Notices by Jay Baker (they/he) (mediaactivist@kolektiva.social), page 23

@blackops Oh neat. And yes, the name is certainly different haha, though seems to still come up in search results -- unlike my mobile OS, /e/!

@Reddog Yes!

@alto @blackops Heck yeah! I've enjoyed Manjaro and Endeavor and also pure Arch. All have their benefits depending on the individual.

@yoasif Good points! So much is polluted by Google, and it's too bad their money has been pumped into both the Chromium projects as well as Mozilla, too as it creates a dependence, but at least Firefox as software is free of that, yes; Mozilla needs to be much better supported by folks than it is. Bloody capitalism!

@blackops I relate! Most recently used Arch, and Pop!_OS (which I've been pleasantly surprised with). But I stayed well away from Fedora since IBM bought them, as I agree with you totally on the corporate stuff!

@yoasif Exactly! I've always advocated for the Mozilla Foundation and for Firefox and Gecko as resistance to the dominance of all things Google. But I realise that Chromium is an open source project financed by Google and browsers like Vivaldi strip away the Google garbage. While folks can complain that Mozilla take money from Google, and Vivaldi don't, as you rightly point out they're still contributing to the creation of a reliance on a Google resource and take money from Microsoft for Bing etc. So it's really splitting hairs when it comes down to it!

After over a decade on #Linux (having used Windows and Mac in those years before), and a few years of offering recommendations on different distros, I've personally arrived at what was, yes, an inevitable conclusion: it's personal choice! I've used Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Elementary, Pop!_OS...what's convenient and right for me isn't going to be the same for everyone. All I'd suggest is making sure you're promoting and supporting well-intentioned good distro developers with decent ethics.

Hey fellow UK activists! Green and Black Cross are running free Know Your Rights trainings in July! Join them for an online skills session and get confident on key information for protesters: https://greenandblackcross.org/events/know-your-rights-training-25th-july-online/ #KnowYourRights #protest

If I ever met @XINTRA, I'd feel like Cintra meeting Sean Penn! https://cintra.substack.com/p/the-sean-penn-experience?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Oh it's non-binary people's day? Yay! Here's my coming out story from a couple years back -- involving pro wrestling (of course!): https://www.mediaactivist.com/2021/06/29/im-coming-out-to-pyro-and-entrance-music/ #InternationalNonBinaryPeoplesDay #NonBinaryPeoplesDay #NonBinaryDay #NonBinary #enby #ProWrestling #wrestling

@fifilamoura Ah shucks, thanks!

@privacydingus Ahh glad it can help!

@crowgirl No, thank you for your fantastic content, as always - I value your views on so many things from technology to the pandemic. Keep up the great work!

@funkybuddha @anarchopunk_girl Exactly, I've started to recommend Mullvad browser as a nifty alternative to cryptobro bigot Brendan's Brave; I like what Mullvad did with that -- got their own search engine now too, though I believe it's just for their VPN customers. Now I just have to figure out which I prefer from Firefox and Vivaldi (though currently using one for personal and one for my main work).

@anarchopunk_girl I used LibreWolf for quite a while but was a bit intense for my needs and a few things broke haha, but yes, I should have mentioned how awesome LibreWolf is!

I haven't done #FollowFriday in a while! And there are a few folks I'd like to mention, just off the top of my head for now. Check 'em out: @dentangle @privacydingus @deadsuperhero @prolrage @trekhausen @fifilamoura @ComicContext @siege @crowgirl @skeletor @BillySmith and cheekily my very own @burtonverse!

@dentangle This is a wonderfully written, poignant, and important read, and I'm only sorry I hadn't spotted it earlier, so thanks for pinning it. As a carer of a partner who got Covid with me in March of 2020 and has had LongCovid since, I empathise, agree totally on your points, and can't applaud you enough for expressing this and raising awareness too. Aaaand now adding you to a list to ensure I see your posts more often! We have too much common ground to not do so!

I know some followers on here will know I've mentioned this before, but the revolutionary spirit is harder to nurture in the UK; its history is different to the US and France and so many other countries. Currently we're literally relying on the fucking "house of lords" (in 2023...I know - exactly my point) but if the "online safety bill" does pass, how can activists respond? And will the state even be able to enforce it in practice?

Speaking of ethics, I'm particularly interested in privacy, security, non-profits, co-ops, and worker-owned initiatives, and I absolutely loathe Google et al. I've always come back to the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox web browser over the years, I rejected Brave because of that bigot Brendan Eich, but the funding from Google itself makes Mozilla a problematic option. I just this week finally tried out Vivaldi web browser and built-in email client from the worker-owned Vivaldi Tech in Norway, and it's *so* powerful and versatile, albeit based on Chromium, with Chrome Web Store access. Also, Firefox containers are a biggie for me. Ah! I'm now feeling conflicted again! #WebBrowsers #Vivaldi #Firefox #Mozilla

But wait! Another perspective: 96.3% of the top million web servers run Linux; ChromeOS, which is just Linux with a Chrome browser interface, counts; Android, which is a mobile Linux distro, counts too...this puts Linux between 23.6 and 44.98 percent! Right? https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-has-over-3-of-the-desktop-market-its-more-complicated-than-that/#ftag=RSSbaffb68 #Linux