VinesNFluff

TLDR: Hired a guy whose previous work was 'using tech to do mass surveillance for the British* state, bragged about it, when there was drama over it, they laughed it off as 'this drama could only possibly be astroturfed and no one reasonable would ever be against this'.

Edit: Fixed mistake

Not bragging about hiring a dude whose entire portfolio is invasive mass surveillance would be a start.

Edit to add: Since the genie's out the bottle on that, a little bit of transparency over what the dude's role in their company actually is and what their intentions are, or heck, literally anything would be nice.

Like, personally I think 'ceasing to be a cop' is the best thing a person in the police could ever possibly do and pretty much proof they are salvageable as a person, so I'm already inclined to think positively of the espionage dude they hired. But their complete and total opacity, all the way down to blocking/banning anyone who criticised them over it, suggests that his presence in the company is not just a case of 'he's good with tech and we hired him', but rather that his expertise in surveillance specifically is the reason he was hired, and yes, there will be insidious things in new Pi models.

I do remember like, back in the day, having a LiveDVD around that had all sorts of 'recovery tools', among them one that was a one-click "grub is breaked, pls fix" thing.

Only had to use it once or twice though.

That is true for me now, but for years I used dual boot on old BIOS based systems so idk /shrug

Well -- they never really backed down on what they did. Far as we know the out-and-proud espionage cop is still in their payroll, and the only response they ever gave to the story was a generalised 'We think the entire thing is being astroturfed and that no one reasonable is ACTUALLY against us hiring this guy who bragged about all the espionage he did' back in the day.

They never said anything about it since. So it's fair to assume they still believe in what they did.

No because I never subscribed to any. I mooched off my father's subscriptions :U

I did switch away and have been trying to convince him to use my Emby homeserver though.

Never happened to me. Like ever. And I've been on Linux (with occasional dual-booting whenever I'm in a position where I need windows--) for like 15 years now?

To be honest a lot of stuff people talk about seems to not happen to me and I think I might be exceedingly lucky or smth.

Partitioning is good even if you're just running Linux. Specifically separating your / from your /home/ -- In case shit goes wrong you can nuke the OS side and keep all your files and shit. (also, mandatory for UEFI systems cuz you also need a /boot/efi partition)

To be honest.

Samesies.

I was happy to buy (the very proprietary, very commercial) Magix Vegas. Why?

Because gasp. It had an option where I paid them money and I just. Had the application. No yearly subscription, no log in every time I turn on the programme.

Just. A one-time activation. Holy shit. I use it for my work and woooooowww.

Even though it can't use my AMD GPU properly.

Turns out pure profit incentive only goes so far in incentivising "quality products and services", and after a while it becomes literally mandatory to be an asshole in order to continue following the profit.

Even paid Libre projects (of which there are a couple) tend to be less dickish than their blackbox cousins, after all, if they were chasing maximum profit and infinite growth, they wouldn't be a libre project now would they?

Mine was Inkscape, back in the early days of the MLP fandom, when I learned I could make show-accurate art using this entirely free computer program. Which lead to using it to make like, memes and shitposts and stuff for fandom shit.

Like I'd used free software before -- But seeing Inkscape in action and then, a year later, getting into college for design-related stuff and learning that people used Adobe Illustrator (which costs a fortune) for the same things was my 'oh cool, my free thing can do most if not all the stuff this expensive tool can'

From then on there was no going back.

Similar vibe, but I think 'marxism' is not the only conclusion from realising how much megacorps control our world. I'm more of a left-anarchist myself :U