I’m almost certain it’a troll, maybe even a previously banned one. Given their username it would be very ironic otherwise, considering that, so far, in the week they created the accounyt, hey only commented to rail against things that respect user freedom.
Good catch. Never used Remote Assistance, so I don’t know how different it is, and if it actually requires telemetry.
Although the broader issue isn’t the why, it’s that it does those things at all without clearly communicating them to the user. Even their documentation has severe lack of any kind of explanation.
I thought so as well for a time, but that tool in particular is what finally made me lose faith that there might be any good debloat tool out there.
Basically, someone mentioned that it does a weird thing, so I’ve decided to take a look closer, and stumbled about a whole lot of dumb choices. To exemplify, I’ll just repost that part of my comment from back then:
Oh yeah, I’ve just skimmed what else the “Disable Telemetry” script does to the registry, and I honestly can’t classify it as anything other than batshit insane.
A few highlights:
- The popup delay of nested context menus and mouse hover popups
- Disables the prompt when there are open programs when shutting down
- Switches the explorer from the default view to This PC
- Enables long file paths
- Expands the file copy dialog by default
- Straight up disables RDP???
And this is only one script out of a few dozen this “tool” has. Not to mention this is listed under “Essential Tweaks” that are, according to the documentation “Essential Tweaks are modifications and optimizations that are generally safe for most users to implement.”
Problem is, there are no good debloat scripts. It’s all written by amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, messing up the system in subtle ways that then take ages to figure out.
Less packages really doesn’t mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I’d say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.
That said, I’m definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.
The problem with domains is that regular people would need to know what a domain is and what verified ownership says about the account in question.
Even then, reading domains is quite difficult, even for people who know about the topic: Humans are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter
For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.
Yup. If anything, they should add a second USB-C connector. Much more versatile and you can still charge your phone if one of them dies.
These flaky, but simultaneously bulky headphone connectors need to die. They’re inferior in pretty much every way imaginable.
Eh, while I agree that some recommendations are dodgy at best, I’ll argue that Wireguard is not only adding to security, it also makes Fail2Ban obsolete. Due to the way it works, you’ll completely hide the fact that you’re even running a SSH server at all, and this includes even Wireguard itself. More importantly though, it’s pretty much impossible to set up Wireguard in an insecure way, whereas SSH provides you with plenty of footguns. You’re not risking locking yourself out either.
Also, security comes in layers.
Exactly. No root login and no password login will do just fine as basic measures, but after that Wireguard is perfect tool for this, no weird rituals required and also quite useful for any other services you don’t want and/or need to expose to the internet as well.
Yup. Those 64 GB SSDs many retailers put into cheap laptops already come dangerously close to violating the Geneva Convention. 8GB is just stupid, even for a Linux system.
I’d be wary of that fork. It’s run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn’t really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.
And they switched to a resolution one that can’t even Integer-scale, and, even worse, isn’t even the correct aspect ratio.
Personally, I’ve seen a few people doing similar things, and to me it’s always an indicator that the person needs to get their eyes checked. Any person with good eye sight or well adjusted glasses should immediately notice that the text actually becomes blurrier and harder to read despite the increased text size.
If anything I’d say that the lesson to be learned from this should be the exact opposite: No company is safe forever, so you should choose based on how easy it is to switch.
Chaining yourself to a single company all the way from the services you use down to the OS and even the hardware is only making it worse. Particularly when Apple is already aggressively anti-consumer on a lot of fronts.
I believe there are some services, including some selfhosted ones, that allow you to quickly create (and later delete) unique aliases.
That said, I was surprised that these dictionary spam attacks don’t really happen all that much, at least based on my own experience. Most of the ambient drive-by spam my server receives targets email addresses belonging to domains I don’t even own. Blocking those and a few Sieve scripts gets rid of 99% of spam for me.
Interestingly, there was one time I received spam to a bogus address belonging to my own domain: A while back, one of my actual email addresses got leaked (thanks Sega) and a few months later that address got copied into another dataset but with a typo, which I assume was caused someone using OCR.
It might be feasible, but it’s a bit awkward to implement because Wireguard is stateless and doesn’t know if a client is offline or just hasn’t sent any traffic for some time.
That’s kind of weird, because the reason why I never bothered with (selfhosted) VPNs before Wireguard was because it was the first one that just worked. Granted, due to its nature, you don’t get a lot of feedback when things don’t work, but it’s so simple in principle that there’s not a lot that can go wrong. For external VPNs like this, it should just be: Load config, double-check, done.
Ok, now I kind of want this. I only have my PC connected to the TV, so I only need the power button, volume controls, settings and the D-Pad. A specialized cover would make hitting the right buttons in the dark much easier and also remove the ads disguised as buttons.
And you can even go a step further and configure it so all the ISOs go into a subdirectory. Then you can still use the USB for other stuff without it becoming a mess. Right now I have the following structure:
├ apps // Lots of portable apps, using the PortableApps system
├ data // For copying files between devices
├ images // ISOs go here, separated into Linux, Windows and Utilities
├ installs // For apps that need to be installed
├ secure // Encrypted Veracrypt store
└ ventoy // Ventoy config
All that on a tiny USB on my keychain and super useful when you’re the IT person for the family.
At the very least their AI Integration Philosophy has a good and nuanced view on the topic. So as long as they actually stick to that those ideas when integrating features it should be fine.