Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.

I think 10 years ago this would’ve been unpopular, but today maybe not so much:

systemd is great software. I don’t use distros that refuse to ship it. Especially the init system. Thanks, Lennart!

Preach!

When I was in unspecified foreign country I went to a graveyard with my family. It was very different in that the bodies were buried basically right next to each other and you basically just walk over the bodies of the interred to get to where you want to go.

It was a bit distinct from how we do it in America where, much like our suburban houses, you have to have a pointless giant green lawn surrounding where the body is buried.

The fact that it was made into a movie as well…

You should just maintain awareness of how much you’re using. I think 32gb ram + 32gb swap is ridiculous, frankly. Fedora by default sets zram up to 8gb, with no other swap space configured. Works very well that way.

Personally I’d also probably not ever set up more than 16gb of swap space. If I’m somehow hitting that limit it’s because I actually just need to buy more RAM.

At this rate it seems like I will also never be upgrading from the 1070. Miners, NFTs, supply chain, AI, tariffs… how is an honest guy supposed to just buy a decent GPU when squeezed between all that bs?

A few remarks:

• Mullvad is not the only acceptable choice just for torrenting. If your objective is just to subvert copyright trolls, any (non-Israeli) VPN that has a track record of not keeping logs will do the job.
• FitGirl is great and all but let’s not forget DODI. One thing I seriously dislike about FG is while she gets the best compression rates, it’s at the cost of like 6x the time to unpack the games. There are probably still more reputable sources for games
• If you want to use your computer without everything being on the VPN, you will have to either use containers (Linux), virtual machines, or explore split-tunneling features in your VPN client if available.

Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.

Andy yen praising trump is one thing and I kind of don’t care about that so much. What I do care about is how proton practices predatory sales to cash in on FOMO. Or if you subscribe for one month it’s an auto renewing subscription. Or that the best rates are if you sign up for a year. It’s weird for a not-for-profit structure to do billing like this

Mullvad doesn’t play games. A flat price and you get what you pay for.

10-20 requests per second

That’s not a DDOS

The VM is Debian Linux with a basic XFCE UI (for a system tray + notification widget) via QEMU/KVM which I run through virt-manager. Most unnecessary packages are removed or not installed in the first place. This is so that I can browse the sites, again, in a fool-proof manner. I share a directory from my host OS to the VM, which mounts it on boot in the fstab. This prevents me from downloading into the guest VM’s disk image and having to keep dealing with that file getting overly big. In the past I’ve done a Samba share but recently I’ve just been using direct shared memory/filesystem and that seems to work OK, too.

As a bonus to this setup, I can use Microsocks in the VM to also proxy a profile in Firefox to get VPN coverage in a specific Firefox profile. I use this when watching on streaming sites instead of trying to watch within the VM, since there is considerable overhead to doing that.

And that’s it, really. My VPN killswitches the VM if it ever experiences a connection interruption. And Qbittorrent is set up to use the VPN interface, as well. I use the aforementioned automatic torrents management feature to sort things when they’re done downloading.

I should state that there are some obvious downsides to this setup. The first is now I have to overcommit disk space and RAM to keep and run a guest VM. You want enough to be able to run updates and the software in the VM without running into a wall. The second is that there does seem to be a CPU penalty when downloading files (maybe it’s because of the way I’m sharing the downloads directory into the VM with virtiofs?)

I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)

The answer to this question is you can setup a docker system (or podman) so that all the traffic in that pod (don’t know the docker term for this) will route through the vpn. A good image to accomplish this easily and successfully is gluetun – and it will only affect the traffic in the containers, not the rest of your computer.

Personally, my setup is much more like yours and it works fine for me, except I use a VM. So all the activity gets confined to the VM and that makes a bit idiot-proof. Using automatic management in the torrent client, completed torrents get put in the correct directory. You could combine this with Jellyfin if you desired.

My own problem with Jellyfin is if I ever use it for anything I want direct playback on all relevant devices, because my computer is not good enough for transcoding (and why waste the energy and time on on-demand transcoding, anyway?) so it requires some massaging of the data to get everything right. I only use it infrequently, practically on-demand. I don’t use Jellyfin for myself.

You’re right. I wasn’t familiar with rawtherapee but just seeing that home page immediately clued me into the fact that it was some kind of image program. Didn’t even need to read a single word.

Come to think of it, there have been a number of times where I’ve wondered about what a foss project does/looks like and I think a single screenshot would’ve just been a big help in understanding how it behaves.

I would have to choose GIMP (in spite of this awful name) because that page loaded without javascript and the photoshop page requires me to enable javascript.

I know I’m being a bit facetious, here, but… Adobe can afford to hire full time front end devs and designers. FOSS projects can’t really compete with Adobe’s investors.

The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos

If they did this they could be sued for the exact same reason Yuzu got sued: circumvention of DRM. That’s a crime in the USA. Apparently.

Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

whoa…

Literally this afternoon I jumped as high as I could to see if I could touch the ceiling. I could not.

Pi-hole is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is the reason I began self-hosting six years ago.