Ooooo, look at mr. “I’m sane” over here!

I am sane. I SWEAR I AM SANE! /me grabs the kitchen knife CAN’T YOU SEE IT? I’M SANER THAN EVERYONE ELSE HERE!!!

[I couldn’t help but play along with the joke, sorry.]

Relevant detail: this potential removal of the driver does NOT affect normal CD-R / DVD-R functionality. It’ll only prevent you from using them as if they were rewritable media.

Interconnect those baby steps, by having the governments

1. coordinate and phase out deprecated/Microsoft/obsolete software in synchronised waves.
2. share their solutions for problems that might pop up.
3. collaborate with governments outside the EU doing the same shift.

That IMO would increase the odds of success. And once the first steps are done, further steps will be easier.

If the technical boundary collapsed, put a human-made boundary in its place. You have the right to have some peace of mind and quiet; make yourself unavailable for at least a good chunk of the day, and make sure your folks know you’re unavailable. And why.

That’s how I remain sane.

I did use the first LMDE for some time, and I loved it, it’s a great distro. I don’t recall why I went for the Ubuntu-based Mint later on, I think it was the PPAs?

From what I remember*, there was always some rough corner. Such as the wi-fi, or the graphics card. Sure, Stable was rock solid, but you always needed something from Testing; and Testing in general was overall less stable than Ubuntu or Mint.

*This was years ago, so it might be inaccurate as of 2025.

Mint is Ubuntu minus everything that makes Ubuntu annoying. That’s why I like it.

I considered to go back to Debian but… eh, I’m too old and impatient for that. Nowadays I mostly want things that work out of the box.

I hope so, too. Their current situation isn’t currently the best (a lot of them went away in the late 10s, simply because people were using them less); I’m kind of hoping to see a revival, but that’s at the mercy of the STF, so I can’t completely rule out that the situation will evolve exactly like in the UK. It’s “let’s wait and see”, you know?

I’m also wondering the impact of that on chatrooms, that used to be extremely popular here.

When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.

[Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:

1. UK follows Saxon tribal law, while Brazil follows Roman civil law. I am not sure but I believe the former requires both sides to dig up precedents, and that puts a heavier burden on the smaller side of a legal litigation. While in the later, if you show “ackshyually in that older case the defendant was deemed guilty”, all the judge will say is “so? What is written is what matters; if the defendant violated the law or not.”.
2. The Americas in general are notorious for sloppy law enforcement. Specially Brazil. Doubly so when both parties are random nobodies.

So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.

Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.

For context:

There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”

So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.

I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:

1. False positives becoming more common.
2. The burden will be considerably bigger for smaller platforms than bigger ones.
3. It gives the STF yet another tool for vendetta. The judiciary is already a bit too strong in comparison with the other two powers, and this decision only feeds the beast further.

On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.

The difference between both links is huge - one shows 7%, another 73%. Since I have no idea which is more reliable, nor I think this difference is due to time (the FF link is from 2022), let’s go with your link instead.

73% Wayland means 27% X11. It’s still a lot; not a big problem in KDE’s case, since its developers are rather emphatic on still maintaining the X11 session. Can’t say the same about GNOME.

And the guy in question is, simply put, a nutjob.

I don’t even disagree with the idea of ditching X11. My criticism is timing; statistics like this show 90% X usage, either instead or alongside Wayland; it’s clear most users still use X11, in one form or another. It’s like making a street cars only when most people still use horse chariots.

For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it…

I ditched GNOME in 3.0 times. And I still gave it a second try, a third, even a fourth. And my system has GNOME (and KDE, and Xfce…) applications, so certain patterns are visible even in everyday usage. And I fuck around with virtual machines to find out about random stuff, including DEs that I ditched (like GNOME and KDE) or I never used directly in my machine (like Elementary).

So don’t assume “ditched it = ignorant about it”.

X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it.

O rly. And the point still stands: GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready.

Unless you want to claim Wayland reached parity with X11, and there’s totally no reason people might want to stick with X11 instead.

And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years.

This does not address what I said.

Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.

That is not what I said.

*Yawn* Given that

1. I have little to no patience towards people who distort what others say and vomit assumptions; and
2. Others might come up with something actually meaningful to contradict what I said,

It’s safe to disregard you as meaningless noise, so I ain’t wasting my time further with you.

[inb4 people discussing the semantics of “ditch”]

Odds are they’re doing the same thing only in theory. In practice, the picture changes - typically the KDE devs are far more willing to maintain old and marginal features and/or support benefiting only a small chunk of the userbase. While the GNOME devs are way more likely to ditch it, babble something about their design vision, then try to convince the user “ackshyually you don’t need it”.

(A major exception is perhaps accessibility, mentioned in the text. It isn’t just the Wayland devs worried about it, but also the KDE and GNOME devs. In this regard props to all three.)

As typical, GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready. I’m glad that I dumped it in 3.0 times.

I don’t use KDE but thumbs up to them. Wayland did not reach feature parity with X11 yet; and while it’s good to encourage migration, users should be allowed to use the old tool when it makes sense for them.

The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I’d have far more pressing matters than the data.

It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.

That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)

I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:

• HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
• since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue
• those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
• Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
• I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN

That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.

*I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.

No, it’s really not.

It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.

I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this.

Sure - the bigger the business, the more expendable each user/customer is. And Microsoft is really huge.

Just keep multiple backups.

Two are enough for most people (the 3-2-1 rule); sometimes one. The catch is that at least one of those backups must be off-line, and in a different medium than the original. While you can use the cloud to increase the reliability of the whole system, you should never rely exclusively on it.