kyub

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the "@"). So e.g. "john.doe@gmail.com" has an account at gmail.com but "jane.doe@mailbox.org" has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There's not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It's spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone's accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf ... and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it's even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He's very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I'd recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS's app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can't get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It's quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you're also independent from Google's push notification infrastructure. But you need a ntfy server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

It's going to get a lot worse because now they know that they are able to deport/jail literally anyone without facing any resistance. If a case gets too big on the media, they can shift responsibility around in a circle, e.g. USA says it can't do anything, El Salvador has to do something. And El Salvador says sorry can't do anything. And so nothing is done, both USA and El Salvador get what they want and the justice system and the victims can't do anything.

This will soon become routine because they will expand their list of "unwanted" persons constantly. First "gang members" and "criminals", then sexual and other non-criminal minorities, then non-criminal political opposition, then potentially everyone who's not super loyal to the fascist administration (aka cult).

What worries me is how fast it descends into madness. Any innocent American citizen should probably sooner, rather than later, be prepared to fight for themselves and their loved ones against injustice, because there might be no one left in the system doing it for them when the system itself has become unjust and/or dysfunctional. I hope that you somehow manage to turn the wheel around but when looking at the speed of Project 2025 and the Trump administration becoming increasingly more vile, I don't think there's much time left. Fascism is growing at insane speed, fueled by disinformation/propaganda and fake news on the web and social media, and backed by obscenely rich oligarchs who never really liked the previous government and laws anyway.

And this is all happening in a time when humanity should work together, rather than continue fighting among themselves. Instead, humanity chose the worst path forward possible, the path which accelerates the problems and has no solutions at all. So now we don't have anything against climate change and this will cause massive problems and completely new wars world-wide over land, food, water. And it's not far out. If you're young today, you'll probably live to experience it. It's probably the right time to prepare for the worst and adjust to a pre-apocalyptic mindset. Because we're definitely not solving this if we can't even solve fascism in Western democracies in 2025.

A fascist-run country does not care about allies or friends. In doing so, it becomes vulnerable and disadvantaged.

"AI" is good for pattern matching, generating boiler plate / template code and text, and generating images. Maybe also translation. That's about it. And it's of course often flawed/inaccurate so it needs human oversight. Everything else is like a sales scam. A very profitable one.

Fedora gives you a secure and functional desktop distro out of the box while with Arch, you can get that as well but have to invest more configuration time, since you have to configure things like Secure Boot, SELinux, disk encryption, firewalls, AppArmor and other security stuff by yourself, it's not going to have all that jazz by default, since Arch is a minimalistic and modular DIY-like distro, so it's up to the user to configure this. Arch doesn't put obstacles in the way of the user but also doesn't just preconfigure this stuff. But it's all there if you need it. Arch also offers a linux-hardened kernel variant which uses various hardening patches of the GrapheneOS project for the kernel (not sure if Fedora offers this as well). Experienced Linux users tend to like Arch's approach because of more flexibility, modularity and minimalism while still offering everything necessary, but the less experienced of a user you are the more you probably will have problems with this approach, and the more you want more things to be pre-configured out of the box, so that you as the user have to configure less stuff. The more you view it that way, the less suitable Arch is for you.

But both are excellent and modern distros. Fedora is generally for people who want to generally spend less time configuring their desktop distro. Arch is for people looking for either a more universal distro or something more modular, technically simple and customizable.

The RedHat backing of Fedora can be a blessing (lots of great stuff came from RedHat so far) but also could become a curse soon due to IBM's influence (which bought RedHat some time ago, and IBM isn't such a great company, and this can negatively impact RedHat as well) and current US politics (it's a US-based company). Arch, on the other hand, is even more independent than Fedora is and it's a fully community-run distro, and from all community-run distros, it's of very high quality, similar to Debian. Both Debian and Arch are also quite democratic in nature. If IBM hadn't bought RedHat, and US wouldn't be like it is today, I'd maybe view this differently but as it is I'd rather use a community-run distro than a US-corporation backed one. Even if Fedora is still very independent as a project, or so it seems.

If you're very well familiar with Arch there's really no need to switch to Fedora, but it can save you some time or configuration trouble overall in some cases, while it could also mean more potential trouble with major upgrades than with Arch with its frequent but lightweight updates all the time and never a big major version upgrade because Arch has no versions at all, it's purely rolling, whereas Fedora is a mixture of rolling and point release. That said, if you update your Arch very infrequently (e.g. only once every couple of weeks), you will also have a higher chance of update troubles (though these are often easy to solve for an experienced Arch user, but can be crippling for a newbie). To benefit from Arch's update mechanisms, you have to update frequently, as in every couple of days, at the very least once a week. And you really should set up a fallback mechanism, e.g. via filesystem snapshots, so you can revert an update which went wrong. Although so far, one of my Arch installations here is like 7 years old and there were only very minor update issues during that whole time, all of which were solvable via downgrading a specific package, waiting 1-3 days for the fix and then upgrading that package. So I'd say Arch is much more stable than its reputation, but still, even objectively small update issues can be devastating for you if you don't know how to solve them, so it again depends on the user.

Another factor is probably going to be whether the AUR or Fedora's community repos have more of the additional packages that you need for your use cases, from the packages that aren't in the default repos.

Which of the two distros makes more sense depends highly on the user, the user's familiarity with Linux basics, the user's available time, and general use cases. I'd say both choices are excellent for a desktop distro, and Fedora would immediately become my daily driver if I ever became unhappy with Arch. Which so far hasn't happened.

Another option if you still can't decide between those two excellent distros would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, which pre-configure more of Arch for an easier desktop use out of the box. So they are more like Arch of course (based on it) but trade away some of Arch's subjective "weaknesses" for Fedora's subjective "strengths". I say "subjective" because those weaknesses and strengths can be different for each user and use case. Sometimes this gets forgotten in discussions like this. It's not a clearly defined drawback if your distro doesn't preconfigure most stuff out of the box. Whether that is a drawback or not depends on the user. However I'd assume that most users probably prefer more pre-configuration. But still, one size doesn't fit all.

Well this got longer than intended but I hope it helps for decision making.

It's the other way around. In general, you should choose Linux over Windows, and only if you really need it, use Windows. Also, if you need Windows just temporarily for some things, consider running it in a VM inside Linux just for those occasions.

Why - well, to keep it short, Linux' main weaknesses for common users (difficulty, compatibility) are gradually fading away (they are already almost non-existent these days if you have mainstream hardware and a mainstream desktop distro like Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu) while Windows' main disadvantages (forced stuff like cloud/AI integrations/ads, complete disregard of user's privacy, increasing security issues due to outdated stuff being kept in the OS for backwards compatibility reasons, and many more things) keep on increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft has a big business interest in getting all users locked into their cloud ecosystem, locked into a subscription with ever-increasing monthly fees, and give up control over their own computer and their digital privacy. They want users to pay them with their data AND monthly subscription fees. MS Office, for example, will probably not have a pure locally runnable version after 2029 (or around that year) anymore. This Microsoft train is heading towards that wall. And the speed is increasing. And tons of users are still inside that train. And Windows itself likely won't be spared either. They want you to pay monthly for M365 and they will get their customers there, eventually.

Furthermore, by supporting Microsoft you're supporting a very unethical company. They partner with big surveillance companies like Palantir and they are an active participant in the despicable ad-tech-industry (the industry that's spying on literally everyone and buying/selling/storing tons of intimate user data even though it's illegal in most countries), they partner with the military, law enforcement and other things. Also, they are a US company, and we all know how US politics is like these days, and this can have a big influence on how "trustworthy" US-based proprietary software will become in the near future. Since 2020, arguably no US-based proprietary software or online service is trustworthy anymore anyway, because of the CLOUD act, which is current law in the US - it means that the US government has access to any customer data stored by a US-based company, regardless of where on Earth they are storing it. This means the often-used claim "my data stored by that US company is safe because it's in a European-based datacenter!!!!11" is false since at least 2020, because MS is forced by US law to grant technical access to customer data to their government. Also, all previous "data transfer privacy agreements" between EU and US like Privacy Shield were all a joke and were dismantled in courts already. So there's currently zero legal data protection - any data you send to a US company is theirs to do with as they please, essentially. And even if there were any meaningful legal data protections left, those big tech companies might still simply ignore that data protection law and only face minor or no fines at all.

So this is not a baseless claim. Just because I might keep some statements short doesn't mean that there are no backing arguments. It's a very good idea to reduce your dependency on Microsoft's (or in general, US-based) proprietary software and services. For multiple reasons. Digital sovereignty has never been more important than these days. It has always been important but it was maybe too abstract in the past for many common users to realize. They are slowly starting to realize now that dependencies on proprietary software from any rogue regime (and the current US regime also falls into that category now) are not great to have. Plus, there is Microsoft on its own already putting ever-increasing user- and customer-hostile features into their products. It's like being in an abusive relationship (as the one being abused). It's just not good for you long-term.

So as a user, you should instead choose software which allows you to retain your digital sovereignty and control over your own computing, and simply not take all that abuse. Linux- or *BSD-based OSes with their open/transparent development models, fork-able/modifiable code bases, permissive licensing and essentially zero unwanted crap like adware, spyware, bloatware etc. offer exactly that. And because mainstream Linux distros have already become so easy to use these days, there are almost no reasons not to start using them.

Obviously Linux is the correct choice but I fear most will simply continue to suck it up and update to W11.

Thanks for clarifying, as a German I did not know and was confused by this. Now I know but am still confused.

Haven't read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it's fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that's not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.

Basically yes. The alternatives passively become better simply because of the mainstream option becoming worse over time. I think it's still going too slowly in general but I'm not complaining, better slow than not at all.