[Arm-netbook] OpenPOWER virtual coffee continues every Tuesday UTC 22:00

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 12:56 PM Alain D D Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 10:55:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> > continues in 5 mins...
>
> Yes ... I could not join ... I had set up a jitsi meeting early y/day
> evening ... Firefox could not see my webcam it could a few days ago - but was
> updated on Saturday - which, I suspect, is the issue - nothing else changed.

yep, almost certainly.  there is a dial-up link (which was in the
calendar invite)

> That FF update also brought in new options "Allow Firefox to send technical and
> interaction data to Mozilla" and auto-set to on ... I do not recall that I was
> asked :-(

sigh.

> Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with
> jitsi). I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome
> 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I
> am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.

it's not - not really.  it's ubuntu-based, which is known for more
repeated consistent privacy-violations than any other GNU/Linux
distro.  i strongly recommend you *not* to use anything based on
ubuntu.  aside from anything they enable background updates by default
without your consent and knowledge.

debian is extremely strict about privacy violations: they don't
tolerate them, at all.  however they do allow people to choose
foot-shooting by adding the nonfree repos, which is a good compromise.

sadly though they over-rode common sense *and blatantly disregarded
the results of a major poll/vote* by making systemd the default.  if
you make a "base" install (netinst minimal) followed by "apt-get
install sysvinit sysvinit-utils" then you can follow that up with
"apt-get remove systemd" and *then* use tasksel to install a full
desktop (or just do apt-get install task-lxde-desktop or apt-get
install task-mate-desktop) you should be good to go.

if you want something that's *guaranteed* to be free of systemd yet
has all the "modern" features expected of a GUI desktop, try "trinity
desktop", hosted by pearson computing.  it's KDE 3, and because it
doesn't have all the crap that's worked its way into QT5, it's
lightning quick to start up on modern hardware.

21 years ago i deliberately chose fvwm2 and do not install a "desktop"
*at all*.  i log in at the console, have created a suitable ~/.xinitrc
(which includes fvwm2 at the end, non-backgrounded), and run "startx".
i *do not want* anything that f***s around trying to tell me how to
"manage" files, or where to click to start programs.  i am perfectly
capable of typing "firefox &" in an xterm, and when i got bored of
that (about 5 years ago), i set up a script to do it for me, as well
as starting 8x 80x65 xterms on the same virtual screen.

l.