For context, as a writer at The Atlantic described it:

The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.

Misinformation. OP is advocating that you shoot yourself in the foot.

The CEO said something silly on Twitter which revealed either that (a) he shares an exceedingly banal opinion with literally half of America or (b) he's not above a bit of preemptive sycophancy to advance his (positive) anti-trust agenda.

There's nothing particularly scandalous in the offending tweet:

• Implying that the Democrats are now "the party of big business" is arguably true (and very boring)
• Implying that the Republicans now "stand for the little guys" is dumb but also arguably true, unfortunately - the working classes swung to Trump in the recent election while the Democrats are fast becoming a party of high-earning elites (which is why they lost)
• Saying that the antitrust actions began under Trump I is, well, true

Proton is not owned Zuck-like by its CEO. It's controlled by a foundation with other stakeholders on the board, including the inventor of the Web himself. In its niche it is still by far the best option. Ditching it for a nebulous non-existent alternative because the CEO expressed a dumb and extremely commonplace opinion is just silly and self-defeating.

PS: to be clear, OP is peddling misinformation because it's not true that "Proton took the stance" of anything. It's the personal opinion of the CEO that's at issue. It's a major distinction. I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual's right to have their own thoughts.

PPS: to be extra clear, my comments are about the post above, not stuff that people are reading elsewhere. But the substance stands. See discussion for detail.

Let's not get carried away. The scope of the comment is pretty narrow if you read it closely. This is one member of a 5-person board that also includes Tim Berners-Lee. The foundation structure is also a protection against abuses.

Daytime energy is soon going to be free in much of the world. The advances in green tech, especially solar and batteries, are real. Much faster progress than even the optimists were predicting a decade ago. The revolution is reaching a tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining and requires no state subsidies. I am not a tech utopian, and this alone will not save us. But there's no denying it's good news. It's all happening far too late but it does look like humans are going to kick their fossil habit after all.

Inconvenient footnote: thank China.

It would help if European voters stopped behaving like spoiled children and voting for wannabe dictators because inflation or immigration or whatever.

Picture a field of soybeans. Now picture a hellish scene of thousands of miserable bedraggled chickens crammed together in a dark hangar.

The taste is exactly the same.

I think progress on this one is going to be faster than people imagine.

This will be easy to hate on, but let's be careful not to get carried away.

Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there's no good option and you have to accept the least bad.

Yes, I've had similar experiences recently and similar thoughts. Crossing land borders in Asia is more stressful than it was a few years ago. Lots of redundant security theater and biometrics everywhere. Of course, China is on another level to everyone else. At the immigration booth, your conversation with the official is now translated and subtitled in real time on both sides. And face ID is now so universal in China that I suspect the fingerprinting has become an afterthought. Everyone is being filmed and tracked pretty much everywhere. Not just cash but even ticket numbers are now redundant. Everything is attached to your personal ID and cameras decide whether you enter public buildings, train stations and so on. The day their government decides to really abuse all that power, they're in deep trouble.

In my experience the border thing is clearly worst in Asia, but with the exception of China it's mostly just tiresome theater.

By contrast I crossed into the Schengen zone from Turkey this summer and was surprised by how little security there was. But then I noticed the police all but dismantling a bunch of heavy goods vehicles in their search for illicit migrants. That was absolutely not security theater.

PS. This subject got me thinking. I've seen a ton of borders because I like to travel by land. Different regions of the world definitely have different priorities at borders. In Asia it's drugs and contraband. They care what's in your bag. In Europe and North America, it's you they care about: why you're here and when you're going to leave. In police states like China, borders are a golden opportunity to harvest a ton of data on suspect individuals. In much of the rest of the world, Latin America for example, borders are mainly just an employment scheme, bureaucracy for its own sake.

Can recommend Hetzner (German IP). Good value and so far solid.

Before that I used OVH (French IP) for years but it ended badly. First they locked me out of my account for violating 2FA which I had not asked for or been told about, and would not provide any recourse except sending them a literal signed paper letter, which I had to do twice because the first one they ignored. A nightmare which went on for weeks. And then, cherry on the cake, my VPS literally went up in smoke when their Strasbourg data center burned down! Oops! Looks like your VPS is gone, sorry about that, here's a voucher for six months free hosting! Months later they discovered a backup but the damage was done. Never again.

Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.

Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.

So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.

UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.

UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.

Ublock Origin and Vimium C. That's it.

I used Dark Reader until last week, when I discovered a native Firefox setting that does the job better: Settings > Language and appearance > Colors > Manage > set background to Black and override to Always.

No more white flashes, EVER (yes, I tried absolutely everything but on some sites there was nothing to be done, even with every possible CSS hack). And no more add-on speed penalty (to be fair it was small, and Dark Reader is still an amazing tool).

Now the web looks pretty ugly but it is fast and always dark. White flashes banished FOREVER.

This looks like a glimpse of how Mastodon (specifically: ActivityPub protocol) can really detrone Twitter. The world is full of governments and agencies and other Very Serious Organizations. They must hate having to depend on a single private company to get their message out. They must be itching for an alternative that gives them the kind of control that they have with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. Surely this is Mastodon's golden opportunity.