Fairphone 4 with eOS, escaping Google and Apple’s duopoly is quite liberating and not as hard as I thought it would be. Yeah, eOS is technically Android, but deGoogled.

https://e.foundation/

I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).

I didn’t know it was a Cloudflare site, but I was happy to see it’s not running Google’s hardware fingerprinting Ajax scripts that I dislike more than Cloudflare services.

The flatpak has been working for me on Linux Mint, although the flatpak didn’t work on Ubuntu proper. From what I understand the Mint devs do some extra tinkering to support flatpaks better than vanilla Ubuntu. Have you tried downloading the binary and running it from a terminal?

The Appimage also works well for me on my Ubuntu XFCE box.

https://www.openra.net/download/#linux

Unless we want Google to complete the “Death Star” and totally control the Internet, I think using services based on their products still perpetuates Alphabet dominance of the web. I use Firefox based browsers and search engines like DDG and Brave that don’t depend on Google’s code base to exist.

I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.

Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.

OpenRA, MineTest, Veloren

I think the automotive analogy is relevant, some think using technology means they understand it. I’m a pretty good driver, but it would be unwise to ask me to repair your car’s transmission. My grandmother spends more time on her computer glued to Facebook than I spend using my computer on a given day, but I’m not asking her to build my next gaming rig.

It’s easier to build a PC in 2023 than it was in 1993. Modern motherboard’s typically don’t require separate cards for sound, network and video (unless you’re gaming). It’s mostly integrated now and you don’t need hours manually manipulating jumpers and trying to affix terribly designed IDE cables now replaced with SATA. I’d much rather work on repairing my modern PC vs trying to troubleshoot a Compaq 486 20+ years ago.

I highly recommend Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States” to gain a better understanding of how and why such deplorable things took place in the US.

In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.

You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.

A dispassionate authority is more effective at protecting local communities from predators, but at what price? Unfortunately that dispassionate authority also has little compassion for the poor and marginalized people it rules and even less accountability to them. I’m also more afraid of the Orwellian police state being proliferated by the marriage of federal law enforcement and multinational corporations than criminals in my neighborhood. Those people breaking the law in my neighborhood probably need better access to mental healthcare instead of long sentences in federal prisons handed down by said dispassionate authority.

Another Linux tablet is definitely good news. I like Purism’s stated values and their laptops are very solid, the Librem phone was a disappointment for me personally though.

Same playbook used throughout history, we need to make you safer by taking away your right to privacy and access to communities you identify with. Without the LGBTQ+ community center in my hometown I doubt I would have survived young adulthood. That was a physical space funded by a non-profit, now that so much of our access to community is online the authoritarians from both parties in the US can just remove communities they don’t like assisted by legislation like this.

Services provided by for profit corporations are almost never truly free. It usually means “free” in exchange for access to your user data or “free” if you watch these advertisements. That’s not free, it’s an exchange of your data that’s valuable for resell to a company or your time to watch their ads.

Stripe is one of the largest payment providers on the Internet, they recommend hCaptcha, not Alphabet’s reCAPTCHA in their docs, so it’s obviously a choice. Please don’t proclaim to be “Extremely concerned” with customer privacy and choose a service provided by a data harvesting advertising company to save money when a privacy preserving option is available.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/prevention/card-testing

Michael, thank you for responding, but Google’s reCAPTCHA isn’t only required for payment on your site, it’s required just to send a message for customer service or to contact sales as I have done both recently. There are plenty of payment provider’s that to not mandate Google services. Personally I enjoy a lot of Google services when I choose to use them, but being mandated to use Google, as my child is forced to do attending school makes me wonder we companies like System 76 perpetuate this trend of the government and private industry forcing people to use services instead of letting consumers make the choice themselves in the so-called “free market.”

There is also a “finite supply” of clean water and electricity, but during the dawn of the Internet age corporations had more lobbying power than before and were able to stave off real meaningful regulation, now the consumer pays the price. We need to stop giving corporations the same rights as people and revisit the 14th Amendment they stole personhood from, as it wasn’t intended for that purpose. Regardless of what Mitt Romney might think, corporations are not people.