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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.

    It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.

    The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.

    The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.



  • There are a handful on non-default apps I’ve used across my last 3-4 distros at least:

    • mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I’ve been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.

    • Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.

    • Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I’ve found.

    • Strawberry - It’s “fine”. Honestly, I’ve never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it’s familiar and generally works as expected.



  • Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

    That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).


  • Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

    This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

    On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.