A college class introduced me to “The Birth of a Nation” aka The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

Did you enjoy it?

Fuck no. It is a deeply messed up racist pile of shit.

It certainly opened my eyes to it’s place in history.

Since the film itself is best left to the trash heap of forgotten awfulness, here’s two points from Wikipedia that feel worth remembering:

• “the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history”
• was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House (for President Woodrow Wilson)

I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don’t hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don’t want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don’t know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

There’s lots of other reasons I’m glad I switched, of course.

I find the windows update and Linux graphical updater processes identical. They only diverge at the end when the Windows one fails with a mysterious error message and offers to retry or open a troubleshooter that won’t work.

Windows arguably is, indeed, two or three different systems stapled together. There’s the C code kernal bits, the .Net runtime higher level bits, and the Electron “this didn’t need to be fast anyway and we only knew how to write JavaScript” bits.

until it came time to install new software.

That is the big giveaway. I used the term “It’s free” too many times when setting up software for them. “I used to have to pay for all of that.”

I always hard code IPv4 addresses. Load balancing and DNS resolution are an admission of weakness.

(This is sarcasm. WTF Steam?)

If I recall correctly, it has been released for moile on and off as experimental builds. Last time I grabbed an APK, it wasn’t ready.

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.

I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.

There’s also some indoctrination involved.

But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.

Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.

Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.

That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.

There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.

I’m pleased to report that all those other promised utopia frameworks turned out perfect, and aren’t in any way still a huge daily pain in the ass. I expect no less from this time around. Computers are finally smart. It’s great.

It’s the AI that is prone to delusions, or was that just me?

A little more time and a lot more money. But the savings will be huge. The savings will make the current era of extravagant burning piles of money look like a sound investment. You’ll be glad you got in on the ground floor…

We do need a little more time, though. And money.

Linux Mint is so nice.

I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.

It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.

That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.