Supercrunchy

Exactly, and some of the laws require just asking if the age is over a some pre-defined threshold, not sending the full date, for example "is the user over 18? Is the user over 15? 13?"

And just to be clear, I do think that "protecting the children" is just an excuse to push surveillance tech that was very convenient to use after the Epstein files. I am strongly against these laws and I am supporting ($$$) activist groups fighting against them. Do consider donating or getting involved too if you can.

But this specific change isn't adding surveillance to Linux. It's just a date of birth field that a parent can set. I can see why a parent would want it instead of using shady and intrusive "child control" software that takes over the computer.

You need to store the date of birth to update the user's reported age automatically. It makes sense and puts the "protecting the children" responsibility back on parents instead of third parties that every website is now starting to use.

The systemd solution is not even reusable for actual verification because it can't provide any cryptographic proof of the verification! It's literally just a date.

a sensor triggers

screen goes dark

rock crubling noises close by

... RUN!

This theory has some solid experimental foundations

Of all terrible proposals coming up in this period, I'm still more-or-less ok with this system because the administrator is still in full control to set whatever date they want, and the field is entirely optional.

They call it "age verification" in the aricle, but there's no 3rd party "verification" whatsoever. It's just a field for the user birth date saved in the user metadata. This is IMHO acceptable because it doesn't force anybody to provide IDs or personal information to some random shady company.

I think calling it "age verification" is a bit confusing and will make people unhappy by default, but might be a smart move to make it compliant with the new laws coming out in this period (the user age was "verified" by the system administrator, after all).

I 100% agree with you. I think atomic distros are great for people like my parents, where they just need a browser and maybe libreoffice, and it's valuable to have something that "just works" (now I need to just convince them to give linux it a try...)

If you start getting into coding or customization then it quickly becomes clunky to use and requires knowledge beyond what a beginner would have, especially because most guides will tell you to use the traditional package manager, but that won't work with immutable root.

Containers, installing software to /home, changing advanced settings is in my experience way too much for most people.

I hope though that this might be solvable in the future with flatpak. Maybe by creating some special category for "CLI tools" with less/no sandboxing but still installable and runnable from a normal user account, and shipping the whole dependency tree.

Lol the AI decided that it's perfectly reasonable for people to stay at their desk and continue working, even with that huge fire. "This is fine" vibe, but in real life.

My suggestion is to use some privacy focused browser for instagram, like other commenters said. If you don't want to move fully to another browser, then at least use that browser only for insta. I would still expect them to be able to track you, since they likely have a big team working on the tracking tools. It's their entire product after all... I am not on instagram so I don't know if it works, but another thing you can do is to make it a game to click the least interesting things you see on your feed. Go in the post, spend a bit of time there, if you are feeling like putting effort drop a like or comment too. Pick the lowest effort posts, things you would never do or buy, but I would avoid politics (you don't want to start seeing biasing content that might actually succeed in changing your opinion). All modern platforms will start showing more and more of that extremely uninteresting content and make the feed less addictive to you and I think also your friends. Don't click or linger too much on an interesting thing on your feed, just duckduckgo it from the other browser instead. The interests data is the most valuable thing they have on you, and they know all your friends so they know who you are even if you used pseudonyms. It's hard at the beginning, but it gets easier as the suggestions get worse. You don't have to spend much time on that too.

Say no more!

https://downloadmoreram.com/ for those who miss the reference (and btw, it's safe to click the download button, it doesn't do anything, it's just a good old school joke website)

Life pro tip that will make your IT deparment hate you: you can use Evolution and change the client id to match outlook's one in the advanced settings. It'll look like you are using the standard outlook client from your IT department point of view, but you'll actually get a usable interface instead. I assume that thunderbird has the same options to override the client id, but I haven't checked.

Don't blame me if you get in troubles though.

8GB is not a lot to work with. It mostly depends on what crates you work with (unfortunately by default rust statically links all code in a single final step and that can be consuming a lot of RAM) Modern editors consume a lot of RAM, and if you have rust-analyzer running it's going to use a lot more in addition to the editor.

Tips:

• trim down yout dependencies (check out cargo tree, cargo depgraph and the cargo build --timings ). Instead of enabling all features on crates, enable only what you need.
• to free up disk space run cargo clean on the projects you are not currently working on, and regularly on your current project. If you change dependencies often it's going to use up a lot of GBs of disk space. You'll need to recompile all the dependencies every time you run it though, so don't do it too often.
• fully close other programs if possible (browsers, chat apps, etc). Look at your task manager to see what's using up memory and kill as much as possible. Consider browsing from your phone instead, and using the PC browser just as needed.
• emacs and vim have a very steep learning curve. I would suggest against that. If it's still too frustrating to code like this, you can disable the language server (rust-analyzer), but it's going to make coding harder. You'll loose edit suggestions and error highlighting. It's still possible to code without rust-analyzer but you'll need to run cargo check very often and read up method names on docs.rs a lot more.

On my system I am using kde x11 instead of wayland for the same reason. Last time I tried wayland I was getting half of the framerate compared to x11.

At some point I want to switch to a gaming-oriented distros and see if it's magically better there.