A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.
Admin of SLRPNK.net
XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net
Alt lemmy account: Cafefrog@lemmy.cafe
Tech workers have traditionally been allergic to unions for some reason, though that is starting to change. They should contact Game Workers Unite or the IWW.
Movim has been developed since 2011 (Chatto began development 8 months ago, in comparison) and is based on XMPP, which is battle tested and proven to scale. It has a codebase that is maintainable long-term.
I personally would not trust an almost entirely vibe-coded app using tools prone to hallucination to be secure and properly implement encryption. But if others don’t have those concerns, then by all means.
There’s a number of ways we can build counter power, and not only does it materially help our situation, it also reduces the feeling of helplessness and despair dramatically, and you’ll likely meet some friends along the way.
Here’s a handy guide on how to get involved in that sort of stuff.
The protests are good ways of meeting like-minded people in your community to form connections, as well as spreading awareness of local mutual aid groups so more can join or form ICE resistance groups who can join an encrypted chat to coordinate, alert neighbors, and talk strategy. It also is a good place for unions or union members to encourage others to unionize their workplaces, which can also ultimately work toward a national general strike, which is our most tangible and powerful collective action.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (such as ending the war in Iran, ceasing support for the genocide of Palestine, and Abolishing ICE).
The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!), for more info, go here, and scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community) section”
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to make a general strike possible.
Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn’t the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so.
Most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.
You can contact the IWW with the link below:
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
Based on their contributing page, Chatto appears to be heavily vibe coded, with them actively encouraging any other contributors to use AI. That gets a hard pass from me.
Movim is a federated chat platform that recently implemented most of Discord’s features. It’s a little rough in the UX department, but it’s pretty much all there, and it isn’t vibe-coded like this chatto app is.
They are fairly useless without first building a large community to back you up.
Xlibre is an explicitly right-wing projevf developed by alt-right developers. They have been rejected by other distros as well on those grounds in favor of Wayback, a non-right wing alternative.
Migrants that does not want and actively avoid, being part of Swedish society
You’re not going to find many leftists that aren’t vehemently against deporting people for not integrating, especially leftists who believe in abolishing borders.
There is nothing right or left wing about throwing out people who commit murder och rape. That is pretty standard in most parts om the world even, because a nation has no obligation to let non-citizen criminals stay in the country.
You… you do realize Trump got elected on that exact rhetoric? People voted for him because “He would only get rid of the bad ones”.
From what I understand It doesn’t generally need tinkering as long as everything you need is a flatpak. I also read that it can require tinkering to install 3rd party printer drivers.
This is bad advice.
In general, yes, but that’s usually considered bad advice to do from untrusted sources, where as the main Mullvad page would be considered a trusted source, IMO. I understand the sentiment in general isn’t a good idea, though.
I dunno, it’s just frustrating to see I guess.
I think sometimes, depending on what is going on in someone’s life, you simply do not have the energy, time, or inclination to learn the intricacies of how to use a new technology.
As an example, if someone has kids and is fairly stressed out from their job, and thus has limited free time, it would likely not be at all appealing to have to dive through a manual to learn the intricacies of a still niche distro to learn how to install their VPN (as someone would have to do if they were using it on their own, and not just following the commands of an internet stranger without researching it).
While I do think it’s generally good to challenge yourself and be willing to learn new things to avoid learned helplessness, realistically all of us have limited time, and depending on someone’s goals and inclination, learning more in-depth sysadmin skills may not be desirable, and different people have different tolerance levels for troubleshooting; some find it fun, other may find it infuriating.
As an example, a professional musician who wants to switch to linux likely would prefer not to have learn the intricacies of Jack, how it’s replaced by Pipewire, how to configure the kernel to perform best for low-latency tasks, ensuring their user profile in the correct admin group to access the correct permissions, etc. They very likely instead just want to get back to making music so they can do their job without having to divert from their main task just to learn how to go back to doing their main task.
I think it’s quite reasonable that some people may prefer the most direct path to the tasks they normally perform, and may become frustrated at having to learn a totally new skill set to go back to performing their original task.
It’s not the worst recommendation, as it is at least better configured than standard Debian out of the box, and comes with an easy Nvidia driver installer tool, but yeah I probably wouldn’t recommend it to most people due to how old and enterprise-y the default app store it comes with looks.
Mint’s interface is very close to Windows 7, it’s the most user-friendly of all the Linux desktop environments, IMHO. It does not handle fractional scaling as well as KDE though, if you use a 4K monitor.
KDE is also quite good, it offers a lot more features and customization, though it can be a bit more buggy than Mint’s Cinnamon.
Standard Debian would be hard for me to recommend to someone new or not interested in tinkering with Linux, or for someone with an Nvidia GPU. I do think Mint’s Debian Edition is a very good Debian option for those without an Nvidia GPU, though, and is what I use myself. It’s basically just standard Debian but preconfigured with sane defaults to minimize tinkering.
They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:
https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut
Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.
One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.
In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.
He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said
Remember; the Nazi’s did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi’s thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.
If you go in with the expectation to never making any compromise or touching anything its not realistic imo.
I agree, but I would argue it doesn’t really make sense for someone to recommend a distro that is more likely to need tinkering and research over one that is more likely to not need much intervention, especially to someone who is averse to needing too much tinkering.
Immutable distros have great promise, and I believe in the future they will become the standard, but right now their potential benefits aren’t likely to be realized by most average users yet, as the ecosystem isn’t quite ready for them to be as easy as a normal distro is currently, IMHO.
Without meaning to offend, I think your experience in both using an immutable distro as well as your general knowledge of how to use Linux from the commandline may be clouding your perception of how intimidating that would look to an inexperienced user.
As an example, despite using Linux for many years, I have never had need to interact with systemd, and thus I wouldn’t have known to start it with systemctl or to use -daemon. I could learn that if needed without any hesitation, but to someone way less experienced in Linux? That would more than likely just reinforce the perception of Linux having a high learning curve or only being good for people who like to tinker and fiddle in the command line.
In contrast on a normal Fedora install, the user can just copy and paste the commands on the Mullvad website without having to research or look through a specific distro’s manual, and at the end the app will be added to their launcher for them to use as normal. That method is likely to give a better impression, especially if they feel like their previous Linux attempts were janky or didn’t go well, as the OP has mentioned.
Needing Ostree is probably not a good newbie experience, and VPN’s in particular should only be installed from secure sources, not an unverified community package.
The average user will not notice any difference between systemd or any other init, nor will they interact with it, know what it is, or likely form a strong opinion about it (and honestly, good for them).
Ubuntu based distros are going to have a very easy Nvidia driver experience (just open the driver tool from the start menu and select the version you want, and bam, done). However, one downside of Ubuntu itself is their pushing of snap packaged apps, which are considered a bit crap, and can cause weirdness (I think Valve officially don’t recommend the Snap version of Steam).
You can avoid the snap stuff with Linux Mint, as they totally strip that out. Only downside of Mint is that it’s still on an older LTS version of Ubuntu, 24.04 (the latest is now 26.04, two years newer). You will need to add an additional PPA (a third party repository) to access the latest 610 Nvidia drivers on it, which some of the very latest games like the James bond require to launch in Proton. That may or may not be an issue for you. Mint also has the best built in app store, IMO.
Fedora is nice, but the Nvidia driver isn’t quite as easy to install, and it doesn’t come with some needed video codecs out of the box, though this script maker can make those pretty easy to get. I’d recommend it if you want more up to date apps in the repos and don’t want to encounter Ubuntu’s snaps.
Nobara is a spin of Fedora with all that stuff included (and has an installer with the Nvidia driver pre-installed, I think), made by the Glorious Eggroll who makes improved versions of Proton.
I personally would suggest choosing between those options, since both Ubuntu and Fedora based distros have a lot of 3rd party support, such as Mullvad, which only supports those two officially, and they have large communities with lots of help.
The shooting and movement mechanics of the OG Dooms are still great, but I can only tolerate them for a few levels due to the keycard driven gameplay combined with the maze-like level design, which I think aged quite poorly, and was something that bothered me even in the 90’s.