They are stealing data that can be (and is, often) used to track you across the entire internet. many social media platforms (again, especially tiktok) use this data to straight up manipulate people into spending more time on their platform and having views that align with the interests of the company. this is especially bad if the interests of the company are really the interests of an authoritarian government that is blatantly hostile to other countries unprovoked.

Not Chinese bad, Chinese government bad. because the Chinese government has so much control, Chinese companies can’t be trusted. yes, stolen data is bad. I know that data is being stolen anyway, but tiktok has historically been very bad about it. however, i was reffering to them moving from one shitty Chinese platform to another even more shitty and even more Chinese (as in controlled more by the Chinese government) one, when there are platforms that are from places that do not have an authoritarian government able to control any company if they so choose. of course something like instagram (reels) or youtube shorts isn’t much better in terms of data theft, but who has the data does matter no matter how hard you’re coping.

ubuntu is an excellent base, but there’s no reason to use it over other distros based on it. it does nothing better than others and forces snaps on you to the point of not even having flatpak installed by default unlike almost every other distro that is even remotely modern.

fucking idiots

why can’t they just let the games be games

I’ll check that out as well

I’ll check it out

extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it’s also difficult to find the one that I’m looking for because there’s generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is “app indicators”) or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don’t already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won’t add enough extra data to really be bloat.

quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.

I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn’t know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn’t mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.

most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there’s nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.

sounds like they are doing what the 3ds did with some upgrades. hopefully the “AI” is actually useful instead of just being injected into a product that doesn’t need it.

how does it compare to something like jellyfin (or Plex, despite not being FOSS it’d be unfair not to mention them)?

that’s fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it’ll run fine even without upscaling.

don’t wanna watch anything rn but boosted for later

you can tell this was made by a Mac user bc it implies that macs are the only functional computers.

guessing that’s why someone was saying Matrix “is CIA” yesterday

in that case I suggest keeping general files (as in not apps, except for stuff like a steam library) on a separate drive or partition from root, that’s more or less what I was doing when I was distro hopping

might I suggest a VM or a cheap spare device?

that’s… actually a great use for AI. good to see something intelligent is being done after all.