• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Well girocards will give the shop the permission to make a one time withdrawal of the amount displayed on the screen, if that money is in your account. If the money isn’t in your account, the payment will not go through. Also if the shop wants to make a second withdrawal, you need to insert your card again and enter your (secret) pin again, they can’t choose what’s charged an when (only before you insert your card an pin, and only THIS transaction will be authorized).

    Its a pretty secure system, as (as long as the card terminal isn’t hacked) you can’t spend more than you have, you don’t need to trust shops to only withdraw the agreed amount, and they can’t charge you a second time. Also the spending shows up on your account balance normally within 1 or 2 days.

    From what I understand credit cards just let anyone make withdrawals of any amount, as soon as you know the numbers written on the card. So not only you need to trust the shop to withdraw only the correct amount, you need to keep track over you spendings really good, because they could just charge you an arbitrary amount of money on an arbitrary company name months after you gave them your details. Also from what I understand (normal) credit cards just will always work, and if you pay more than you have you just automatically accept a credit contract you need to pay back to your bank. Also (years ago, don’t know if still true) payments get charged to your bank account on bulk at the end of the month, which makes security and not spending to much even harder.
















  • If you want to be sure you cant be tracked, monitored, spyed on, and calls can’t be intersepted:

    Don’t ever connect it to WiFi and don’t insert a sim card.

    Graphene or not, your ISP can still share your position or other meta data with government and stuff (in the us they can also be forced to not tell you) - in some countries they legally sell to third party’s, in some probably illegaly

    Calls are normally not encrypted so the os doesn’t matter as much if its the government who can force your ISP or if someone is skilled enough for a Man in the middle attack.

    Android is a highly complex system, it will never be 100% safe.

    If you just want to decrease spying by companies and less powerful people:

    Use neo store or fdroid (no google play or aurora) as all apps there are Foss

    Don’t install gapps or any other google services/packages

    Use shelter for less trusted apps

    Use netguard to block apps from accessing the internet

    Physically block your cameras

    If you want to be absolutely sure no one is recording audio: destroy mics with a needle and connect headset only when you need it

    To only use communication apps which are encrypted and you hold the keys should be not needed to be said: matrix, signal, element, xmpp are good, (telegram (normal chats), Facebook, WhatsApp etc is a no go)



  • I think me admitting not understanding something and following advice of trusted humans is a very different thing than will full ignorance and you framing it as such is telling of the ivory tower you sit in.

    Maybe what you tell me about flatpac being better and more secure is right, but trusting you, a stranger from the internet is certainly not better than trusting friends studying in the field. Is flatpack the more secure version of the aur though? The aur ist fully foss, so public scrutiny takes places. In my mind, flatpac wasn’t, but maybe I’m wrong here.

    As for point 5.: again: I don’t argue that the way its done in Linux is bad or without reason. I just state that it is more difficult for the end user.

    For btrfs: As for my understanding: the graphical installer only supports one option for encrypted file system: lvm-ext4. When you select encryption it is not possible to select btrfs anymore (or any other). As soon as you tick “encrypt system” it defaults to luks–>lvm–>ext4 and doesn’t allow you to change it Maybe because it only support encrypted lvm and subvolumes won’t work with btrfs (+to quote your own link: "The DebianInstaller can format and install to single-disk Btrfs volumes, but does not yet support multi-disk btrfs volumes nor subvolume "

    I don’t understand the part about “rsync”, but im pretty sure its not what I had in mind when talking about first time user friendly options.


  • Kvantum was choosen arbitrarily to make it tangeble what I mean, I don’t know what specific customization option is was missing I. Ubuntu gnome 5 years ago exactly.

    I guess you misunderstood my point, Its not that the specific team speak package is not in the apt repo (but available via flatpack) its again only chosen for illustration. My point is that in my Ubuntu experience I came acroos many different packages only available in certain stores/repos/as sourcecode/flatpack/snap/appimage/wine/bottles/lutris etc. Pp. Which package is available in which formats is secondary, my point is that there are a lot (especially coming from win where there is 1 [plus the win-store]).

    Those behave very differently under the hood and in the beginning it feels like for every second program you need to learn about a new format/store/manager/package, which is exhausting quickly, because while appimages are quite close to .exes and easy to understand, flatpacks, snap, apt wine etc. Are not. Nearly All of those are available in one place if u use arch: the aur. It really doesn’t matter if the aur package really only also installs and configures bottles for you, the fact that you need one command and one command only to get all your stuff (yay xyz) instead of 5 [to be honest maybe less or more, I still haven’t found how to configure bottles, wine, lutris etc. Myself for things like league, on Debian I just download lutris, the league install script fails and I have no idea what to do and just play other games, and even if I would know how to do it, there’s a chance it would break every league update and I would need to get Into it again, while on arch I type yay league-lutris or smithing like that, and it works ]

    I didn’t know kubuntu was part of Ubuntu, I thought its more or less another Debian derivative made by different people… or is there literally an Ubuntu with kde (which is not kubuntu) I have never heard of?

    I think your description of the file structure proves my point of it being hard to grasp for a beginner and some programs just handling it differently because they can. And you didn’t even touch on program files, custom temp directories or trying to install a programm to a different location (like an HDD instead of an the main ssd etc.) Stuff like symlinks doesn’t make stuff easier but harder for a beginner in my opinion.

    With your descriptions of the different stores/package managers/packs/etc. I again think it proves my point of being difficult, especially when just coming from win where you just double click on the .exe Not needing to know any of this and just typing yay xyz is a huge bonus on terms of ease of use and low starting threshold.

    For discovery: it frequently crashes on my system so I tend to use apt, but sure with flatpack you could get team speak there, but again for league you would need lutris and understand wine settings and so on. Its not about the specific package, its about needing to understand many different installation methods and background systems, and even when understanding most, its not enough to get all programs.

    I agree with you that the config file approach might be more customizable friendly for experts than the registry, but for a beginner? On win I never ever in over 10 years needed a setting which wasn’t in the settings (at least before the hyper enshityfication that is win 11) On Debian you can’t even change the fucking input method without using commands. (There is an option in the kde settings but it just displays “cannot connect to fcitx dbus” which is like Chinese for me and would require an evening of tinkering and reading docs or more to fix. I also ran into stuff I could not find in the settings (in like only some months of usage) and needed commands for, but can’t remember what it was. But IF KDE settings would cover everything and work reliable, it would be as good (and better) than windows. This just isn’t the case.

    Sure the win programs may don’t have configs for everything, but every intended function works. In 97℅ the time it is just available from the gui of the program, and even If someone tells me to run the forge installer and select the Minecraft mods folder, its at least the same on every win system. With every second guide for Linux the (official) website tells me “locate foo under /usr/foo/bar and append allow online = true” and the file just doesn’t exist in this location for me. For an intend function of the program I never ever in 10 year of windows needet to open the console. Its always just in the GUI which makes the underlying system and its complexity irrelevant for the casual user. With Linux half of the stuff I can only do from terminal so I need to understand the folder system, config files, fhs etc.

    Its not that fhs and having multiple locations which get used more or less consequently in more or less most of the cases is a bad thing in general. I am sure a lot of smart people have had very smart thoughts about this, but from a user perspective learning about all off it is way harder than not needing to know about it at all.

    For the datetime thing, I don’t wanna make it look bad or be ignorant and say there is no reason for it to be complicated. Of course you can’t have the same expectations for a Foss project as for a commercial project, I am just stating, that there is stuff like this and that it is way harder from a user perspective so there are no wrong expectations set. That the local stuff from KDE settings won’t work (at least for me) because of some fcitx dbus I already told you, but also other stuff like trying to change the username won’t work as expected. I did it without knowing you should never change the username on Linux… It didn’t tell me that the option is experimental or won’t work for some stuff so I expected it to just enter new name and that’s it, like on win or Mac, but it wasn’t and stuff broke all over the place (desktop entries, file locations, automatically generated vs code scripts, default locations, some programs entierly,) and I still haven’t got my taskbar panel to acknowledge the new path, it was always trying to open from the old path, even after regenerating the shortcuts and uninstalling and reinstalling panel. Maybe if I would understand fhs better I could know the place where some cofig lies where I need to change the path in line 253 and it would be clear to me that this isn’t regenerated when reinstalling the programming, but as a casual user, I (didnt know (and still dont know) how i could have fixed it and just gave up at some point and reinstalled Debian fro scratch with The correct username.

    Sure, I theory thing could be a lot better, but for someone without an degree in IT stuff like this is far from trivial, especially when you just wanted to correct the typo In your username before starting to work and instead spending one day trying to fix changing the name and two days reinstalling and reconfigurating Debian after giving up. Sure, a texfield in the windows settings might not give you the same freedom, but it does what you expect and works (again, at least before win 11).