One of the key issues is that disabled people can’t build the accessibility they need to participate. There’s no “contributions welcome” that one can say.

It’s a very dire situation, but I’m glad this is getting more attention in the community. This is probably one of the most important blogposts I’ve read in a while.

If you downloaded it in 2023 then it’s likely a really old version of Linux mint, I’d advise dowloading the latest release from their site and reflashing.

there has not been a more fun time to use linux than today (and every day after today).

The caveat are games that require kernel level rootkits for their “anticheat” functionality. These are usually massive multiplayer games that have some emphasis on microtransactions and in-game gambling (think your league of legends and apex legends/fortnite).

Decades spent on the puter

chances are you’ve already benefited from collectively owned software and haven’t even realized it (silicon valley loves piggy backing open source)! Using a libre operating system just means taking onus of that fact and using it for your own ends from top to bottom. Really it’s just a gateway to being being even cooler.

windows in a virtual machine to play some games?

While this is possible. Chances are that most of your games are already playable through Valve’s efforts with proton. You can use apps like bottles to run them or just use Valve’s Steam client itself. Linux is nowhere near the state it was in only half a decade ago.

I can tell you from experience that I have been able to play modded fallout new vegas on Linux using mod organizer 2, so you just need to give it a shot. Protondb is a community database for games and there are always people willing to share their experiences on getting it to work with linux.

How about for emulators like duckstation and pcsx2?

Both support nearly every Linux distribution. If you install Linux Mint, it’s as easy as going to the software center and downloading them from there.

Firstly, generative AI has valid use cases for accessibility and quality of life features.

Hard disagree. First, to get it out of the way, disabled artists should not be expected to use LLMs to “reach” the level of able bodied and neurotypical artists. I’ve seen this take be brought up in other places and its always shrouded in the same ableist rhetoric. Not that you were implying that if you arent.

Second, none of these features are necessary which cant already be replaced by a human. Need to summarize an article, what if the author just writes a summary for the article as well? The speaker has an accent or speaks in a way thats hard to hear: closed captioning subtitles and more access to sign language translators. There are better methods to solve these problems that dont require the resource consumption and lack of rationality that an LLM provides.

We were already in the hellscape dystopia when the first programmer signed an NDA and computers started becoming the property of corporations rather than being collectively owned by society itself. Nothing has changed except the absurdity of it all.

unless I want to be my generation’s equivalent of a boomer still using a Nokia 3310 instead of an iPhone or Android.

And this is bad how? Technology isn’t inherently better because it’s new or widely used. Old printers that dont brick themselves because of not using the correct toner are more useful than one that can print out a page of AI slop.

AI isnt the “smartphone revolution”. The technology has existed for decades, they just found a way to market it to users and creating this shock and awe narrative of promised breakthroughs that will never come.

Dont get caught up in the hype because a dying, deindustrialized empire thinks a slop machine will defeat communism. Israel doesn’t use AI to accurately predict which Palestinian father and his family to vaporize, they use AI to make this process more cruel and detached.

I guess its not useless on technicality, but it is definitely malicious. Now that Chinese tech firms want to create their own models, they’ve done the same web scraping frenzy that takes down websites and forces everyone to “cloudflarize” themselves or risk being taken down by an AI bot scraping every single webpage on the site, even ones that aren’t meant to be accessed. These programs constantly need more and more training data to keep being relevant but none of that data is sourced in an ethical way. Everyone else has to eat the externalities that these companies offload because this technology is no way sustainable if these scummy tactics aren’t used which should be a death blow to its adoption but it never is.

The energy requirements for genAI is immense. While China has made inroads in sustainable energy and optimizing their models, none of the western models even care and will willfully accelerate climate change for zero benefit to society. This isn’t a “Nokia phone to apple smartphone” jump in progress, this is just a very well tuned crypto scam.

Generative AI as it’s being presented now is just a paper crown technology and a ploy to drive up artificial (as in not organic) demand for compute power to make investors richer while also impoverishing and endangering working class people. While you can say capitalism is much to blame, I don’t think any socialist government actually needs a text slop machine to function compared to a imperialist state with a text slop machine.

AI has always been a term in computer science that’s been co-opted by techbros in both China and the US to be a status symbol.

AI is haram

edit: This isn’t a hot take.

China getting into AI is annoying, they shouldn’t ape White people’s useless technology. Hopefully socialism reveals how useless genAI is and it gets relegated into a party trick and they don’t wreck anything important. I will bury myself in dogshit if socialism collapses because of ai slop.

My favorite thing to say to AI people is “no high speed rail?” Works every time.

I’m from the Northeast US (demonrat blue state) and the woke liberal education I got was that communism starved people and everyone was poor because the communists used their authoritarianism to steal from the middle class and fund their vacations.

• Stalin -> Killed millions in the gulag
• Mao -> Starved millions and hated democracy
• Lenin and trotsky-> were defeated by EVIL Stalin who made the USSR into a totalitarian hellscape.
• Hitler -> A product of his circumstance, really quite blameless and he was a figurehead.

A lot of the anti-communist education was -> they had good ideas -> evil bad cult of personality comes in and quite literally enslaves everyone -> all the people are poor and sad.

Most of my peers know this is bullshit so they go on the internet to “discover” the true history but are funneled into the liberal zionism pipeline where they somehow love Cuba but think we should nuke China.

What was the context for this? Justifying bombing a hospital or a school of kids?

I hear you, I see you FartMaster69

Use a docker/podman container for managing python projects in NixOS NixOS doesn’t follow the filesystem hierarchy standard so a lot of standard tooling won’t work without extra steps.

The issue here is that the attribute “wxPython” does not exist in nixpkgs and you’ll have to package it yourself. Trelby is also not packaged either.

Also: https://www.trelby.org/download/

There are pre-built binaries for Ubuntu, Fedora and flatpak from FlatHub. On NixOS you can setup flatpak via a module in your system config and its my recommendation if you’re not going the docker/distrobox route. You don’t need NixOS for this and I would just recommend something like Fedora Atomic with KDE (Fedora Kinoite)

The pypi installation method seems like more trouble than its worth.

You either want to recover a file or you don’t; confusing users with a third alternative when they are anxious already by the possibility of losing precious edits is considered a bad idea, certainly so as we move further towards smaller, simpler Emacs.

The support for lzip-compressed Info manuals was removed from the Info mode. We anticipate that lzip will disappear from the face of the Earth in the near past, and are preparing Emacs for that in advance

Amazing bit.

Also LLDB support? I didn’t realize it came through in this version, too good it got removed in the anti-next version.

“Welcome to the c/libre megathread: How much of a nerd are ya?”

• https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/2289

Dear LibreWolf Developers,

I’ve noticed that you’re quite open about your political stance, identifying as leftists and expressing support for what you describe as “woke” ideology. I respect that you have opinions and the freedom to share them, but I’d like to offer some thoughts on why I believe it’s worth keeping politics separate from the LibreWolf project.

Politics is an incredibly difficult and messy topic. Most people—including myself—can’t claim to fully understand what the “right” kind of politics is. There’s so much propaganda, so many lies, and endless deceptions swirling around, and the worst part is that people often don’t even recognize when they’re being influenced by them. They genuinely believe they’re on the right side, but it’s hard to know for sure. That uncertainty, I think, makes politics a shaky foundation for anything beyond personal belief.

LibreWolf, to me and I’m sure to many others, is about something more concrete and universal: freedom, open source, and privacy. These are the core values that make your project stand out and attract users from all walks of life. Real freedom isn’t about picking a political side—it’s about empowering people through technology, regardless of what they believe. When politics gets mixed into a software project, it risks alienating parts of the userbase who might otherwise support it. You could lose people not because of the software’s quality, but simply because of a statement that doesn’t align with their views.

Take what’s happened with Firefox recently as an example. Their entanglement in political issues has left some users feeling like they can’t express themselves freely anymore, and it’s driven them to look for alternatives. LibreWolf has a chance to be that alternative—a browser that stays above the fray, focused purely on its technical merits and commitment to user empowerment. But if LibreWolf becomes perceived as politically aligned, it could turn away potential users who are just looking for a tool they can trust, not a platform for ideology.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have your beliefs or express them in your personal lives—everyone’s entitled to that. But when those beliefs get tied to LibreWolf, it can complicate things for the project and its community. I hope you’ll consider keeping LibreWolf a space that’s purely about the software: a tool for freedom, privacy, and open-source ideals. That’s what makes it special, and that’s why people like me turn to it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for all the work you put into LibreWolf—it’s a project worth preserving for what it does best.

Thanks, and regards, A user who like your work

PS.: This is a reaction to #1978

I love AI-generated slop posts on the bug tracker.

Response from librewolf:

Thanks for enlightening us and making us realize the error of our ways! wasting our time with this issue.

China, Russia, North Korea

Conveniently all enemies of the US State Department. Don’t those tankies know that these countries are bad because checks notes they do the authoritarianisms.

If you already know your ins and outs of the Firefox about:config and policy templates and have set up your own comfy Firefox then Zen isn’t going to do you much good. But for people who use power user browsers like Vivaldi (or even shiver Opera GX) and want to find a Firefox equivalent that meets their needs ootb then Zen is a good option. I taglined it as the “Better Vivaldi to your Chrome” since the reason people would use a program like Vivaldi is for the UI enhancements. The issue of course is that both Vivaldi and Chrome are proprietary programs using a dominating web engine.

Zen isn’t as hardened ootb like librewolf but I think it will bring a lot more people over to Firefox because of its presentation.

it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones

It is a shock for sure when I first used it, but you get used to it since the vertical tabbing is integrated with the Zen workflow (split view, side panels). It also frees up some space for navigation since you’re able to collapse it.

Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted

Interesting, I might have to look into this later

Does Sync work properly

Yup Sync works the exact same on Zen as in Firefox since Zen is just Firefox at its core. You just sign in as normal and your tabs should be there

You also mentioned add-ons not being enabled by default.

There are no pre-installed extensions (as compared to Librewolf which has ublock pre-installed), all firefox compatible extensions are compatible with Zen minus the ones that obviously clash with Zen’s design like vertical tab extensions. Just install them from the addons store as you do normally.

is the DRM-content playable on all Linux machines regardless of distro?

Yes, Mozilla handles the Widevine licensing for Linux but you’re locked to a lower level of DRM (720p instead of 4K afaik). There are extensions that re-enable HD content that just spoof your user-agent (your browser’s identity) to mimic a Windows or Mac machine.

Is it safe - am I not giving my Mozilla ID to a third party?

• https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy
• Zen is just Firefox with a heavy paint job, so all the security issues are handled by Firefox and not the Zen team.

The cycle of violence