Yep, it happened again. You wake up, or were woken up through your suntimes app on the phone, and it’s an hour late. You’d normally don’t even recognize it, because all computers, TVs, and radio wall clocks were adjusted automagically. Except of course those in our cars. Why don’t we stop this?
As always, thanks for reading.
* some would obviously call it BACC, like in biannual 😉 In German, this would rather be HJKW, like halbjährlicher kollektiver Wahnsinn. I don’t care, since time is man-made anyway…
Oh my… being curious, I tried the built-in webbrowser of the Gnome desktop, which used to be called “Epiphany”, and which is now simply called “Web”. And with that browser, I started viewing a well-known site full of trackers, which is spiegel.de
This got me more or less immediately:
Really? Selling a free product for 0 (zero) Euro? On which you can install Windows in parallel? (Hint: you can’t – Windows always has to be installed first in case you want that)
Oh my oh my – I really hope that no one ever falls for things like these. And most importantly: do never, I repeat *never* ever click on one of those links, in no browser – that these people are up to no good is obvious.
That was a short experiment – and now I’m back to Librewolf, which is a correctly configured Firefox with uBlock Origin already installed. There are others, like Mullvad, Zen, and the likes, or you could even use Firefox itself in case you want to configure it for security and privacy yourself, and don’t forget to install uBlock Origin in that case – you won’t even see that crap like above.
Never again… isn’t it time to overcome capitalism, and to stop all that ad crap once and for all?
Got Gnome 45 on Arch today, and – as expected and even announced – none of the former extensions kept working. Looked like this:
Gnome 45 desktop on Arch Linux, with Conky and my own wallpaper photo
The workspace switcher still worked, but is redundant now because they made another pill-shaped one on the top left (not movable). Freon and Openweather extensions don’t have version 45 yet, and even Vitals – at least the one packaged in Arch’s User Repository (AUR) was too old. And GSConnect, the most important one for integrating your phone(s), is gone as well.
My solution, for the moment? Go to XFCE. I’ve tried Budgie but didn’t like it, and I never became friends with KDE again since leaving it 20+ years ago. So for now my Arch desktop looks like this:
XFCE4 desktop on Arch Linux, with default background and with added weather and sensor applets (built in, eat that, Gnome!)
So still no GSConnect (or KDE Connect), but still better than this forced-into-your face behaviour of Gnome. Seems like Linus was right, that is cancerous behaviour, thanks but no thanks.
Edit/Update:
I gave KDE another try. No love yet, but it’s growing on me. And KDE Connect works as well (that small phone icon in the lower right):
KDE Plasma desktop on Arch Linux, with Conky and some additional widgets
So let’s see…
Edit/Update from later the same day:
Back to Gnome by now. Like I said, I tried to love KDE or XFCE or other desktop environments, but just can’t. So for the moment I installed the latest nightly build of GSConnect from Github, and for a bit of weather info, I used another extension from AUR’s git. That relies on the installed weather app from Gnome which isn’t as good as OpenWeather, but it works (showing Frankfurt, not the place we live but close enough). For the moment, I can do without Vitals or Freon, I know that my CPU temp and fans speeds are good no matter what I’ll do. So back to minmalistic Gnome:
Gnome 45 desktop on Arch Linux, with GSConnect and a bit of weather info
And yes, as I stated before: the recommendation for us “normal people” is to stay away as far as you can from everything “Enterprise”. I learnt it more than 20 years ago, even then Red Hat was nothing about freedom, and everything about making money. Take Debian instead, which is a true free software project – and if you want to support it financially, look for “Software in the public interest“.
It reminded me a lot about when I first got an iPhone from my former employer – you couldn’t edit the news they threw at you in any way, unlike Google’s own Android Pixel phones where you could select which content not to be shown to you (they disabled that by now), just like Avram describes it about being in Windows here.
But what he probably doesn’t get is that this way, you’re only training the beast, feeding it with creating your own profile, which will inevitably lead to the fact that you’ll live in your own filter bubble over short or long.
But oh my, is he right about the embarrassingly stupidity of some of these “news”! Have you for instance tried to visit Youtube without being logged in into Google to have it filter things for you? It’s a real shame, often right-wing or dangerously close to conspiracy theorists, and from top to bottom really really bad. And we trust these same companies with developing anything “artificially intelligent”? If so, then I see no future for mankind; we’re doomed.
In his article, Avram tries to find and show some workarounds to the problem, but I think it’s those companies themselves – and their interests are far different from the average person’s, who has to live with the crap that they’re shoving up our screens. In my opinion, workarounds won’t help us much longer, the only way out of that is to get rid of Windows, and any kind of “social media”, or even more difficult, the quasi monopolist which Youtube has become by now. To even have to pay for an operating system whose makers do that to us is utterly insulting, isn’t it? So the best advice I can give to this is: break free from these self-inflicted chains, cancel Microsoft et al from your desks, and use something free (as in speech, and as in beer).
It was over 25 years ago now that I decided not to support a black box operating system anymore, as I called it at that time, and moved to a first (for me) version of Linux instead. My team lead at my employers’ at this time recommended to not focus on Linux but to try Solaris instead, so I learnt that as well – and got job offers simply through asking questions in some newsgroups (anyone remember those?). Both Suse and Red Hat were too commercially driven for my interests, so I’ve found better ones over time. Today? I currently live on the Gnome desktop of Debian stable, and my weather icon looks like this:
Date and weather in Gnome
And when I click on it, it looks like this:
Extended weather in the Gnome desktop
No ads. No distractions. Just peace of mind. And to friends, I would never recommend workarounds but only the best that I can think of.
Wann immer ich Nachrichten wie diese sehe, regt sich in mir der Wunsch nach der Möglichkeit eines direkten – aus dem Volk heraus geäußerten – Mißtrauensvotums gegen einzelne Minister (wie in diesem Fall gegen die Herren Wissing und Lindner).
Wirklich; wir brauchen scheint’s deutlich mehr direkte (Basis-) demokratie und Volksentscheide. Es kann nicht sein daß einzelne gewählte Politiker vier Jahre lang einen Freibrief dafür bekommen, eine Dummheit nach der anderen zu begehen und ein ganzes Land der Lächerlichkeit preiszugeben. Oder eine Industrie zu unterstützen die dies – bis auf Porsche in diesem Fall – gar nicht will.
Und bevor die CDU/CSU oder gar die AfD sich über einen solchen Beitrag freuen: ich könnte auch gut ohne einige Abgeordnete wie die Herren Merz und Söder oder gar den meisten Mitgliedern der AfD in einem deutschen Bundestag leben. Aber ok – wir leben ja in einer Demokratie, also werde ich diese wohl ertragen müssen, auch wenn sie den ganzen Tag lang meist Unfug erzählen.
Vielleicht sollten wir “dem Volk” ja auch – wie die alten Griechen es hatten – die Möglichkeit geben jedes Jahr ein bis zwei Politiker abzuwählen? Es muß ja nicht gleich der Schierlingsbecher wie bei Sokrates werden, aber Dame Professor Mary Beard erkärt uns – jetzt doch wieder auf Englisch – wie Demokratie auch aussehen könnte:
Free Speech – What’s it all about?
Mehr interessante Geschichtsstunden – nicht nur über Demokratie – bei Dame Prof. Beard gibt’s hier. Eine “Dame” ist ein ziemlich hoher Rang eines OBE – also eines Officers of the British Empire. Und übrigens, Sokrates war toll… 🙂
A friend of mine is a journalist, normally he writes all kinds of interesting stuff about motorcycles, cars, and e-mobile devices of all kinds.
On his blog he linked to an article which he published on Heise Online, a big German computer magazine publisher. And these ask for more before they let you enter:
Heise “Paywall”
Last time I looked, they allow more or less the half world to track you with their cross-site cookies and such – that’s why I called this screenshot “Paywall” here. You pay with your data – and this should be forbidden.
Same goes for Spiegel Online, Zeit, and some other very good magazines. Sorry guys, the price is too high. And having to pay to be protected from that spamming business is morally questionable to say the least.
k, I’m out. You lost one reader.
P.S.: just wanted to have a look if their new c’t magazine is out, and what’s in it – but even that is covered by their stupid paywall. So you *definitely* lost one reader, guys. Not the smartest way of doing business, don’t you agree? Keep your crap and your cookies for yourselves… 👎
As ArsTechnica reports, you will need a Microsoft account for future versions of Win11. Which means that we will wipe our disks clean of it. My wife didn’t want any Windows on her new machine (her Notebook still has a dual boot Win10/Ubuntu setup), Zuleikha never wanted it at all, and my triple boot system (Win10/Debian/Arch) will be a dual boot one with the next system disk I’ll build in.
Who needs that crap? We certainly don’t. Time to say goodbye to silly enforcements from tech giants.
Same is true for Google who just rolled out their last updates for the Pixel 3 series – after that, it’ll be LineageOS.
