Excluding hardware (microcode, UEFI, etc); within my Linux system, the only proprietary software I have installed are Nvidia drivers and Steam (installed via flatpak). When I first made the switch to Linux, I was actually shocked at the minimal amount of proprietary software I actually used/needed.

Undoubtedly

I don’t think it ships with a desktop environment by default; I think they’re just referring to the Qt framework. If it is mentioning a desktop environment - it’s probably LXQt.

LMAO. Microsoft really made Windows Server and won’t even use that crap themselves.

Buster clearly disapproves of the upgrade.

Or as I’ve taken to calling it; GNU+Linux

Fr. Had me thinking ASUS Motherboards. Really had me going there😅

I’m still in shock how quickly they have progressed.

TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don’t give two flying hoots about me.

Currently, I pirate because I can’t rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can’t own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn’t pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn’t pirate the media I consume. I’d still data hoard because it’s a literal addiction, please help!!)

I don’t pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they’re ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don’t like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don’t trust what I can’t verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg’s Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I’ve long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).

Or as I’ve taken to calling it, GNU+systemd+Linux.

Too bad I’m on Linux.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic but I think a classic IPA doesn’t need a modern twist. I’m all for IPA open sourcing their beer; heck, free beer is good enough for me.

In all seriousness though, I already saw a user recommend kanidm. I can vouch for kanidm; written in Rust, it allows offline authentication and offline caching of user info, which is really handy if you’re in a situation with poor internet connectivity. kanidm is feature rich:@[email protected] already mentioned OAuth2 support, LDAP, RADIUS; etc. It even supports TOTP!! Kanidm doesn’t support SAML IIRC, But SSO can be achieved through OAuth2 with OIDC.

From kanidm’s Github:

Kanidm aims to have the features richness of FreeIPA, but without the resource and administration overheads. If you want a complete IDM package, but in a lighter footprint and easier to manage, then Kanidm is probably for you. In testing with 3000 users + 1500 groups, Kanidm is 3 times faster for search operations and 5 times faster for modification and addition of entries (your results may differ however, but generally Kanidm is much faster than FreeIPA).

https://github.com/kanidm/kanidm

Incredible!! I don’t think I have ever heard this explained in such simplicity. Great write up.

Google can go to hell.

You are going to be trapped in a room for 12 hours with a mid 2000s office desktop with no internet connection and an external hard drive; what are you putting on the hard drive?

Nothing, because I won’t have an internet connection…

For all those wanting to know what version of the xz package you have, DO NOT use xz -V or xz --version. Ask your package manager instead; e.g. apt info xz-utils. Executing a potentially malicious binary IS NOT a good idea, so ask your package manager instead.

And our harddrives ;)

I personally prefer to use Flatpaks over traditional packages because of the added security, sandboxing, and overall convenience of not having to deal with dependency hell. It’s especially nice being able to have proprietary applications sandboxed from the rest of my system without worrying that Steam is snooping on my ‘super-important-tax-documents’.

Flatpaks are also very useful for having up-to-date packages on distros like Debian, and it’s derivatives. People can still use their preferred distro without having to worry about not getting a certain update, feature, bug fix, etc, for their applications.

Being able to restrict what applications have access to is a game-changer for me. A lot of times Flatpaks, by default, have very lenient permissions, and with the use of Flatseal I can restrict it to my liking. Worried about Audacity’s telemetry?? Turn network permissions off. Now, not all applications will work well (or at all) without internet connectivity, but for applications like Audacity, it works great!! Flatpaks can also be very useful for developers.

That’s not to say that Flatpaks are without their fair share of issues. Are they bloated?? Yeah, and although it’s not an issue for me, it may be for some people. Desktop integration is, meh. Themes, and fonts don’t always integrate the best. (A while back there were issues with Flatpak’s sandbox, but I won’t touch on that because I need to refresh my mind on it, and it was actively being developed to fix those issues so it possibly isn’t even an issue anymore.)

Overall I think Flatpaks are absolutely wonderful.

Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.