I just updated my Fennec (F-Droid build of Firefox with some deblobbing and changes) and half of my settings got reset, with the most interesting one being my search engine being changed back to Google. Is it just a bug in their building script or is it actually something more shady?

I suggest just reading the full article and making your own conclusions but I personally deleted the game for now. I need to see how far these measures will actually go and will they want to like take my DNS history or something.

I love ray tracing and path tracing when they're done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don't seem to care about RT.

When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I'm not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we're approaching the physical limit of transistor size).

I believe it's one of the first apps to do it. It's not too responsive on my device now (newer software do be meaninglessly heavier) but M3E is stupid and cool so all apps should be M3E.

Free and open-source software is now going strong with extremely popular and even industry standard products. However with fame always comes abuse which unfortunately affected FOSS as well.

In recent times we saw separate political decisions by big FOSS companies/teams such as the Linux kernel development team prohibiting citizens of Russia to contribute to the project, as well as general rise of political (specifically aggressive left and ultraleft leaning) drama and discussions in the space.

This makes me believe that the situation is only going to get worse. I can't be sure if projects will start implementing restrictions on their use (therefore switching to a model that is not considered free and open-source) but it's clear that contributions will likely and increasingly continue to be affected. This may cause all kinds of issues, up to addition of malicious code that starts on certain (and obviously unreasonable) triggers.

A complete death of the free and open-source model is practically impossible. There will always be people making their code truly free (as in freedom), at least for a limited time. Though when it comes to big players, their free future is at a significant risk.

"But I can always fork it!" - sure you can and your project might even gain solid ground but the political issues will remain, both for you and your contributors.

"Then how do I fix it?" - it's simple - keep unrelated politics away from your and others' projects and don't ban contributors who have political activity of any kind outside your projects, even if you disagree with them. Also create a separate account on social media for all politics-related discussions. Do not use your developer account or especially your project's official account.

Unfortunately there's still no information on the matter. Neither Tobias nor Brodie know pretty much anything.

However I would say the reason for the ban has to be illegitimate if the truth remains hidden even after the negative public reaction. From my knowledge on the FOSS development world and community, the chance of the reason being political is fairly high as the FOSS community stupidly doesn't respect anyone right leaning. The "we won't let you change our system" reason is also possible though.

Tried the Xfce version on a PC that I needed for some browser work only (Discord server moderation). The installation was a bit scary but not too bad.

Then I was greeted by an HDD boot speed comparable to my gaming PC with an NVMe. I still miss that now when the PC is running Arch (btw).

When it comes to issues, I only remember a missing screenshot utility (fixed with 1 command) and fonts (can't remember if I ended up fixing it).

I tried installing a bare system and then installing the best DE (which is GNOME.) but I had to configure Xorg and Wayland myself and uhh I failed miserably. Still wanna do it though.

I've always been a hater of the Anaconda installer. It's not necessarily hard but everything was in wrong places and UX was nonexistent (just try to remember the tile view of steps). Now that I've heard a lot about the new one, I had to try it.

So I downloaded the latest stable Fedora 42 GNOME edition image and booted it off an approximately 15 years old flash drive.

The first impression was "bruh no rounded corners. Imagine using web UI" but then it got better. There's no stupid tile view and the only real complaint is in my case the buttons on the bottom were in a weird spot between the left side and the center (just move them to the right please).

However I'm strict so I also checked the partition manager thing and I actually liked it. I haven't tried doing actual work with it though (as I didn't plan to install anything) so there might be issues there that I didn't notice.

Overall it's a terrific improvement but you do a simple installer so just switch to the GNOME's one duh.

I'm genuinely curious. Other changes are just following modern (and stupid) trends so nothing weird with that. This one though just makes the maximize, minimize and close buttons look smaller than others (new tab in Console etc) which imo creates inconsistency. Also it may not apply to all display resolutions but it does on mine.

As a tech support channel member I sometimes see people not being able to install or repair a desktop OS because of inability to get another PC to create a bootable medium on. I guess such an app should help them because USB-A to USB-C adapters are much cheaper than computers. The only downside (or probably a feature) is it can't flash official Windows ISOs yet.

Today I got banned from Mastodon (infosec.exchange instance) for stuff nobody should ever consider wrong. I can't add screenshots (because I can't register on imgur for some reason) but I can add the comments below:

1. @eff tbh I'm considering joining Meta because I support their recent decisions. The FOSS alternatives are very toxic and don't want to change.

2. @BrodieOnLinux do we have any evidence of you actually living in Australia though?

3. @GossiTheDog ugh how do so many people not understand that opinion based censorship is not democratic at all? It's more nazi actually if you ask me.

4. @nixCraft well I support the changes. Moderation nowadays is pretty terrible and doesn't allow any unpopular opinion or religion. You can use heavily moderated forums that only allow your opinion but for gatekeepers it's not the way to go.

5. @eff @theintercept @jilliancyork ok the first example is kind of hate speech. Calling people trash is kinda bad.

6. @eff now this is better than fake free speech.

However, the admins at least very kindly recommended me finding another instance before suspending my account. That kind of attitude is highly appreciated, even though I disagree with the moderation techniques themselves.

With that out of the way I would like to remind everyone one more time that FOSS social networks do not offer what they claim to be offering. If you're on such a network, you can stay there only as long as your political, religious, cultural and other views are the same as the admins' and the users'. If you want real free expression, I guess you can only get it on Facebook or by creating a new network. In other case you'll constantly be getting reported and eventually banned like in my case.