Ah, the usual propaganda from the fucking content mafia and the lobbyists they bought:

“The takedown of Fmovies is a testament to the power of collaboration in protecting the intellectual property rights of creators around the world,” Knapp says.

“Strengthening intellectual property rights is an important element of the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership,” Knapper said

I’ll happily repeat again and again and again:

• If pirate sites offer a better user experience than your paid offerings, you don’t deserve payments at all
• The money goes mostly to some rich fucks, fucking shareholders, lawyers and bought politicians and and not to the artists/creators of the movies (with some exceptions for the really big names)
• I will very happily pay a service which is not shitty, not region locked, doesn’t annoy me with advertisement and is reasonably priced. The illegal sites are demonstrating that it is possible to sustain such an offer on advertisement alone. Don’t give me fucking bullshit that it is not possible for companies like Netflix while most of the subscription fees are going to shareholders and higher management instead into creating new content

Seriously, fuck all the politicians and governments which act against the benefit of most of their population to conspire with the content mafia.

Indeed. :-)

I still insist that the music of our generation growing up was the best time for listening to alternative/metal etc.

So much innovation, new genres were created, and so much creativity.

Today most of the music sounds like ‘more of the same’ and very formulaic to me. I am happy for any recommendation of current music in alternative/metal which is innovativ.

Thank you very much, a great recommendation!

… and yes, agreed: I am lucky I had a very good manager once, who didn’t pull the usual shit and had human integrity, but people like that are the exception not the rule.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I’ll buy it! :-)

Yes, I also saw it in every job/team/organization, and it seems very human, everyone just likes some people better than others.

The think which irks me, is that I also sometimes experienced favoritism/nepotism with totally incompetent people I had to directly work with and also several level above my pay grade. Like, if you have two competent people and chose the one you like more, I can totally understand. But if there are competent people and you chose your incompetent crony over literally everybody else, it seems self defeating in the mid/long run.

I benefited of someone with relative power taking a liking to me later in my career, and all of a sudden I was elevated into a network where things are possible which weren’t before. Still at the very bottom of the ladder, but very aware how much difference a few connections can make.

Correct, not all of my examples are about nepotism.

Thank you for your recommendations, funnily enough I don’t suffer from the political/social skills.

What I cannot wrap my head around are situations, where people through nepotism/favoritism or politics get a position where they fail, which then comes back to the people who put them there. To rephrase it a little bit: “Why not put someone who is 50% competent and 90% loyal on a position instead of someone who is 25% competent and perhaps 95% loyal”? It seems kind of obvious to have a little bit competence, and if it is only for self preservation. (Just to ‘objectify’ that: Saw higher managers which are totally incompetent (not only my opinion), have a proven track record of failing everything they touch by stupidity (like: that is not how reality works stupid) which got officially demoted after several years, hurting their sponsors. Why didn’t their sponsor demote them earlier or put them in the position in the first place?)

Wow, thanks a lot, the books look very interesting and special shout out for the Podcast, I already subscribed to the feed! :-)

• Finch - Say Hello to Sunshine
• Paledusk - Palehell
• Faith no more - King for a day, fool for a lifetime
• Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
• Philipp Glass - Glassworks
• Henryk Mikołaj Górecki - Symphony of sorrowful Songs
• Fear Factory - Obsolete
• At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command
• Boy sets fire - After The Eulogy
• Refused - The Shape of Punk to come (not a fan after their sell-out-reunion, but the album is still great)

Fair question. First move for Mozilla: Fire the whole fucking leadership team and use the millions saved for some more developers working on Firefox. That should finance the next 2 years, afterwards we can think about next steps. :-P

In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.

For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.

As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.

If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.

… as already mentioned above:

1. This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
2. Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
3. It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
4. This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.

… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.

Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.

So, serious question: How is this good for me?

Edit: typo

I wish the thing about tags was ironic

Concerning the rest of your points: Icons are one of the few things I never had an issue with in Gnome. ;-)

Concerning automated setups, the only system I care fore is Linux and am forced to use macOS. For my use cases, I don’t care about the tooling/possibilities for companies to install crap on my machine (my company does that). Using Ansible to automate my setup for macOS is theoretically possible, but such a crappy experience compared to Linux, that I don’t bother. Not to mention no unified installation/update system on macOS and the shitty default apps like Finder, Window management etc. The solution which sucks the least for me is using macOS as dump VPN driver for my virtual Linux box, so I can get shit done.

… no need to argue about bad Gnome defaults, it is trivial to disable all animations and the shell is fast enough even on my netbook. :-)

Wait - Gnome user here (heavily modified and with multiple extensions) …

macOS window management and trying to using it via keyboard is a totally miserable experience (forced to use it at work :-/ ) … at the same time, Apple thinks their users are smart enough to use tags, while Gnome developers think the user are too dump to use tags. I still happily prefer Gnome over macOS on my desktop for literally everything, macOS has no proper software management, all apps try to up-sell me on their shitty i-cloud offerings, setup cannot be properly automated, the ‘auto features’ totally suck and do everything I do not want them to do and macOS feels too slow for the hardware it runs on…

Gnome sucks, but it sucks less for me than all other alternatives on the desktop at the moment…

My biggest reason to stick with Gnome are Wayland, Evolution/Online Accounts and that I can automatically configure Gnome to something usable with dconf/gsettings. I am not holding my breath that KDE ever gets their KMail story under control, stability as in zero crashes and being fully configurable via Ansible. The very moment this happens, I’ll happily jump ship. (Of course also waiting for Wayland support for Xfce :-P)

It sounds really strange, that you end up with the problems you described given your usage.

My systems are heavily modified/tweaked, so one would expect I would experience the problems you describe.

Given your usage, using an immutable distro sounds like a no-brainer to me, immutable Linux was created with your usage scenarios in mind.

In your shoes I would still try to pin point the root cause of the error, because in theory™ your usage should not be a problem for any of the mainstream Linux distros and we don’t know if an immutable distro solves your trouble.

Given your 6 montish circle it sounds like some kind of accumulation? If the computer runs stable for several month, IMHO you can rule out hardware problems, unless you have a kernel update every 6 months… :-P

Can you be more specific about your hardware, laptop model and Ubuntu version you are using?

If you ever figure out what happened, or if you try out an immutable distro and it runs for a year for you, give us an update! :-)

IMHO you should first figure out what exactly happens/goes wrong with your Ubuntu installations.

Immutable distros might or might not be a solution, but if the core of the problem is really the quality of the Ubuntu updates for example, you could try to run Debian (stable).

But again, the suggestion to use Debian is throwing a solution in the room which might not fit your problem.

Just as a reference point: I am running Debian stable on Laptops, Netbooks, Raspberry Pis and in virtual machines (AMD64/AArch64) and have no weird bugs, everything works for years now and runs smooth.

Concerning the Steamdeck… I love them, they run perfectly fine, but unless you are tweaking them/do more than run games, you cannot really compare them to what happens on your desktop.

Vivaldi is a great Blink-engine based browser, my fallback in cases Firefox fails to render a page I really need.

Outstanding are the official flatpaks for amd64 and Aarch64.

(I do not understand why it is impossible for Mozilla to provide an official Aarch64 flatpak.)

Awesome, @hades@hades@lemm.ee . Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction! :-)

No worries and thanks a lot for your suggestions/answers!

Thanks for your suggestions: Can confirm start/end bytes are wrong. Tried to open in Shotwell, GIMP, Firefox, Google Chrome w/o results.

I assume the hard drive is ok: I also have some git repositories on the drive and the checksums for git are correct. Every other file on the drive is ok, so cryptolocker malware could have only been on my phone at that time.

Tried GIMP, Firefox and Chrome - does not work.