like everyone else in Russia, who have a public profile, Snowden knows that he can either toe the party line, or plunge to his death from a basement window. What we really need to do, is to realize that anything coming from the mouths of anybody in Russia, is the result of a proverbial gun to their heads and should be treated thusly.

He could have chosen to not collaborate with the russians

Yes, he could indeed. He could be the metaphorical guy with the bags standing in front of a line tanks. But why should he?

This might not a big deal for you, but on a purely theoretical level, you don’t see how this hypocrisy could be important for others?

If you insist on applying a purely theoretical analysis, on the actions of a very real person with very real concerns for his safety, then I think I’ve found the problem with this discussion. You can’t lift this problem to this level of abstract theoretical morality.

But to answer your question more clearly: no, I don’t see how this perceived hypocrisy could be important for others.

Do you sincerely believe, that Snowden should have stayed put and faced a firing squad for whistle blowing? Snowden is trying to survive, and if daddy Putin says “go on TV and say these lines”, then the sentence doesn’t have to end with “or else”. Snowden did what he had to do for his country, by telling the public about the surveillance, now he’s paying for it. Why should Snowden be fighting for the Russian people as well?

Very few places that wouldn’t extradite Snowden instantly, even fewer that can’t be paid to do it. With Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea remaining his options, then Russia was the obvious choice. At least survival in Russia came with a price, had he stayed then the pay-to-play model for life wasn’t available.

Original Finnish management has split off to a new independent company with the same name last year

Best business move EVER! Now people have to wonder with whom they’re doing business. Sorta keeps people on their toes. Way better than coming up with a new brand, making it easier for their five customers. /s

I was wondering what a washing machine needed a TPM for. Better title: “machine fails to boot after power failure”

We already have one for the Danish government’s apps. It’s called 2.1 stars. /s but also not really /s because most of our official government apps are actually rated rather poorly.

But seeing how the best rated app by the Danish government is actually rated 4 stars on play store, a badge may be in its place.

I’m quite aware it is. I usually use the detailed view, so sorting is easy. But going into the menu to turn off grouping only works once for me. If I go into the settings for explorer and chose the “make the current setup default” button (or whatever it is called, I can’t recall right now), then every single other aspect than grouping are preserved. Are you telling me that my issues aren’t caused by windows 11 being a needy little b*tch?

Can you though? Explorer.exe on windows 11 is already a steaming pile. Why the fuck can’t I disable grouping? If I need to find a specific kind of files in my download directory, it’s way easier for me to sort by size. What isn’t easy is that now it’s grouped by fucking date as well. IDK when I grabbed the last windows iso on my.visualstudio.com, I just know that I have <10 files that are >3GB in my download directory. But noooo now after sorting by size I’ve got to either search though 4 or 5 groups or turn grouping off.

The IT dept at work has decided that we all will run windows 11, and it’s locked down tighter than I’ve experienced in a long time. Guess who has a VM called “Windows 10 Daily driver” running. Fuck windows 11 and the iso it rode in on.

Tldr: you’re better off just buying a new monitor, and don’t go down the road paved with adapters and vague vendor promises. That way lies madness.

I’ve tried several combinations of docks and adapters, and if you do go that way, only get a dock which natively outputs something your monitor accepts and stay the fuck away from Targus, their display link implementation will add a whole new layer of frustration to your troubleshooting.

Adapters often require power, and sometimes the dock can’t supply that power in the long run. I have had setups work for 4months before suddenly a monitor dropping out randomly. As in working fine, then no connection and a few seconds later back online. After 3 docks and 4 sets of adapters, the only thing that worked was dropping the adapters and getting new monitors.