Captain Beyond

The point (as I see it) is not so much to stop scraping as it is to prevent bots from effectively DDOS-ing web services. As others have said ActivityPub content is public and there are ways to get it without slamming instances with scraper bots.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I’m too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.

But but but I thought Apple was the good guys, all the degooglers said so

Little Kitty Tables

Note that “source available on github” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.

That said I believe Stremio’s repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it’s GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.

Like any company offering “exclusive deals only in the app” the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That’s one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the “deal.”

This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or “bypass” onerous things like the “integrity API” is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.

We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.

This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.

I don’t use brew but I do use Guix on top of PopOS, for most of the same reasons I use Guix System as a daily driver distro on my other machines. The PopOS install is meant to act as a “Windows replacement” so it has proprietary drivers, Steam, etc. For anything that’s not a system package I get it from Guix if possible, because I prefer Guix’s package management and its commitment to software freedom.

On Windows I use Scoop which has a handful of similarities in terms of user package management.

From a technical or legal perspective, copyright infringement is not theft. The relationship a copyright holder has with a work is of a completely different character than actual ownership. See Dowling v. United States (1985).

Whether or not “AI” training constitutes copyright infringement is, as far as I know, still up in the air. And, while I believe most of us can agree that actual theft is unethical, the ethics of copyright infringement are as far as I know also very debatable.

Disclaimer - not an uncritical supporter of “AI.”

I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.

The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It’s important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.

I don’t agree with everything F-droid does and I don’t think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it’s a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.

No. This isn’t a thing. Don’t try to make it a thing.

Once something leaves your computer you lose control of it. The recipient can do whatever they want with the message. If you don’t trust the recipient not to be malicious then don’t send them anything sensitive. You can’t untell a secret.

Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific

Guix is currently hosted on FSF infrastructure and, as another commenter pointed out, is in the process of migrating to Codeberg. It has never been on Github.

Linux is the kernel, so the userspace is irrelevant. And I’m not sure what the exact amount of Linux you can change before it is no longer Linux, but it’s Linux enough to run entire desktop environments.

Disagree - making it harder to ship proprietary blob crap “for Linux” is a feature, not a bug.

I just think it’s worth to keep in mind that the most widely used smartphone OS already is a Linux… especially since people who want so called “real Linux phones” end up wanting to run Android crapware on them anyway.

If you want a Linux phone that can run Android apps, they are very plentiful. You can even run so-called Linux applications including entire desktop environments. Android is very much not a “fake Linux.”

(That is not to say I have no interest in non-Android Linuxes, I just don’t think it’s worth switching just so you can claim to run “real Linux”)

Yes, pre-NT Windows actually was DOS. Windows 95 was MS-DOS 7.0.

Android is Linux.