Remember that this is just one case in isolation. US-based data hoarders like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and so on are also regularly sued for various privacy law violations. And they all deserve it equally, TikTok included. I hope no one is left out. That said, unfortunately, the punishment is often a joke, which means these companies simply pay it out of their pocket change and then continue doing the exact same stuff. For example, France sued TikTok for something like 5 million $. Unless that number goes into the billions at least, I bet it's still way more profitable for those companies to continue to absolutely sh*t on anything privacy related. So, in essence, nothing will change because of this. Not for US-based data privacy violators, not for Chinese-based. "Same shit, different country" has never been more fitting.
kyub
Get an external drive, it's useful to have lying around for those rare occasions where you have something on an optical disc.
Arch breaking easily is such an over-exaggeration. I've run Arch so many years and the amount of tinkering I've had to do because of botched updaates is so minimal. Often times, they announce it on their main website even, with instructions on how to fix it. You also should have configured filesystem snapshots to easily revert after a bad update. Or have a USB installation medium ready to boot from and then repair/downgrade the affected bad package. That's usually all there is to do, and it happens rarely.
If you have multiple problems after Arch upgrades, then I'd guess that's a misconfiguration on your end, leading to unstable system behavior after updates. Arch doesn't do any kind of hand-holding, you're allowed to completely misconfigure and break your system, but then it's also your own fault.
If you didn't update for a while, you should probably update the archlinux-keyring package first, then do the rest of the updates. Otherwise, the other packages won't be able to be updated when package signing keys changed in the meantime
So yeah, I wouldn't recommend Arch for beginners, unless you really want to learn Linux the "hard way" and have a little bit of spare time and don't mind reading on the Wiki, but still, Arch instability is kind of over-exaggeration. Arch is very stable for a rolling release distro, but you do have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and then. That's the nature of rolling-release. I still wouldn't call that unstable, though.
If the user is at least somewhat competent, antivirus is normally not needed. Antivirus has several issues on its own, before even considering its defense "capabilities": it can contain spyware itself (harvesting user data, auto-uploading "interesting" files to the AV vendor cloud which leaks personal data, etc.... e.g. Avast was recently caught spying on the web browser traffic of all their user base and then selling that data. Yes, that's an AV vendor you're supposed to trust), AV (like all software) has security holes which can be exploited (there was already malware which only worked BECAUSE you had an AV installed, and it wouldn't have worked if you hadn't), and you have one more process constantly running in the background with lots of access rights which isn't great either, it may even damage your system by finding and quarantining false positives, and if your system is already infected then any AV running on it is also compromised as well and won't find certain malware anymore because the malware can hide its processes from the AV. Furthermore, AV is only somewhat good at detecting past threats, not good at all at detecting current, dangerous threats. (Typically, virus writers test their own creations against current AV anyway, ensuring that they don't detect it). Also, no AV detects e.g. Windows 10+/MS Office/MS Edge/Google Chrome/etc.'s invasive telemetry, which is (in this case) a euphemism for spyware functionality bundled with an otherwise legitimate application. AV should at least warn about it, otherwise it doesn't live up to its promises of combating spyware at all.
All in all, a competent user is likely to have more security/privacy issues or trouble WITH an AV, than without it. Which means, in the hands of a competent user, AV is the only thing on the system which behaves the most like malware. So simply by learning and following good security practices, you can avoid most if not all threats coming your way anyway, without any additional software needed on your machine.
That said, if the user is quite incompetent and executes everything at random and doesn't really care what sites he visits or what phishing mails he opens, and generally has a carefree attitude when workilng at the device, then having an antivirus constantly scanning everything and maybe avoid execution of a known threat, can do more good than harm.
If you're ever unsure, upload the file in question to virustotal.com - it will scan with something like 30 antivirus engines. You can't do that on your own. That makes it more likely that something is found, if there is a known threat in it. Or ask on a forum. If you're unsure your own system is infected, scan it with an offline virus scanner booted from a USB drive (preferably also with multiple scan engines), because scanning from inside an already infected system cannot ever guarantee full recovery. Although, no AV can ever guarantee full recovery regardless, which is why in the end you should completely re-install any infected system, and not rely on one AV's cleaning capability. Because there's no guarantee that the AV found and cleaned everything. If the malware contained a backdoor then maybe there's new, undetected malware already present as well.
Well, Linux is like a juggernaut that's inching ever closer in all sorts of areas (while already dominating in some areas). The time frame where it makes sense for Microsoft to spend increasing amounts of resources to maintain and further develop Windows is closing, and if you look closely, they've pretty much shown that Windows is not at all priority #1 anymore since at least Nadella became CEO. We also live in a world which is increasingly becoming OS agnostic, which is bad for Windows' dominance and great for Linux, MacOS, and others (because there's less and less relevant applications specifically requiring Windows). Of course, Linux on the desktop also grows stronger and more mature year after year, which further accelerates the change.
There will also be some points in time which hugely accelerate things, like Valve going all-in on Steam Deck and Proton and to make Steam a more independent store/community platform, and also Microsoft making Windows worse and more user-hostile over time. From a business perspective, it makes sense for MS - they want to go full cloud (= full control), almost full removal of control for the user, and full ingestion of as much data from the user as they can - to sell it, utilize it for own purposes, and train AIs with it. It's what increases profits in the short-term. A lot of companies are doing that kind of stuff. MS is just one of the more ruthless ones, which, again, makes sense, because they still have a big userbase to exploit. In the long-term, they're damaging, no, DESTROYING Windows' reputation as a half-decent OS (even among Windows fans) and driving more and more users to the alternatives. It's kind of inevitable. MS' striving for profit has doomed Windows, and soon, when no single company will be able to compete with the ever evolving Linux ecosystem anymore, Windows is also doomed. It's kind of a law of nature now. It's not a question of if, just when.
(I've used both Windows and Linux extensively, Windows since MSDOS/Win3.x, Linux since 1998. About 10 years ago, I've switched exclusively to Linux and banned Windows into a VM only that gets booted less and less [I think it's been off for 2 years already]). I, for one, welcome our new old Linux overlords.
Now that you know better, make sure to keep an eye on Windows or MacOS only dependencies in the future, and avoid those.
Flameshot is great, I use it every day at work and home. The integrated editing/annoation/drawing functions are superb.
I think there's no convention where you "should" mount permanent non-removable partitions. Just don't use /media or /mnt for that (per convention). So create any directory yourself for that and mount them there.
Yes. It’s basically about a ban or circumvention of E2EE, as usual. And as usual, this is not an option. Do not throw away your rights to strong, working encryption. Never.
- Closed source (has always been bad for an OS, a 1-US-company controlled blackbox at the heart of your "personal" computer)
- Privacy nightmares (and getting worse)
- Forced cloud integrations (and getting worse)
- Forced AI integrations (and getting worse)
- More bloat and ads (and getting worse)
- More restrictions (e.g. local user accounts) (and getting worse)
- More dark patterns to try to annoy the user and get him/her to accept something that MS wants (and getting worse)
- More opt-out, on-by-default bad stuff being added (and getting worse)
- There's probably more...
The question is wrong: it's not why do you "still" hate Windows. I did like Windows 7. It was the last Windows I liked. After that, it's just a downhill enshittification spiral. The only real question is: at which point will it be too oppressive for the common user that even the most common user will try to avoid it entirely. And I fear that there's still more than enough room for MS to make Windows worse before enough people migrate away from it.
RethinkDNS is probably better, but I'm currently still using NetGuard Pro and kind of happy with it, but I will soon migrate to Rethink DNS. If you use NetGuard, make sure to use the Pro version, download its hosts file and use it in whitelist mode and display all contacted hosts/IPs for each app (block everything by default, allow only the technically necessary connections!). The more proprietary apps you use, the more tracking hosts you'll see being contacted (lots of proprietary apps contact Google, Meta, etc.). Don't allow these connections.