When I was going through college I had to work as a Microsoft salesperson in the largest commercial shop of my country. Basically I had to sell Windows laptops and ensure every purchase had a Microsoft office attached.

My stand was right next to Apple’s and I had a lot of Apple fan boys tease me saying how superior Apple hardware was, how fast and secure everything is. I felt that by having no experience with Apple devices I was not doing my work properly, I couldn’t personally disprove their experiences and opinions with my own. I ended up buying a 13 inch MacBook pro for 1300 euros, I believe. Since I worked at the shop they gave me a considerable discount, I’m unsure what the actual retail price was but certainly at least 1800 euros.

I felt robbed, to be honest. Using an Unix like system was nice, I always loved posix shells. Everything else was honesty a terrible experience. Why the hell do I need xcode to do anything? Why does git depend on xcode? Why is xcode no longer available for my machine directly from the store? Why is the store sooooo damn slow? Why am I forced to use Safari’s garbage engine, regardless of the browser I choose?

I understand the appeal of having an entire ecosystem of devices that play nice together but MacOS was the only operative system I tried that would actually get on the way of doing work for me personally. For 1300 euros I could have gotten a beast windows laptop at the time, with a nice dedicated GPU instead of that Intel integrated garbage card that can barely play a YouTube video without full speed fans.

A couple of months ago I ended up installing EndeavourOS on this MacBook and it honestly brought this laptop back to life. So much faster and I can finally go back to installing up to date browsers! I have full Java stack running on an up to date intellij IDE and it works nice. A little slow, sure, but fast enough to get work done on emergencies. No more eternal spinning wheel loops.

Hate is a very strong word, I don’t hate Apple. I just would not buy or recommend anyone to buy any of their products. They’re pretty, tho!

I don’t know which provider is the best but I’ve been using Proton Pass and it’s excellent. Proton Pass is a password manager but you can use it just to generate email aliases on the fly. The paid version has unlimited aliases and only costs 2 euros a month. I think it’s a very nice value.

I get it. The problem is that the target audience doesn’t watch these videos. We all have that one friend who thinks VPNs make you invisible.

Yep, I know exactly what you mean. Lack of ipv6 is mind blowing, to be honest.

I used to be a Mullvad customer but switched to Proton because I use all the products on their suite. It makes financial sense to me.

Mullvad, however, has the best VPN experience ever. Faster, more stable and way less Captchas (though I’m not sure that’s good?). Plus, I love their bullshit free pricing. It’s 5 euros a month regardless if you buy 1 month or 2 years. Can’t recommend it enough, even though I’m no longer a customer.

Red Hat burned all the bridges when they pulled the rug on CentOS. I admire and commend the open source community on Rocky but they still depend on Red Hat source code, which has been apparently harder and harder to grab.

I’d rather move to Debian, thank you very much. Which we have and went very smoothly. Only a couple of servers left!

Every info seems to point that Discord hasn’t had a single year with positive profit. Here’s one of the sources

Discord isn’t in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable

Discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in funding. It has more than $700 million in cash on its balance sheet and the goal to become profitable this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Source

Revenue alone doesn’t mean much, how much was profit?

I’ve been using Proton Pass since it launched and I think it’s really really good.

Positives:

• Nice integration with both desktop and mobile
• Integrated in the proton suite, which I was already using
• Allows you to generate an email alias for each login automatically. Websites will never have your real email and you can easily generate a new alias if one has been compromised
• Supports 2 factor authentication via TOTP, works really well

Negatives:

• No passkey support yet
• Free version only supports like 5 email alias

Proton Pass is the same, it’s instant. You just need to pay to get an unlimited amount of them. Great feature, integrates nicely with register forms as well.

I have never been much of a Twitter fan but I have idea why people don’t just move away from it. What more incentives do people need? 🤷‍♂️

In Portugal, pretty much everyone has access to this functionality. I think the functionality is amazing, I use it very often. The fact the cards only work once and have a spending limit really gives me a sense of security.

Revolut also has this functionality, I use it for purchases in foreign currency.

Never heard of privacy.com, I’m already set with the services that provide this functionality. I can’t say if the service is good or not, but the practice of creating virtual credit cards is invaluable.

Such apps would become illegal in the EU. Imagine breaking the law by using Matrix to chat with your buddies.

I personally feel like Mullvad provides a better, faster and cheaper service than Proton. However, Proton has other very interesting products such as ProtonMail, ProtonPass and Drive. I’m interested in all that, so I ended up moving to Proton.

I don’t have a single bad thing to say about Mullvad, excellent service and pricing policy.

Isn’t mullvad browser just yet another Firefox flavor?

Public charging stations could lead to juice-jacking attacks.

Are all laptop chargers USB now? Unsure how someone can extract data from a PSU.

I tried Proton for a month for I’d get A LOT of “confirm you’re not a robot” when entering a lot of websites. Was really annoying. Did you ever get around that?

Even if you have no privacy concerns I would say Telegram is a much better choice. The fact you still can’t edit a message in WhatsApp is baffling.