You’re looking at this with a very closed mind. This isnt (currently) being designed for people to just do normal computer stuff but in their brain. This technology has huge potential for improving prosthetics and treating neurological disorders.

You could just look at my profile to see that I’m not. I’m also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn’t change that I’ve never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.

I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge

Neat, I haven’t tried the Jitsi integration so I wasn’t aware it had persistent rooms. That’s the main thing I need to exist, I’ll have to give it a try. Although, I do still greatly prefer the format of servers and channels, rather than spaces and rooms.

Channels that function similar to discords? You can start a voice call in a room or create voice calls, but those function pretty differently from Discord voice channels.

I love Matrix but it really isnt a good discord replacement. It’s much closer to Telegram or Lemmy. It doesnt even have voice channels, the main reason everyone I know uses Discord. I hope we do get a proper decentralized discord alternative at some point.

Ive seen a staggering amount of students who relied entirely on AI fail out of the masters program I’m in. Cheating only gets you so far.

Yep, didnt make a single sensible point. Just anecdotes and irrelevant examples. I’m bad at ignoring an argument so I went and blocked lol

That’s not what a false equivalency is, but ok.

FOSS has this reputation among most people.

Most people don’t have any clue what FOSS is. They just want software, and if its free and works, they’ll like it.

I am genuinely curious why you think people pay money for worse software though…

I provided two reasons in my post. Superior marketing and professional support.

That was my entire point. The person I was originally replying to seemed to suggest exactly that.

Ok, but thats not what you went on to say.

You are not arguing in good faith, I don’t care to continue going in circles.

How is that false equivalency? Comparing fdroid to the play store is about as close as you can get.

Like I said, there is bad FOSS software, but that doesnt make it generally false. People pay for software that doesnt have a good free alternative, they pay for support, and often they will pay to use software that has good marketing because they are simply unaware of the alternatives.

I’m not saying all FOSS software is great, but lots of software does have great FOSS options, for example, Firefox, Blender, and Bevy. Obviously there are also examples of proprietary software without a great alternative, like Photoshop. I like FOSS, but I don’t avoid proprietary solutions that do a better job. Believe it or not, I still end up using mostly FOSS software.

You’re not backing your points up with any actual reasoning or examples while also being condescending about it.

You can also go on the play store and find a huge list of proprietary apps that haven’t been updated.

You need some actual stats to back up this point. Plenty of proprietary software is unsuccessful because it fails to profit, so its shut down. At least FOSS software will continue as long as someone finds it useful enough to keep it going. Plus the obvious, that if you like a piece of software you can maintain it yourself.

Also saying that FOSS software is “notoriously low quality” is silly. There’s tons of great and important FOSS software and plenty of shit FOSS software, just like proprietary software. Your comments just ignore how much proprietary shovelware exists.

I’m not saying Librewolf is insecure, I’m just saying its a bit less secure. They generally do a good job keeping up to date, but there can be delays if an update conflicts with their changes.

Librewolf is not just a Firefox config. You can look at the repo and see a number of patches. Without a paid security team to review these patches with every update, it is less secure.

I’m not saying not to use Librewolf, the likelihood of a zero day specifically targeting it and effecting a significant number of users is very unlikely, simply based off of the size of its userbase compared to more mainstream browsers.

It does, but less than Firefox does. Their lack of manpower means delayed updates to fix zero days compared to Firefox. It also means less eyes on any patches introduced, so I’d be more concerned about malicious code being introduced.

It just lacks manpower unfortunately. Going with a browser that has the funding for a security team is the safer option.

I agree, Mullvad is the only fork that I have confidence in the security of (ignoring Tor ofc since it’s not really for general use).

Also want to add that this was caused by a configuration issue. If you want security, don’t use Firefox (or its forks) default configs, look into Betterfox. Apparently Zen also uses this as the base for its default preferences, which is a good decision.

What do you mean? The dev did acknowledge it and linked to a relevant discussion.

Because its a stupid issue. The complaint is that a Firefox fork acts like Firefox.

I’m not sure why you linked to this irrelevant 3 week old issue while referring to something that was fixed a year ago. Referring to it as a backdoor also implies that it was malicious, when it was simply incompetence. Have there been any security issues since? (Not trying to imply that not having any would make it safe, just wondering).

Zen is an amateur hobbyist project, expecting it to be something else is silly. It isn’t backed by a company, so you take on these risks when you use the project. The same thing goes for all community run browser forks, and unfortunately, using upstream browsers will 100% be more secure. If you don’t want to take those risks, just use Firefox (preferably hardened).

Security costs money, open source browser forks generally don’t have much of that.

Edit: I’m not trying to shit on this browser, or even say that nobody should use it. Be aware of your attack surface and know what risks you’re taking on when using any piece of software. I’m probably still going to play around with Zen, but I probably won’t be doing my banking on it.

Floorp is even less trustworthy after that incident with part of the browser being closed source. Even if they undid it, the fact that they would try that is unacceptable.