Will disenfranchised Trump supporters boycotting big tech lead to the year of the Linux desktop?

PGA Weblog ^

[Paladin2]

Mozilla have apparently gone all woke.

Will Firefox limit speech of all kinds for the unwoke soon?

[hecticskeptic]

Here’s the problem with this... it gets very messy to know who to support and who not to. Personally, I’ve never used Twitter, Amazon, Apple, FascistBook etc. and I avoid google like the plague. However, if I have to fly somewhere, is there an airline left that goes where I need to that hasn’t done something stupid or taken some ideological position on something or other that I find untenable?

Case in point... I don’t normally think of Mozilla but then there is this headline that was posted yesterday here “ Mozilla Threatens to Go Beyond Deplatforming in Creepy Statement” https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3923653/posts Then of course there are all the linkages between these folks that one never necessarily thinks of right away. As noted at the above link... “According to Computer World, 91 percent of Mozilla’s funding in 2018 came from Google (as they secured being Mozilla’s default search engine). This deal was renegotiated in 2020 and extended for three more years, with approximately $400-450 million more landing in Mozilla’s lap.”

If this was just a case of not dealing with a known mafia member, that’s easy. However, expecting to know who all the legitimate businesses are that the mafia is laundering money through gets to be extremely difficult....

[Openurmind]

Sure sounds like it. Moved to Waterfox myself. Forked from but not hooked to Mozilla. And still uses Firefox addons like NoScript and Ghostery. Same familiar layout, controls and all.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Here is one example. Apple Inc

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D000021754

Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Raphael Warnock

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/recipients?candscycle=2020&id=D000021754&toprecipscycle=2018

Beto

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/recipients?candscycle=2020&id=D000021754&toprecipscycle=2016

Hillary. Oh, and Paul Ryan. Isn’t that cute.

[Pollard]

GrapheneOS works on only a handful of phones, ironically, the Pixel line of phones sold by google. GrapheneOS is Linux but compatible with Android apps. Little tricky to install but there's a few people on ebay selling Pixel phones with GrapheneOS pre-installed.

There's a way to put Linux on a Chromebook but that's even trickier.

Tablets, depends on the model I suppose. I have a rugged Panasonic tablet that I run Ubuntu on. It's a touch screen but the kind where you have to use a stylus. Works fine on Ubuntu though.

Here's what my Panasonic CF-H2 rugged tablet looks like

Mine's silver but they made them in white too for the medical field. Kind of an oddball but it's an Intel machine made for Win 7 and Ubuntu works just fine. Linux/Ubuntu works fine on most anything that ran windows. I use Thinkpad laptops for daily use and have for close to two decades running various flavors of Ubuntu. They sold a lot of Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed.

[SanchoP]

1994? You are a fossil. :) I started on Slackware before Patrick made the great leap forward during the dialup days and that was around 2000.

[G Larry]

Just go to the nominal supplies of the product you're after.

Home Depot

Other book stores

Bed, Bath, & Beyond, etc....

[Noumenon]

Consider Opera for a browser. Built in VPN.

[Openurmind]

I used it for awhile. :)

But I still have a trust issues with “free” VPN connections.

[Paladin2]

Thanks for pointing to Waterfox.

I’ll try it.

[Openurmind]

Absolutely my privilege, and it works fantastic on windows or Linux.

[rockrr]

“Business runs on Microsoft”

Whatever ones feelings about the Microsoft Corporation and its various agendas, they have (and continue to wield) a huge presence in the computing world. Gargoyle and Linux platforms make up less than 10% of the field, compared to Microsoft, at approximately between 77% and 87.8%, and IOS at approximately 9.6–13% (numbers courtesy of Wackypedia).

If your agenda (editorial “you”) is to knock MS off the block, you have your work cut out for you.

However, advocating for Linux based software for personal consumption is a worthy and worthwhile endeavor. I worked in the IT support industry for 25 years. That meant supporting Windows - almost exclusively. The last outfit I worked for hired a guy to be the Manager for Desktop Services. That meant he was in charge of everything non-network and non-server for the organization (approximately 5500 computers and a roughly equal number of phones). His previous gig was as a manager at Amazon where the default workstation ran on Linux. He assigned me to several projects to bring Linux into the environment. Not necessarily to replace MS, but to augment what we were already supporting. I worked out strategies for imaging, deployment, and support. Every one of those initiatives failed to garner any support by management.

Despite the dedicated efforts of the manager in charge of the environment, he failed to generate ANY interest in changing things. It’s difficult to make inroads when you have a group that is so stuck on stupid.

I’ve had ready access to software for the last 25 years so naturally my machines have run on Windows. But I am an experimenter so I haven’t limited myself solely to MS. Now that I am retired I no longer have access so I imagine that my next machines will be Linux based. I can live with that.

While I find the presentation of Linux OS’s awkward and somewhat amateurish, they get the job done. I dislike how they operate in a network, but I continue to find ways to make them function - at least adequately.

I do see Linux in my future.

[Bob434]

One point about waterfox,it s a heated debate in the community i guess. Waterfox apparent.y isn’t updated as quickly as FF? Some claim it is a security risk, others claim its not that big a deal?

I don’t know much about it so can’t comment beyond pointing that out. Perhaps it sjust fine, but i can attest that it works really well

[Bob434]

I think too many people just aren’t committed to accepting the inconveniences that come with taking a stand. Linux is great. But there is a learning curve, though it has gotten much less lately, but still. Tske Amazon for instance. I don’t think a lot of folks are gonna want to do away with the convenience of going to a site that has practically everything under the sun, and good shipping policies etc. Places like youtube have many 1000s of people there, and people looking for clicks and likes in order to make money likely won’t switch to l0ess populated sites where they can’t make as much.

Linux is great, and I wouldn’t be without it, but you can’t really play all the cool games as well as you can on windows, without the “hassle” of having to use emulators that don’t really work well sometimes

I 5hink a good portion will boycott, but not enough to make a serious dent in the giants bottom line, so it will come down to it being a personal choice rather than an effort to send big tech a message. I think they have probably factored in how many will leave their product and have decided it won’t hurt them too much

[zeugma]

Regardless of which distribution folks go with, I would strongly advise you get one that has “LTS” (Long Term Support) somewhere in the description, as it means you’re going to end up with a more stable environment in the long run.

I would also strongly suggest you get an external drive to back up your computer to. Personally, I use ‘backintime’ to do my daily backups, because it is an extraordinarily efficient program. On any given day I can do a full restore to a previous day’s backup. There are several other programs that use the same basic mechanism to manage backups.

If there is interest here, it might be worthwhile to have a couple of threads that discusses the process and pitfalls of migration from non-free to free alternatives.

[Vaduz]

Big tech is silencing conservatives and it leaves their web sites with only liberals and other losers it make their sites as useful a Etch-A-Sketch.

[Bob434]

Children like them always get mad, stomp their foot, and take their ball and go home

[Vaduz]

Indeed some people age but never mature.

[Openurmind]

From what I understand it is at least unhooked from Mozilla and in competition with them. So both of those are a plus in my book. And alone it might not be as safe as Brave, but... Add NoScript and Ghostery to it and it is even more secure that Brave. They stop EVERYTHING by default. You have to turn things on sometimes to see them, but only what you need to use the site and the other 50 hidden scripts remain blocked.

[Bob434]

I just tried to sign into my youtube account using brave, in order to start removing my account with them, and get links to sites with info i need,, and was informed that I couldn’t because brave isn’t a secure browser lol. Wonder what youtube fears fromthe brave browser?