I’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).

It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.

I’m not much against having repositories with plugins, extensions or whatever BUT they should be like Debian, you can just pack everything into images / a folder and use offline for ever when required.

Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.

Same goes for modern Docker powered solutions and JavaScript frameworks.

Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.

Speaking about VSCode it is also open-source until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).

I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.

It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.

For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.

Can I start with Gentoo or is that too easy?

I would say that security and privacy are also very important. That’s something you can’t get with Windows.

Congratulations! Next you might want to learn about the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

Windows has spyware, so that should be enough reason to not use it for someone like you. You will have to spend some time to learn GNU/Linux, but for most office tasks it shouldn’t be difficult, especially if you are good with computers. Most popular distros already come with a PDF viewer and Libre Office, so it should be able to do almost everything you want out of the box. VLC player can play all common video types and is easy to install. Libre Office might have issues with some Word documents though, so you might need to look into that. A web browser (usually Firefox) and probably some email client will be preinstalled as well.

You might need to check if your printer and scanner will be supported out of the box or if extra drivers from the manufacturer are needed (then check if they are available on their website). I think printers will probably work fine out of the box, but scanners might require extra drivers (this depends on the model - there are models that don’t).

If you need more motivation, look into the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

GNOME also has an app that lets you do encrypted incremental backups very easily.

It is possible to be entertaining and ethical at the same time. Someone else will take their place.

I would venture that the majority of people see it as an investment of one sort or another. I think the insane market cap, and the devestating effect the recent crash had on its reputation and use, are evidence of that.

You are right, but it doesn’t matter what most people think. I mean we should educate them about it, but their opinion is irrelevant.

Most cryptos have fundamental problems that I don’t see being fixed, eg it’s deflationary properties, BTC’s wasteful PoW, ETH skirting/crossing the boundary of being a security, etc.

Etherum has already switched from proof of work algorithm to less wasteful proof of stake. So it seems that at least that problem can be solved.

This is like the one thing they are good for, and Monero is the best at it. This is an arguable point though, others may say that this is a negative due to the implications and governments have cracked down on privacy enhancing tools like Tornado Cash for this reason. I personally value privacy to an extent, but do not see the need in my life to use Monero. I certainly wouldn’t fault you for using it, though.

You should be able to buy any of the popular cryptocurrencies anonymously. They won’t make your payment history private like Monero does, but you will still be anonymous when paying.

I think adoption has stagnated. And look at El Salvador, they basically had to force crypto on the populace and they use their own proprietary wallet, nullifying privacy benefits. And again, it is treated as an investment by the government there who are buying BTC to speculate.

I don’t know exact stats, but it’s bigger than I expected before I started looking into it. There are a lot of crypto ATMs now in cities, which you can see at https://coinatmradar.com. There are also some stores and restaurants that accept crypto, especially in the US (https://coinmap.org/view). You can also find some online services on https://cryptwerk.com. El Salvador is certainly messed up. Bitcoin probably isn’t even a good choice, because of its big transaction fees. Other cryptocurrencies are faster, can handle more transactions and have smaller fees.

Yeh this is dependant on your country. Here in Australia every crypto transaction is a capital gains event 🙄

Damn, that’s crazy. So you can’t even buy something without paying an extra tax?

No problem, take your time :).

They were fine with Linus investing in companies and then reviewing their products or competing products and I don’t see that as a result of sloppiness. They haven’t even addressed it in their apology video.

Also moving too fast is not a valid excuse for misleading millions of people for years.

That’s sad. I hope that the company fails and they get hired somewhere else.

Good point, they can’t change who Linus is. But then I don’t understand why Luke and others would stay there for years and continue working with that guy, continue to take part in unethical behavior. It makes me think that it just didn’t bother them enough.

Linus is not the only one to blame. The people who work there could have done something to stop the unethical behavior or quit. But some of them stayed there for years and enabled Linus. I can’t look at those people and not think that they aren’t incompetent or corrupt.

What they did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It’s the only way to stop corrupt/incompetent reviewers from misleading people.

But Steve didn’t contact Linus to give him time to prepare an explanation in which he would blame everyone else and say how sad he is! It’s just a poor $100M company, they are just humans and they make mistakes. :D

They have been misleading millions of people for years and getting away with it. I hope this company is done. There have to be consequences for this kind of behavior.

What Gamers Nexus did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It’s the only way to get rid of corrupt channels like Linus Tech Tips and I suspect they were just one of many.

Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter

Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.

He could actually still log in and use terminal (https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=760). So couldn’t he have just reinstalled the desktop environment? :D

Hey, remember that time when Linus promoted a kickstarter scam? https://youtu.be/VHjmlQdzpW4