Linux Mint 22 BETA is out based on the most recent Ubuntu LTS 24.04.

Important Changes:

• Linux Mint currently ships with the Linux 6.8 kernel. More importantly, Mint will now follow Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel series so Mint can work on the latest machines. This also removes the confusion of the "Edge ISO" as this affects all Mint 22 users.
• Linux Mint uses Pipewire as its audio stack.
• The Linux Mint team along with other communities in the "we forked off of GNOME when it became GNOME 3" have started the Xapp project which plans to continue GTK desktop app development sans libadwaita and GNOME specific technologies.
• Mint now uses Matrix for community coordination and includes the Element webapp client preinstalled.
• Cinnamon 6.2 and various UX improvements.

Windows 10 goes End of Life in October 2025.

But my heart is like a claw machine, its only function is to reach, it can't hold on to anything

I'm going to make a post about this movie, both positive and negative thoughts right now. This movie is so transgender it hurts.

TL;DW: Apple Intelligence is Apple training their models locally on your personal Apple product data (aka anything you do on an iPhone, Mac, iPad or your Apple ID) using their Apple Silicon chips as well as building a Apple Siri voice assistant client for OpenAI's ChatGPT. The features seem gatekept to newer Apple products and they claim it's opt-in.

It looks like "AI" is here to stay as capitalists have placed it in most supply chains and industries. Goes without saying, but don't buy Apple, you're just buying yourself a one-way trip to a digital jail where the walls are made out of "seamless apple ecosystem" and "shiny metal devices that are cold to the touch."

Especially don't buy anything from the Apple Store because that's trashy Global North treat brain behavior.

NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution based on declarative builds using the functional Nix package manager. It boasts the most amount of available software on any Linux distribution as well as configuration options for various programs. There are more than 100,000 packages on nixpkgs as well as more than 10,000 options for system configuration.

Nix resources:

• Vimjoyer's video series on Nix hosted on YouTube (invidious proxy)
• No Boilerplate on NixOS (invidious proxy)

NixOS is a great way to learn how GNU/Linux works as well as to build a system configuration that you can take anywhere, anytime.

TL;DR Discord loves to present itself as a company run by a few gamers just like you. The service aggressively advertises itself as "for gamers" with the hope that this "reputation" alone will propel Discord to the top. This has worked really well. The Discord team has refused, however, on multiple occasions to take certain steps to protect their userbase, described in more detail above such as adoption of E2E encryption or going open source. Instead, the Discord team states clearly in their privacy policy that they will gladly hoard a plethora of data about their users indefinitely, loosely claiming to only delete it when its no longer needed. The data they collect and store includes (but is not limited to) full chat logs, all chat media, a list of who you chat with, email address, IP address, device ID, behavioral analysis, activity tracking on the service, pulling info from social media accounts you link, and much more as stated above and in their Privacy Policy. Discord shares this same data with all of its partners, affiliates, agents, and "Related Companies" while lazily instructing you to check their privacy policy to find out what happened to your information, as its no longer any concern to Discord. In addition, Discord goes further to say "Developers using our SDK or API will have access to their end users’ information, including message content, message metadata, and voice metadata". Their very vague "information" wording allows Discord to send whatever they please while, of course, leaving it up to you to go check their privacy policy and figure out just where and to who Discord sloppily throws your data around. Discord continues to show little to no progress or effort in considering open source code, strong end-to-end encryption adoption, or even something as simple as allowing the deletion of an old account. It is important to note that while Discord allows the "deactivation" of an account, their support team will happily inform you that they do not delete your data and your account cannot be deleted. This data is again stored for an indefinite period of time.

Discord is proprietary spyware. Using it means endorsing and legitimizing it.

Discord relies on its reputation to lure its victims. Despite just starting out as a way for to mingle in chatrooms and VoIP rooms, Discord has now expanded to any sort of purpose, even extending to schools where students will use Discord for clubs as well as online projects where communication is done over the platform.

The reliance on Discord is dangerous. Any thing you type or do in this program is recorded for the highest bidder (that be your government or private data brokers). The interface and UX is designed to keep you in the app for as long as possible.

There's no way to "smartly" or "responsibly" use Discord. One way or another, Discord will extract value from you. It's not just about you, but about everyone who uses the platform.

Solutions

There are no "alternatives" to Discord. I'm not going to try to fool you by saying there's a magic bullet to defeat Discord's presence in western society (other than socialism and ). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to help.

• Matrix: A decentralized messaging protocol. It supports video conferencing on its main instance as well as support for the Discord "Server" functionality. Easiest solution for a drop-in replacement.

• IRC: The one that came before Discord, community networks can be used if you need to communicate and is just as secure as Discord (public chat rooms with zero end-to-end encryption besides TLS)

• GNU Jami: If there was a magic bullet, this would be it. Completely decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging network that is device based. It is a GNU package, possibly the most guarantee for freedom you can get in this world. The team is small, but if you need somewhere to host your leftist activities that will require more than a court order (or a simple bribe) to de-anonymize by state and non-state (those funded by other states) actors then this is it.

Conclusion

This is a post for self crit. If the service is free of charge, then you're the product. Any leftist should take steps to eliminate their dependency on Discord and proprietary messaging programs. Also any leftist should spread this message and inform others about the risks of using proprietary software.

We should also take Discord as a lesson in how to identify the dangers of proprietary programs and why it could make us vulnerable to abuse (which as we know in a capitalist society, is coming one way or the other). Discord isn't the lone offender, but an example of how nonfree software will always pose a threat to a free and democratic society and only benefits the bourgeoisie.

Let this be the last thing I have to say about this accursed program

(Angrily taps foot)

I wanna play my fitgirl repacks minus all the stuttering but nvidia is transphobic :(((

Tried NVK but then realized that all my apps don't have it turned on yet because mesa 24.1 hasnt been released and so they default to OpenGL or don't run at all.

The wait is so excrutiating because it's right there. Just give me my nvidia 555 driver naowhhhh!!!

Anyone else feel like this?

Linux gaming >>> Windows gaming tho.

However, as reported in Vietnam.net, it's possible Steam has been taken down in Vietnam after local game developers complained about the scope and size of Steam's vast portfolio of games, claiming Vietnamese devs cannot compete with Steam's releases given they are subject to government approval and thousands of international games on Steam are not.

Citing it as "an injustice to domestic publishers", Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development "will die" if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games.

Based Vietnam protecting its domestic games industry from American capitalists. :)

TLDR: the online game monopolies of Vietnam complains that they can't extort the market share our Lord and Savior Gabe Newell rightfully earned," said one unhappy Steam user.

Steam users are so fucking insufferable. They hate all capitalist game companies except this one which they will eagerly lick the boot of.

It's tiring to tell libs that its actually CPC instead of CCP.

• CCP = Chinese China Party (???)
• CPC = Chinese Party of China (correct)

I'm literally going to drop kick someone who gets it wrong!!!

Thoughts? Is it worthwhile to correct people on this?

I just tried out the COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) created and engineered by System76 (people who are behind POP!_OS). It was an incredible experience even though it was just a pre-alpha.

COSMIC was engineered virtually from the ground-up to be System76's solution to move away from GNOME and onto their own tech stack. The entire DE is written in the Rust programming language utilizing the iced application framework with their in-house application library libcosmic (similar to how KDE uses Qt+Breeze+Frameworks or GNOME uses GTK + Libadwaita).

Impressions

If you're familiar with POP!_OS 22.04's take on GNOME, then the workflow is no different here with emphasis on features such as tiling, application dock, application launcher, universal search launcher and of course: auto-tiling.

One of the exclusive features of COSMIC is its 1st class support for custom theming on the fly. You're allowed to theme the desktop in almost any way you can (even with nauseating colors) and the DE will adapt to your preferences.

It can even theme gnome apps! (I read other books dw)

Auto-tiling is also great to use, you can toggle specific windows to be floating or tiled.

Theme integration with Qt apps are a work in progress + some quirks of running COSMIC in a container with KDE. So far, I really enjoy how buttery smooth everything is (besides some pre-alpha stuttering), the entire desktop feels like a really cohesive experience. It has the efficiency of a tiling window manager but the convenience of a DE.

It has an overview!!! (super+w)

You can also stack windows on top of each other

Not everything is implemented (obviously) but just the promise of a DE that does tiling and window management like this has me sold.

How to try out COSMIC?

NixOS

There's a flake

Fedora Atomic Desktop

You can use a universal blue image and rebase to that, it even includes options for having a fallback desktop environment of either GNOME or KDE as well.

Other

• Arch has an AUR package
• Fedora has a COPR repository
• Compile from source (instructions)

Note that this cannot be used in production: cosmic is pre-alpha software as well as needing to turn off SELinux.

Or wait until POP!_OS 24.04 is released with a stable version of COSMIC this summer. This has been my first time running COSMIC but when the stable version drops you bet I'm switching over (though no one can take away my Fedora atomic distro).

Switch to GNU/Linux or pay the ultimate price

CW: Transphobia, ableism, misgendering

I've posted a video from Nicco Loves Linux covering the whole situation to the libre community here for context.

TL;DR: Vaxry, the lead developer of the popular Hyprland wayland compositor and tiling window manager has been banned from ever contributing a patch to freedesktop, a highly influential software group that is responsible for the modern Linux Desktop. This was due to him violating freedesktop's code of conduct because of his toxic discord community and crypto-fash blog. Vaxry then writes two screeds and throws a public temper tantrum, leading to inevitable clash when his nazi friends harass the freedesktop people.

(EDIT: Removed direct links to blog, the entire blog is pretty reactionary outside of the purely software related posts) The blog posts that got them banned:

• 2024-fdo-and-redhat
• 2024-fdo-and-redhat-pt2

Fun screenshot

: "I'M NOT MAD I'M NOT MAD"

Critical support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and their never-ending crusade to destroy white people

Breaking News: Person who claims to only care about code gets banned from one of the largest FOSS development projects due to toxicity and harassment.

CW: Transphobia, ableism, misgendering

I wonder why this happens so much. They said that they only care about code and commit quality yet they get banned for violating a code of conduct due to bigotry. Can someone help connect the dots here?

freedesktop CoC Moderators (slightly concerned) : "We noticed that you've cultivate an unhealthy community and that toxicity is not allowed here."

Vaxry : "This is all a plot by Red Hat to target me for being a WHITE MAN and not a privileged minority."

That's the joke.