Wait but Hexbear said that China is a democracy? Did they lie?!??

Just like their planes. Al Jazeera made a really awesome documentary about Boeing and their terrible quality control. They gave some workers at one of the major Boeing assembly facilities hidden cameras and microphones, and let them interview their colleagues. The factory is full of crackheads, and most of Boeing's own employees who literally put the fucking planes together said that they wouldn't fly on these planes themselves.

Fuck lemmy.ml and all the other tankies in the fediverse

It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.

That's not how it works. Firefox has full support for Manifest v3 extensions, but it does also support MV2 at the same time, and aims to keep MV2 support alive in the future.

• LibreWolf as my browser (it's a more secure and private version of Firefox, comes with a pre-installed adblocker and removes all the unnecessary junk) (Flatpak) with some of the following extensions:
  • LibRedirect for redirecting privacy-invasive websites to private frontends
  • ff2mpv
  • Read Aloud (text-to-speech)
  • Buster for solving CAPTCHAs
  • Dark Reader
  • Violentmonkey for userscripts like Lemmy Universal Link Switcher (it's really useful)
  • DownThemAll
  • Search by Image
  • Server-Status (GitHub) shows information about a web server like country/region (via local GeoIP database lookup), SSL certificate information and more. Good open source alternative to Flagfox.
• Thunderbird for emails (Flatpak)
• Proton Mail Bridge (Flatpak)
• Merkuro Calendar
• Ptyxis (Flatpak) as my terminal. It's optimized for containers (e.g. distrobox). foot is a pretty good alternative if you want something more minimalistic and don't care about containers. There are countless other good options like Kitty, Alacritty, Konsole, WezTerm and many others.
• Emacs as my IDE
• KWrite, Kate or NotepadQQ for quickly editing text documents. There's also Apostrophe for GNOME.
• QOwnNotes for local/Nextcloud-synced notes (Iotas for GNOME) There are other good options like Trilium Notes or Joplin.
• Speech Note speech-to-text note-taking (https://piped.video/watch?v=zlLVgTB42Bo)
• Akregator as my RSS client (Newsflash for GNOME)
• Strawberry as my music player (Amberol or Rhythmbox if you're on GNOME)
• Spot for Spotify (Flatpak)
• Cider for Apple Music (unfortunately not FOSS anymore)
• Feishin for connecting to my self-hosted Navidrome music server
• rescrobbled for saving my music listening history to Last.fm. Also works with self-hosted ListenBrainz.
• Jellyfin Desktop for connecting to my self-hosted Jellyfin media server
• mpv as my video player (Celluloid on GNOME)
• FreeTube for watching YouTube videos
• This modded YouTube Music client that has an adblocker and many other cool features: https://th-ch.github.io/youtube-music/
• Kasts for listening to podcasts (also has the ability to sync with gpodder.net or self-hosted GPodder on Nextcloud)
• LibreOffice (Flatpak) There's also OnlyOffice.
• Skanpage for scanning documents
• GNUcash for accounting
• Notesnook or Standard Notes for end-to-end encrypted note-taking
• Anki Flashcards (Flatpak)
• Logseq (FOSS Obsidian alternative)
• Flameshot for screenshots (GitHub, Flatpak)
• Kdenlive for video editing
• GIMP, Krita and Inkscape for graphics stuff
• Blender for animation stuff
• Natron for VFX
• LMMS and Ardour for music production
• Virtual Machine Manager for creating/managing KVM/QEMU VMs (Boxes for GNOME)
• Nextcloud Desktop for connecting to my home server
• Signal Desktop (Flatpak) There's also Flare for GNOME, which uses GTK instead of Electron and feels more native (Flatpak)
• Element (or NeoChat if you use KDE, Fractal for GNOME) for Matrix
• WebCord for Discord. There are some native GTK clients like Abaddon and Dissent.
• Paper Planes (Native GTK Telegram client)
• Konversation or HexChat for IRC (Polari on GNOME)
• Tokodon as my Mastodon client
• qBittorrent for downloading torrent content. (You can use KTorrent on KDE and Fragments on GNOME)
• Pika Backup for taking backups (There's a pretty good video about it: https://piped.video/watch?v=W30wzKVwCHo)
• Timeshift for btrfs snapshots
• Gradience to customize GTK4 appearance
• Bitwarden for syncing my password database with my self-hosted Vaultwarden server (also works with their public cloud syncing option). Use KeePassXC if you prefer something entirely local.
• LocalSend for sharing files on the local network (basically works like AirDrop) (also works over NetBird or Tailscale btw)
• NetBird for creating a flat VPN network between my devices
• KDE Connect for better integration with my phone. Also works over NetBird btw. Check out GSConnect if you're on GNOME.
• KRunner for quickly finding files or applications (Ulauncher for other desktops, rofi for window managers)
• Safing Portmaster (Firewall and DNS blocking solution. Check out OpenSnitch if you just need a firewall)
• LACT for controlling AMD GPUs
• Flatseal for managing Flatpak permissions (On KDE this is integrated in the system settings)
• Bottles for managing Wine prefixes (Flatpak)

If you like gaming:

• Lutris for managing my games
• Heroic for Epic Games and GOG
• Prism Launcher for Minecraft
• Dolphin for emulating Wii and GameCube
• Ryujinx for emulating the Switch
• RPCS3 for PS3 emulation
• Vita3K for PSVita emulation
• PPSSPP for PSP
• Cemu for Wii U emulation

For the CLI:

• fish shell
• starship
• tmux
• fd as an alternative to find
• bat instead of less (written in Rust, has some nice syntax highlighting)
• ripgrep
• fzf
• zoxide
• yt-dlp
• streamlink
• ncmpcpp
• ncspot
• newsboat

They should really switch to Mastodon and host their own instance, just like the German public broadcast service: ard.social

Ironically you can't use FreeBSD (or any BSD) to watch Netflix content. Even on Linux the resolution and bitrate get limited. What a fucking joke.

Thankfully there are better frontends for many social media sites. For YouTube, you can use Piped and Invidious. LibRedirect is a browser addon that automatically redirects all YouTube links to your selected frontend. If you want a native desktop app, check out FreeTube. On Android you can use LibreTube, NewPipe or a fork of it called Tubular. On iOS, you can configure Yattee to work with Piped and Invidious, this guide explains it: https://gonzoknows.com/posts/yattee/.

It has a few privacy features, some themes, some other stuff. Nothing significant. It kinda became popular lately, and some people started using it. But now it's proprietary, so I wouldn't use it anymore. LibreWolf is much better and open source.

Brave has built-in telemetry, that pings their servers every day, by default it comes with a whole bunch of blockchain/NFT bullshit, it installs VPN services on your computer without your consent, they used to insert their affiliate links into URLs of shopping websites and there are many more controversies around​ Brave.