I’ve not heard that one, but it’s a better acronym to pickup the privacy abusing tech bros

FAANGs = Facebook, Amazon, Apple, NVidia, Google - ie the big tech companies - technically it’s kinda out of date because Nvidia isn’t doing much (any ?) creepy shit whereas Palantir are the worst. However the acronym was actually an investing one as short hand for high capital gain tech stocks

TLAs are “Three Letter Acronyms” - a short hand way of referring to the govt dept’s who tend to use TLAs - CIA, FBI, NSA, MI6, MI5, BND, etc.

Technically a lot of them are FLA (four letter acronyms) CIA equivalents are CSIS for Canada - ASIO for Australia, DGSE for France and GCHQ is the UK equivalent to NSA for example

Yep. It’s real, scores of noobs on the reddit subs sobbing about.

I believe protonvpn install was the usual culprit. I won’t link to reddit but the /r/linuxmint sub has many posts

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=446923

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/yes-getting-gnomed-is-a-thing

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=suxMvUuFDMw

Using a VPN may subject you to NSA spying.

NOT using a VPN WILL subject you to NSA spying.

Might as well make their job harder.

Edit to add

Everyone on the internet in any country should assume their local spy squad is spying on them plus the Americans & the Chinese. You’ll rarely be wrong anywhere in the world, and they have a lot of backdoors via network hardware (among other ways).

You can potentially have privacy from the FAANGS if you are careful. TLAs not so much.

OK, in broad terms you want a distro that is reasonably up to date, but doesn’t have to be bleeding edge.

I run Mint Cinnamon and Arch KDE for the limited gaming I do, they both work perfectly fine.

Almost all games that have a Linux port will have the support & requirements specified for Ubuntu, which has a KDE flavour, however most people won’t recommend Ubuntu (for good reasons). An Ubuntu derivative with the issues removed however is a decent choice: Mint or PopOS.

Mint is by a long way the most recommended Linux distro for beginners and for good reason - the install process is easy, the community is supportive, and it does pretty much everything straight out of the box.

Cinnamon desktop environment is customisable, not as much as KDE. If you’re really keen on sticking with KDE then either EndeavourOS (which is basically a bundling of Arch so it’s easy to install) or KDE Plasma - which is Debian based but more up to date than Sid I believe.

I don’t recommend Arch for beginners unless you’re highly technical and willing to RTFM.

Most windows games will work in linux via proton/wine etc. You’re Your only really blocked ones are the couple of companies that insist on kernel anti-cheat and are anti-Linux (EA I think ?) it’s a handful of AAA games that are locked out.

Generally you don’t need any hardware changes nowadays, in fact it’s often the other way around - stuff that W10 & 11 no longer support can often be made to work on linux. AMD & Intel GPUs are less troublesome than Nvidia, but it’s generally not a big deal anymore.

Reddit’s /r/linuxgaming has fairly reasonable people (for reddit) and a fairly deep archive that will allow you to search for the specific games you most play, and ways to get them running.

KDE is not a Mint supported DE and the KDE files are not in the Mint repos.

This can be made to work if you’re experienced but is definitely not a good idea for beginners. It will eventually break, and dependency hell is a thing.

For a KDE option suitable fir beginners, Fedora offers KDE as does Ubuntu, or there’s KDE Neon

Ubuntu touch project runs linux on a tablet while retaining the phone/android functionality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch

https://ubuntu-touch.io/

https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/userguide/install.html

https://liliputing.com/ubuntu-touch-mobile-linux-distro-is-now-based-on-ubuntu-24-04-lts/

There’s a list of supported devices there. Lenovo was one

Caveat - I don’t use skylight or bluesky

A cursory search indicates the US should work. It also came up with a reddit thread suggesting it’s basically just bluesky - dunno how true that is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1jquvhe/creators_to_follow_on_skylight_social/

"Your followers and follows on Bluesky and Skylight are the same unless you make separate accounts; something to keep in mind. "

Which implies they’re different front ends for the same thing.

Good find although not the article I was thinking OP was referring to. It was more recent, within the last 12 months I think.

My best recollection was that the person had a hotmail or outlook account which was suddenly terminated following criticism of microsoft (possibly their failure to address a security issue). That account was their login/access path to a high profile foss tool. I don’t think the tool itself got taken down in this case.

Not sure how accurate the above is, it’s my vague recollection.

Remember the Github dev who got blocked by Microsoft

It’s funny, I do remember the story, but I can’t find it across multiple search engines (obviously Bing are going to block it so DDG can’t find it, but I also tried startpage, searx, ecosia as well)

Can you point me to any links or give me a few more search terms to help finding it ?

God help me when I’m barracking for 4chan

Will give it a try too

I’ll give summit a try, thanks

Hey no worries, sorry if that came across a bit harshly.

I ended up finding the right setting eventually - but thank you very much for the reply

OK so that works but is awfully clunky - swipe partway right to upvote and fully right to downvote as opposed to tapping on the up / down arrow.

Yeah if that’s not configurable I’m out. And I’m damned if I can work out where to configure it

EDIT

OK, it’s settings, appearance, comments, show comments action buttons.

With that usability hurdle cleared, OK, I’ll give it a burl

OK maybe I’m thick but that’s not what I see on my menu - I’m on android in case there’s an ios thing happening here.

From the main screen there’s 5 buttons along the bottom - right hand one is settings.

There is no comment option listed. If I go to general then there is a comment subsection (opposite order to above) but it only has comment sort, hide parent, enable comment navigation and combine fab & nav buttons.

So is it one of the last two I need to change ?

I’ve just installed thunder.

Pros setup was super easy although it initially said my instance didnt exist then suddenly found it

Cons Long pressing a comment and getting an overlay popup in order to upvote a comment is very annoying

I’ll leave it installed but its not for me right now.

Has anyone found anything else good ?

AsteroidOS is a linux based replacement for wearOS (android for watches) which is FOSS and removes all the google privacy issues.

https://asteroidos.org/

Kick the can down the road and download the MASgrave Win10 script (I think that’s it, I don’t use windows) that puts you on the Long Term support - iirc that gives you until Jan 2027. That’s enough time to get through the zero parental sleep phase and be able to think clearly…

If that’s of interest I’ll dig the correct details out (ping me) or I’m sure someone else knows what I’m waffling about & will drop the link

Yes but don’t use it for anything valuable. USBs have a high failure rate when used for heavy read writes.

You can get USB enclosures for M2 drives if you want to go that route a bit more reliably. Ensure you use USB3 (which will still be slow but not as boneachingly bad as USB2)