Mordikan

Yes and no.

A lot of privacy threads focus on fantastical what-if scenarios that just never really come up. For the majority of Internet users, the biggest threat they would face comes from the adtech sector. Now most people aren’t going to understand what is collected in realtime as that’s usually company specific and usually encoded on the site/app, but standards are all open for anyone to read. Mostly this is going to come in the form of OpenRTB 2.6 (https://iabtechlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/OpenRTB-2-6_FINAL.pdf) or the Prebid library and its User ID Module (https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/modules/userId.html) with maybe some custom fields and VERY granular audience mapping.

Specific to that standard, 3.2.20 Object: User and 3.2.27 Object: EID and 3.2.28 Object: UID are the important ones, but honestly all of the information can be used in conjunction with other pieces. Now if you look through that info, you’ll notice you don’t really see that much. You’re real name isn’t present. Your email isn’t present. Your physical address isn’t present (although its likely your geo location info is accurate from the device object). The thing is that so many little bread crumbs exists and so many actors are mapping those bread crumbs that once human psychology is overlaid on top of it crazy amounts of information that was not collected can be inferred. People think info like “His name is John Smith” is important when really “This is device ID EA7583CD-A667-48BC-B806-42ECB2B48606” and the numerous IDs built from that or a dozen other things is what matters.

Just from that standard with enough data/time, its possible to determine your demographic/sociographic information. One could determine who you will vote for and political leanings, how much money you make, what your job is, your sexual orientation, etc. This is great if someone is trying to sell you Tide detergent, but its also really useful if you’re wanting to start a “grassroots” campaign to add/remove rights for specific citizens. It allows you to know where you can get a foothold for your legislation (Cambridge Analytica comes to mind). And these things are all easily verifiable from your browser. Without an adblocker, go browse the internet and keep track of how many 1x1 tracking pixels get dropped on you. Checkout what’s in your cookie store and what’s sitting in sessionStorage and localStorage.

So, I think groups like r/privacy focus a lot on sci-fi inspired dystopia, when instead they could be focused on more real world dystopia.

You might try Vortex through lutris: https://lutris.net/games/vortex-mod-manager/

I’m not sure why one of those is flagged. From what I can see its just the obnoxiously written write_file.content one-liners and lots of regex/sed, but nothing looks wrong with what its doing.

That mouse is probably using like 0.5W of power, that’s way too much. Throw it away and keybind everything.

Might check the file permissions then. Who owns the file? Does VMM have read permissions to the file? UUID 1000 is root, so it sounds like VMM is being run as your user, but the ISO is owned by root. You could try chown’ing that file to your user.

The printers require AD authentication to print but no prompt? Is Kerberos setup correctly for CUPS?

Mundane tasks weren’t really the focus. This was a debate between Redhat and the Linux old guard where the points were all based on the extremes. They follow different ideas on how tools should work, though. Init systems focus on doing one or few things but doing them very well (the traditional UNIX approach). Systemd is a suite of many moving parts to accomplish a whole range of tasks (more modern). Init is mostly just bootstrap and services, but systemd is that plus networking, plus user sessions, plus logging, etc etc. More moving parts means increased complexity and more chance for failure. Systemd as a suite then becomes a potential single point failure where init based systems would not be. Scripting for either can be involved, but generally speaking init is/was easier to write things for.

I think most users today focus on Redhat’s control and not putting too much faith in one setup for diversity’s sake rather than the other points, but the original debate really was a philosophically based one. There isn’t a right or wrong on these, but some really interesting history.

I think for those people it boils down to systemd being an init system that does more than an init system maybe should. Combine that with it being more complicated to work with and with Redhat not really being that open to feedback.

Honestly, most of your selling points while completely valid don’t matter in this case I think. The problem is that is a repair business doing work for non-technical people and those are technical selling points. For example, my wife is allergic to tech. She wouldn’t care about dual-booting or telemetry. She just wants the simplest possible solution that she doesn’t have to think about. She’s bored having to listen to me talk about projects/work and while she has to have a PC for daily life, that doesn’t mean she wants to have to have it. She just needs it and needs it to be easy.

The biggest selling points to her would be:

1. It just works
2. She doesn’t have to relearn things (meaning the layout and where to click on things)
3. It runs her stuff (literally all browser based applications)
4. Her files and pictures are there

That’s it. I think the biggest positive sell to repair shop users would be “its just like Windows”. They don’t need it to be better, they just need it to be the same.

“Will not connect to the internet” is probably too vague to troubleshoot. Isolate exactly what part is failing. Is the device receiving an IP address? Are you able to ping anything on the local network? Are you able to ping a remote IP address? If you aren’t receiving an IP address, is DHCP running? Can you statically set your IP and ping out? Is there another switchport you can try on the router?