privacy hardly matters in the real world anyway

Agree with all of the above and especially this. It’s counterintuitive for me - I’ve spent a lot of time and money to set up privacy conscious services for myself and my family over the years. But practically speaking, our lives wouldn’t be any different if I hadn’t.

I still do it and invest in it because I think privacy is a fundamentally important human right, but I have to recognize that it’s my own passion and not someone else’s.

I honestly love this, it could be a great “desktop” underneath all of your windows with some small tweaks. Widgets to show import system stats, shortcuts, and an always available tabbed terminal.

Ha that’s a great point, Acrobat is garbage. I was talking about their creative suite with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

I agree - while I am very frustrated with Adobe’s practices I can’t deny that their creative software is very, very good. They have managed to build software suites that have been stable, consistent, and near the cutting edge of their industry for decades while avoid significant bloat and legacy hangover.

There is clearly a market for alternatives and we’ve seen some interesting packages come out but nothing has been a proper replacement yet. The barrier to entry for alternatives hasn’t been a legal barrier - it’s been a lack of design and development expertise.

Hardware acceleration has worked fine on Linux for me but I had to enable it. There are several options for HA of various components in the settings in the new Steam UI.

Well put. I’m a privacy-conscious Linux user, but I’m constantly frustrated by the lack of technical understanding in the privacy community, especially towards Apple solutions. They’re not perfect but they are very good. They have made major investments in improving the privacy protections for their users in a way no other major company has that I know of.

Are you a very technical person who wants to improve their privacy and have fun figuring out technology? Great, me too, run Linux and GrapheneOS.

But, if you’re not highly technical or you don’t enjoy it you run a real risk of misconfiguring something and being far less private than you think. The truth is you might be better off with Apple’s “Advanced Data Protection” (E2E encryption), Private Relay (VPN + Tor hybrid on Cloudflare CDNs to avoid VPN blocks), “Hide My Email” email masking, disabled telemetry, fine grained app permissions, etc.

At the end of the day, all this stuff is good for is pushing back a bit against corporate advertising profiles. Focusing on it too much isn’t healthy for anyone.

I agree. We need to be careful about what news/media we consume, and I think we can do this without being uninformed. I have several family members (on opposite ends of the political spectrum) who are having significant mental health problems in part because they are not considering what they are consuming (especially online). It’s dramatically impacting their health and families. It can happen to all sorts of people, whether they’re getting overwhelmed with anxiety on the state of things or getting sucked into an angry political group.

You can stay informed without clicking on/listening to/watching everything that sparks your fear, anxiety or rage. Curate your news sources, pay attention to their motivations, and listen to your own emotional reaction. It takes a little work but is well worth it when you can be a kind, functioning, and informed neighbor to everyone around you.

You’re right! Edited.

Friendly plug for Pop!_OS, a great Ubuntu-like distro with flatpacks