Michael’s clickbait game is amazing lmao

As someone who has migrated data to new PCs many times, I will say you should always back everything up and sort through it later. I have had many occasions where I’ve forgotten about important files or documents and deleted them because I didn’t know they were in the location I deleted. Storage is relatively cheap, buy a 30$ hard drive dock and a couple TB hard drive (spinning HDD, not an SSD), and use a program like FoxClone to completely clone your current OS drive. Then you can happily wipe it and still have the backup should you need it.

Screengrabbed some of the conversation https://imgur.com/a/JD1e9Vj

GrapheneOS supports this type of security checking outside of Google’s Play Integrity API but app devs have to enable it. The Graphene devs encourage leaving one star reviews, emailing support, and linking this page: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide

Invidious still works very well, however it is an ongoing battle with YouTube. They ban an instance and the instance’s ban evasion routine tries again, or in the case of IP range bans migrates to another provider and the game goes on. Despite this, it is the only way I know of to access YouTube relatively pain free using a public VPN provider. By now YouTube has blocked a lot of public VPN IPs. To me, this advantage makes it worth it.

The best way to keep up with which instances are currently functional is via the Invidious Matrix room, https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org. You can also check the instances list https://instances.invidious.io/ but it may get out of date sometimes.

Finally, I’ve found the best way to use Invidious is via FreeTube (Linux) or Clipious (Android).

This season is gonna be a banger

I think this will make more sense if you understand how repositories work. You can take a look at this link for the openSUSE repositories, and can Google for the basics on how a repo works if needed https://en.opensuse.org/Package_repositories. As you can see there is only ONE repo for tumbleweed, and there will always only be one, as it always contains the latest versions of packages accepted into Factory. However, there are multiple Leap Repos containing curated combinations of package versions that create a stable system. In theory, everything you install from the official Leap Repos should just work within that version of Leap. However in order to get this kind of stability Leap does not always package the newest version of every software in a given Leap release. Sometimes newer is not better, as adding new features can uncover bugs upstream and downstream, which may not always be fixed in time for a Leap release. With Tumbleweed, you get the double edge sword of being the first to possibly see any bugs, but also be the first to see the bug fixes.

As to whether or not certain packages are included in the Leap repos, both Leap and Tumbleweed are curated in what packages they contain in their core install.

For Leap, if you need a certain package it may be critical to check in the core Leap Repo whether it is included, because installing the latest version of the package from a 3rd party repo may not go well with Leap’s older versions of upstream software.

For Tumbleweed, I’ve found that the newest versions of most 3rd party Linux software rarely encounter any issues with the upstream packages included in Tumbleweed. This makes sense, as new versions of downstream software might be expected to utilize newer versions of upstream software. But again, while openQA makes Tumbleweed the most stable rolling distro, you will see bugs and you should have the knowledge to know how to deal with rolling back packages (or your whole system) if things don’t go well.

Yes they use different repositories and release models. Leap uses a normal versioned release model (like Ubuntu for example) where packages are in a “stable” state and only non-breaking patches and minor updates are available for that release. Tumbleweed is “rolling”, which is explained here https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Upgrade_Tumbleweed. With Tumbleweed you are expected to manually update to new snapshots using zypper dup, and it is a bit more work to manage especially for new Linux users. it is also recommended to disable GNOME and KDE’s automatic updates, since individually updating packages reduces the benefit of the openQA quality checks for Tumbleweed which depend on snapshots (which appear as new distro versions to zypper). I personally uninstall Gnome Software completely, and I like to use zypper -vvv dup --no-recommends as recommended packages can sometimes add unnecessary bloat to the system.

To be honest, I think NVIDIA Optimus iGPU+dGPU is just the most common configuration by a huge margin so you hardly hear about other multi GPU configs. However looking at the repo https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control it doesn’t have language specific to NVIDIA that I can see. And, if openSUSE is now advertising it as their preferred way of managing multi-GPU configs, I’d imagine there is the possibility of improving it if there is missing functionality.

What do you recommend for users coming from Windows?

The ultimate in privacy for YouTube is Invidious https://invidious.io/, which fully proxies your videos from YouTube through an Invidious server. Every once in a while YouTube will get the upper hand and figure out how to fingerprint and block the servers, but so far the community has always figured out how to circumvent it. One advantage is that you can feasibly use a VPN with Invidious; without it, you have to keep hopping from VPN server to VPN server until you find one YouTube hasn’t already blocked, especially on a large public VPN like ProtonVPN. This applies to NewPipe as well, since NewPipe still tries to talk to YouTube directly as far as I understand. On Android I use Clipious as the app to access the Invidious servers.

Agreed of course, just letting them know the choices they have haha… my path was long, from Windows to Ubuntu to Lubuntu on an old PC, then dabbling with Qubes (daily driving was too painful) which introduced me to Debian and Fedora, back to Windows for gaming, dipped my toe back into Linux gaming with Fedora, and finally settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed for all my machines. It was all worth it tho!

Proton, which is the main enabler for Linux gaming given that not many games are released with a native Linux version, is provided via Steam already with no need to install SteamOS. If you are coming into Linux brand new from windows I’d recommend installing a very popular distro like Ubuntu, or Mint. Learn the basics, and make sure to learn how to backup your data on Linux. If you are a) frustrated with missing some feature or software in your current distro or b) just curious about tweaking your system, start learning about how to work in the Linux shell (start with bash). Then come have some fun on a distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed (my current distro), where you always have access to the latest software and can change tons of things about your system in exchange for having to put in some more time to manage it. If that still doesn’t satisfy your needs and you have decided you love Linux and are never going back, then check out Arch Linux or its derivatives where you have nearly unlimited freedom but the highest time investment.

Michael using different language than NVIDIA to describe the state of the driver is confusing. I guess he considers New Feature Branch to be stable, except the first 555 versions released under that designation were (IMO, based on my system and watching the feedback forums and changelogs for 560/565) not very stable from a user perspective… which I suspect is likely why NVIDIA has not released any 555/560/565 to Production Branch for ~6 months now. And it’s still not clear which major version is planned for Production Branch…

I have to ask if you have ever watched professional level StarCraft 2. Because those people play at an insane level of multitasking and optimization and it is actually beautiful to watch in many cases. The stuff they do is often not even achievable by the average player. I’m sure there are other examples in FPS games and other genres, but what professional RTS players do definitely pushes the level of human cognitive ability.

The obvious barrier to entry here is knowing the game, as you can’t really appreciate things fully unless you’ve played at least a little. But I’ll say that I started off watching LowkoTV and he was entertaining enough to watch until I finally decided to try out the game, and then came to appreciate it even more after that.

Obviously using in game portals to related content creators to push more ads is idiotic, just saying the recognition of the importance of gaming content creators to the games themselves isn’t inherently a bad thing.

So many people say to isolate google play services in another profile, but I have not seen anything quantifying the amount of attack surface reduction or what benefit this gives in terms of anonymity or security. Google play services includes Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) which is what enables most apps to give timely notifications. There are alternatives like ntfy, but they require some understanding of how to set them up, and tinkering.

Finally, multiple profiles is useful for the most security conscious but for the typical user I do not believe its very useful. One thing I noticed is notifications are not consisently reliable, so setting up a “Facebook” profile does isolate you from the app but then you may miss notifications. You also have to type your password for every profile switch.

Honest question, what is better for security: 1)proprietary software offered in a community flatpak by some random person 2) proprietary software from the official non-free distro repos 3)proprietary software via the vendor’s repo or binary installer

The reason I ask is I would of course prefer a flatpak offered by the vendor. But in many cases that simply isn’t offered. Looking at Zoom especially, which is a horrible POS software on Linux that probably SHOULD be sandboxes, but there is no official flatpak.

Agreed… depending on Google to implement or fix very specific features is just shouting into the void. Use a trusted 3rd party app like Bitwarden, as you mentioned

I wonder whether this eventually is going to result in some sort of spinoff project, otherwise why not a) officially graduate her with full sendoff like they did with Coco, or b) announce an indefinite hiatus, which has precendent in other vtuber orgs. It seems like she’s not joining Hololive Staff, so this whole “affiliate” thing seems like she’s getting some sort of role change that would land her outside of the current hololive management structure…interesting stuff

OK cool now you are arguing in bad faith. Nothing in my response was an attempt to hide the class conflict inherent in liberal democracy.