Removed by mod

If you already know your ins and outs of the Firefox about:config and policy templates and have set up your own comfy Firefox then Zen isn’t going to do you much good. But for people who use power user browsers like Vivaldi (or even shiver Opera GX) and want to find a Firefox equivalent that meets their needs ootb then Zen is a good option. I taglined it as the “Better Vivaldi to your Chrome” since the reason people would use a program like Vivaldi is for the UI enhancements. The issue of course is that both Vivaldi and Chrome are proprietary programs using a dominating web engine.

Zen isn’t as hardened ootb like librewolf but I think it will bring a lot more people over to Firefox because of its presentation.

it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones

It is a shock for sure when I first used it, but you get used to it since the vertical tabbing is integrated with the Zen workflow (split view, side panels). It also frees up some space for navigation since you’re able to collapse it.

Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted

Interesting, I might have to look into this later

Does Sync work properly

Yup Sync works the exact same on Zen as in Firefox since Zen is just Firefox at its core. You just sign in as normal and your tabs should be there

You also mentioned add-ons not being enabled by default.

There are no pre-installed extensions (as compared to Librewolf which has ublock pre-installed), all firefox compatible extensions are compatible with Zen minus the ones that obviously clash with Zen’s design like vertical tab extensions. Just install them from the addons store as you do normally.

is the DRM-content playable on all Linux machines regardless of distro?

Yes, Mozilla handles the Widevine licensing for Linux but you’re locked to a lower level of DRM (720p instead of 4K afaik). There are extensions that re-enable HD content that just spoof your user-agent (your browser’s identity) to mimic a Windows or Mac machine.

Is it safe - am I not giving my Mozilla ID to a third party?

• https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy
• Zen is just Firefox with a heavy paint job, so all the security issues are handled by Firefox and not the Zen team.

ultimately a war that has been raging since biblical times is not something I can solve,

Linux users do like to yap a lot. It’s probably because there isn’t a constant stream of first time user experiences that the community can benefit from and that it’s a very online community. Also the generational gap is definitely there: I booted into my first Kubuntu install nearly two years ago and the Linux desktop is no where near where it was when I started (most of my info that I had before is outdated). I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone who has been using it for more than a decade.

If you want to talk to a Linux person about non-“I customized my terminal to do everything 1-5% faster” stuff you can always ask me questions!

Americans should not be allowed to joke about Chinese censorship anymore

It has always been racism which makes my liberal peers snap when I say it. Though they do become more radicalized in the end (or just stop saying lib shit)

He only removed the maintainers from the list with “.ru” domain names in their emails. So yeah, a eebil Ruzzian spy can still intentionally introduce malware in the kernel they just need to use an all american gmail account.

Absolute plonkers, I think it would be hilarious if they thought they could sneak this through people as if Torvalds himself didn’t design git to make it impossible to hide.

This in itself isn’t surprising, nor does it really hurt Russia in any material way since all this means is that Russian hardware and contributions aren’t allowed in Torvalds’ git tree.

What was disheartening was to hear Torvalds spit out the most racist shit imaginable while his co-maintainers try to do damage control. A person sent a revert patch and he went “Well did you know the Russian orcs are the natural enemy of Finns?”

RMS is a creep and Torvalds is a Nazi/Finnish, never meet your heroes I guess.

The cycle of violence

This means that for everyone else, this information is irrelevant.

True, when Microsoft tells its customers that their computers can’t upgrade to Windows 11 because of “hardware requirements” they were obviously not lying through their teeth, totally not because the margins are higher when people buy new computers (and the bloody yankee mining supply chain can continue at full speed).

It’s not like x86_64 laptops keep advertising AI capabilities through their new NPU units and thus can do the same thing as ARM snapdragon chips.

The software is proprietary, what they tell you is what they want and are willing to tell you.

Never stop , Never lose faith

Maintaining the GNU agenda is our topmost priority

If I were to explain it more specifically (sans people are dumb level takes), when something is part of the dominant hegemony (Windows has almost become synonymous with the personal computer, something still connected to a Pax Americana mythos) and people aren’t educated on different options then all people have are anecdotes and personal wisdom. Windows as a brand and as a force in computer technology warps everything around it, not the other way around. That’s why we see so many conflicting opinions on Windows, there’s not a leg for people to stand on and judge their experiences objectively. People’s lives depend on the very thing that’s hurting them.

Add a huge splash of US hegemony to the mix and you can see how Silicon Valley is the technological Hollywood of the world. Communal efforts to create software for the common good is one of the main ways to combat this because it gives us an external vocabulary outside of the silicon valley ideology that’s taught to us. I only really started to understand how computers work when I delved into free software projects.

Good correction, I’m not a Windows user anymore and I defer to this YouTuber since he seems the most knowledgeable. No one is infallible and I don’t want to maliciously spread bad info

But yes, I see, good thing to know that in order to disable recall I need to use an arcane cli command or use a Windows feature most people don’t know about.

Windows is a pain in the ass to work with but at least it warns me before i format the boot sector.

Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian) also warns you no? But in any case, it’s a learning curve just like any other. Stick with it for a couple more months and it’ll go away I promise! Linux only gets better over time.

Politics, however, is inescapable. The family is battered by political ads while watching Cardinals football games. Mr. Martinez drives past billboards on his predawn commute to haul wastewater, and his daughter, Julissa, sees ads as she flicks through social media.

On one blistering late-summer Sunday, arguments started up — again — about why Julissa had embraced Ms. Harris. “Because Taylor Swift endorsed her,” Mr. Martinez said. “I don’t like Taylor Swift,” she retorted. Explaining her support for Ms. Harris, she said: “I just like what she stands for — women’s rights and everything. It’s empowering for a woman to be so powerful.”

Julissa glanced at her father. “A man will never know what a woman goes through,” she said.

On your left you can see the purest form of ideology, nearly 99% pure , unfiltered, sans GMOs.

Windows 10 hits end of life next year, so Windows 10 users will become the Windows 7 users of today as software and updates slowly stop coming to them.

Microsoft could also just… forcibly update your machine. It’s their operating system after all.

What’s your point here? That volunteers not financially backed by the US regime don’t magically have the capacity to reverse engineer the dozens upon dozens of blobs that get added to the kernel every release cycle? Or that they’re even trying at all? Both aren’t a good look for whatever you’re trying to say

they’re not adding anything of value.

Now you’re just being vindictive towards others and I really don’t like that. It doesn’t cost anything to not be unkind towards people’s contributions. You’re free to criticize the approach but I draw the line at the idea that it is worthless because none of this work is.

Is it really a fork if all you do is take upstream and remove the blobs?

Yes that’s what a fork is, a disagreement with upstream’s direction and taking your own measures. Git is a decentralized version control system that allows for this.

What code has this fork created that makes it novel?

Deblob scripts and regularly checking the source code for complying licenses. They regularly follow upstream kernel releases and are the first ones to signal license issues and inconsistencies.

Have they tried to replace those blobs with open source drivers?

I should have been more specific. Virtually all drivers in the upstream Linux kernel are licensed under a libre license. However, manufacturer firmware (small amounts of code designed to “unlock” the device’s capabilities) are distributed as a binary blob that gets loaded into your computer (you’re allowed to redistribute the firmware in binary form, but not anything else). The Linux kernel’s upstream (aka Torvalds and other high level maintainer’s own trees) allows the use of nonfree firmware for device support (AKA getting your foot into the door). In short, no modern computer device that people use regularly is free from private tampering. Who are these “private” tamperers? The US-led digital empire.

If you have a machine (or more likely, a virtual machine) that doesn’t require device firmware, then linux-libre is the superior kernel as it subtracts the space and attack vector costs of nonfree firmware. We aren’t at that point yet as CPU microcode is far too important to give up on physical hardware, but for nations in the Global South with the engineering capacity, linux-libre does all the work of de-westernizing the kernel.

“No one knows how our retaliation and revenge will be completed,” she said.

A true role model . Also worth to note for the umpteenth’ time the oozing ideology of the article. Kim Yo Jung is only referred to as Kim Jong Un’s sister even though she holds a high ranking role in the publicity wing of the government, it’s literally her job to be this badass.