It was also an option to not make a useless field. Not like this self reported dob is going to cut it for the existing age verification laws as is exists now. But I can be mad at people in a position of community production for not having a spine, too.

How is this supposed to be making the best of the situation anyway? It accomplished nothing but piss off the community and signify to authoritarians that open source developers are ready to bend over for them. Simply threaten unenforceable fines across the world and suddenly everything is hopeless. Better get ready to comply, its inevitable! Its pathetic. Ageless Linux might be performative bs, but at least its critical of this over reach instead of intentionally signalling compliance in advance.

Good system design doesn’t do things without me asking it to. I’ll gladly manually re enter my birth date for an external service if its required, which to be clear, should be as close to 0 times as possible. What, should I keep all my job application info in the initialization system too? Because a website I’m on might ask for it at some point? Don’t want to be too redundant.

Literally this field serves no purpose other than to build compliance with the surveillance state. No end user asked for this. Like I said, can’t imagine any end user making use of the existing systemd fields either. But those also didn’t get any attention because they weren’t made as a reaction to threats by a malicious regime.

it’s in one place that any third party can reference.

But why would I want that?

Even if you ignore the whole “this doesn’t verify anything” discussion, why would I want to give third parties easy access to personal and potentially sensitive information? I personally am not interested in simplifying data collection for corporate entities who definitely do not give a shit about the safety of my personal data, let alone hypothetical children. I do not know why this data collection needs or would be desired to be implemented within systemd, besides being a direct response to age verification laws saying its an OS providers responsibility to collect it. Arbitrary data collection by private entities is not “useful”. My personal data has no business being referenced by random asshats that ask for it. There are so few things in the world that “justify” needing my age that I would suggest it would be easier to make my birth date a permanent data point on my PC. Same goes for the other personal details that systemd already supports. Crazy to imagine anyone actually using those on a personal machine.

I don’t like this theory because they have already had access to this information with social media. Individuals willingly volunteer this information about themselves and their friends, and data brokers would collect and centralize it from multiple sources. This is why some platforms were trying out AI age verification in countries that hadn’t officially mandated ID verification yet. They were confident enough, with all the info they had already collected, to assume someone’s age. They would hope that the people who fail the check would be few enough to not cause an immediate uproar(“just verify with ID, what’s the big deal?”)

This is most certainly more of an authoritarian power grab to prevent any anonymous criticism what so ever. Id verification will allow them to target any application that does not comply and preserves user privacy. Anyone who does not comply will be implied to be a criminal or enemy of the state. They want to make a system where corporate surveillance cannot be avoided.

The corporations lobbying for this want to benefit from being a part of the fascist state, but don’t want to handle any legal obligation or public scrutiny from the obvious damages that will come from collecting this information. That’s why you have different companies lobbying for different “solutions”; whatever keeps them from facing repercussions but still makes them money for being a part of the surveillance state is what they will support.

Teamspeak 6 self hosted servers are in open beta, and is a comparable experience in quality/features to people looking for a Discord replacement. All the open source Discord clones don’t have group screen sharing available yet.

Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn’t that big of an issue, which is problematic… this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.

Years ago, official development of an android app of syncthing was abandoned by the official developers. Most android users migrated to an already existing fork by a github maintainer catfriend1.

Catfriend1 unceremoniously disappeared, with their github repositories being taken over by a new user researchxxl. This was entirely unannounced and wasn’t really discovered until people with automatic updates enabled on *Obtanium noticed it.

researchxxl is not a known community member, and is being very reclusive when interacting with the syncthing community. Their github account was made specifically for the repository transfer, and their method of handling existing credentials is suspicious; looking no different than a hostile take over.

At this point in time, they are collaborating with Nexon, a user who worked with catfriend to publish syncthing fork builds to Google Play. They are more well known and trusted. If you can trust Nexon, and trust that end users in general are putting more scrutiny on the github source code after this whole situation, you can probably trust the recent releases for now.

Sorry for any details I may have gotten wrong. AFAIK, no one has taken the time to document all the things that have gone down. I would have linked to such a document otherwise. A lot of the discussion on this is happening in separate discussion threads, one of them being researchxxl’s github issue page, which they are censoring/deleting discussions from with(till recently) no oversight.

*Edit: this is also a poor summary. There is a lot of additional context that I don’t feel comfortable trying to encompass. Like why the official syncthing developers stopped their official android app, or catfriend1’s forum account coming back for a short time to try to explain their side of the story. Frankly, for how many people are using syncthing, I don’t think this story is getting enough attention.

I was using Windows 10 LTSC for a bit before Home/Pro editions reached EoL. My past experiences with Linux were all such a significant addition of frustration; I couldn’t justify switching to Linux.

After a string of back-to-back hardware failures, I’m back to using a 10+ year old desktop I built. Ended up trying trying Fedora 42 with KDE and suddenly had none of the issues I had with past Linux attempts. My three biggest complaints before about Linux had been random Bluetooth device incompatibility, Nvidia support being trash, and most Steam games requiring extra commands and constant troubleshooting to get running decently.

I feel like a lot of those issues were from me starting with Arch derivatives on niche laptop hardware that was already beginning to fail. My experience with Fedora has been fantastic. My biggest problems now have been: -KDE discover store is really inconsistent with its packages. I would not expect the average Windows “user”(bought a PC and that’s what it came with) to bother understanding the difference between a flatpak and a native package, and would get really annoyed when stuff is out of date or mis-configured out of the box. I had a better experience using a GUI in Arch with the AUR to install software, ironically enough. -There are a few things, ie Nvidia drivers, non-free codecs, non flatpak Steam, that have inconsistent community documentation on how to install them. These become immediately bad first impressions on people switching from Windows, and I think its important that they are clear to install properly as possible.

Other than that, Fedora is stable and runs great. I’m using a Nvidia GPU and have no issues with it(this time, at least…). A lot of my software was already open source, but I run a few Windows applications, besides Steam games, with Wine; rarely do I have to do any extra configuration. KDE Plasma as a desktop environment has given me the customization and control out of the box that I have been missing from Windows for over a decade, while Fedora has some sane defaults for it that make it accessible to Windows users expecting something a bit more familiar.

There’s always a weird quirk here and there, but I have had my fair share of troubleshooting on Windows before as well. I feel like Linux as a home PC OS is mature enough that people who don’t do much on the PC anyway could find their way around it, while it’s still going to be an annoying learning curve for people who see end user software as a hobby. Entirely usable though.

Obligatory I don’t play games with anti cheat and I don’t use streaming services with DRM. I have a few games with Denuvo, and haven’t had any problems arise that needed me to switch Proton versions that end up triggering install lock outs.

Its usually games, though its generally “whatever we are doing at the time” with trusted, long distance friends. Its not something I would want to share over publicly accessible URLs. And it almost always involve varied and fast moving visuals, so basic software encoding is not acceptable.

I have tried jitsi before. It does not use hardware accelerated codecs or provide audio isolation for applications. I can’t imagine using its screen share for anything more demanding than a slide show presentation.

Do you have any guides or resources to using OBS as a screen share tool? I tried in the past to use it as a platform agnostic solution, but ran into a lot of problems that would prevent my friends from using it. Virtual cam didn’t provide audio, and using input mixing to combine mic + isolated application audio(already a multi step process in OBS per app) involves a lot of tech knowledge that is beyond what the end-user demographic of discord is willing to put up with. I also tried using vdo ninja as a P2P shareable link for video group conferences, but couldn’t get the webRTC links to work with direct streams from OBS.

I despise Discord and have been having success with moving close friends to more private IM apps, but so far, nothing has come close to the effortless ease of discord group calls with screen sharing. Most competing social screen share apps don’t even have audio support, and the ones that do either don’t have audio isolation, or their implementation of it is broken.

On top of using include mode, be sure to go into Qbittorrents settings and bind the network interface to the VPN. That will ensure that even if the VPN is disconnected or turned off for some reason, Qbit will not attempt to communicate on clear net. Some people would rely on Proton VPNs kill switch feature for that, but that is not available with split tunneling.