Brave was found to inject crypto referral links into your clicks url auto complete.

tomsguide.com/…/brave-affiliate-links-autocomplet…

.

Also, their whole business model was (is?) just replacing ads with ads they get paid for.

Sure, that sucks, but the product is good

You can’t always agree with everyone

It’s also just another flavor of chromium so it still helps Google maintain their monopoly.

Anyone trying to de-google needs to be using Firefox.

If you only use software that is created by people you like… well… i guess your only choice will be an abacus…

Peter Thiel was also a major, early investor in the project.

That’s another ‘this one thing should let you know this is radioactive.’

How mich actual difference (minus the crypto) is there to base-chromium?
Afaik chromium is capable pf being a browser. Does that also have syncing or is it not capable of that?

Exactly this. They’re acting braindead and disliking things for no valid reason

Just massively spreading misinformation

I’m as crypto bro as they come. Fuck Brave, BAT is a pay-to-surf scam.

I don’t use Linux except on my steamdeck and even I know there are a bunch of distros that look and act (minus lots of the bad stuff) just like windows

i wouldnt know where to begin if i had to switch, since im not in the tech industry, only 2 of my bros would switch since they are programmers.

(venting frustration)

I’d argue with the installer point - if it’s in the repo, and it almost always is for anything a newbie would be using, it’s actually easier. Search, click, done. BUT…

Drivers though, specifically companies not supporting Linux drivers, is shit. I’m helping a friend transition to Linux and am dual-booting myself so I can help with the actual os available for troubleshooting. And fuck me, sound drivers fucking suck ass on Linux. It’s because Creative is a bitch and won’t make Linux drivers, but also apparently literally nobody is both running a creative card and anything above 2.0 speaker setup. I have two creative cards, a decade apart, neither works with my 5.1 speaker setup. FL and FR work, the rest are some sort of fucked and come from an incorrect speaker(s). One of these cards is like 15 years old now, and nobody has noticed or rectified it. And if I reboot straight from windows to Linux, the sound is mangled. I need to shut the system down and boot it cold. Then FL and FR work. Hours of troubleshooting last week got me absolutely no progress.

Then I need software for my Logitech g903 (there is 3rd party software available) that does profiles and switches on the fly based on the application in the foreground (crickets).

Then there is an issue where if my monitor goes to sleep, when I wake it up I get patches of graphical artifacts. On the 2D desktop. Every few seconds, for about a quarter of a second. Random location each time. Random size. I’m on a Radeon 7900 XTX, which isn’t terribly new now. But the friend I’m helping, no issues at all with drivers or hardware. An older 6700 XT. But come the fuck on.

Both of us are on bazzite (I suggested it so they wouldn’t nuke the system as they learn) so it’s just Fedora silverblue with a few tweaks, not some out-there distro.

And, shit. If you need cellular connectivity on Linux, as far as I can tell you’re fucked if you don’t go the Ubuntu route. Debian doesn’t work, Fedora doesn’t work, Mint doesn’t work, I went down a rabbit-hole and tried a dozen distros. I ended up with kubuntu, since I wanted kde, but I tried anything just to see what would work. This is on a modern ThinkPad, still under (extended) warranty. I thought ThinkPads and Linux were supposed to be like this holy-grail of free-as-in-freedom computing? Ugh.

So yeah if you have a basic system, aged a bit, nothing special, it works well. Take one step outside of that perfect-scenario bubble, and paaaaaain.

To be fair, a lot of those are due to a Windows legacy of dominating the market, which isn't going to change until there are more people elsewhere. It's a bit of a catch-22, and yet even being a small percent use in desktop Linux has started to get distros that feel and run similar to Windows enough so people who don't dabble in Windows specific software don't miss it. It's also a bit much to weigh Windows as better in many of those above features when it still have its own issues often, even though it is the dominate and supported OS.

I laughed at your last part. I have never not had to do the same for Windows as I have for Linux when a problem pops up. Google the problem. Those troubleshooters are such a waste of time, and honestly the only time I've had an automated fix that worked to resolve a situation was in Linux via purging the old driver and reloading it. The Windows troubleshooter is like the first tier on a tech support line, where you tell them, yeah, I already did all that.

Gaming performance; although Linux is gaining ground, Windows is just better in this regard

I mostly agree with you but this contradicts everything I’ve seen. Presumably you have evidence of this?

• Driver availability; Linux is getting better, but Windows is superior

Doesn’t Linux have pretty much every driver built into the kernel with the only notable exception being the NVIDIA closed source drivers. Even those drivers are a single command away from installation, it even configures itself correctly out of the box for Wayland support.

Media codecs and formats

Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.

Driver availability

Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.

I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.

That’s more of an Nvidia problem than a Linux problem.

What? When was the last time you tried Linux?

With flatpak, it’s usually a one-click process to install anything nowadays.

True.

Hmm, I have kinda opposite opinion, hardware is pretty good, build quality is great, but the OS itself is meh. File manager is bad and clunky, desktop customization is very limited, network manager is buggy, especially with VPNs, no built-in functionality to import VPN config files like in Linux. Also, I used it for years and still couldn’t get used to all the shortcuts and "Mac-way"s of doing things. Just not for me perhaps. Not bad, but in terms of UX worse than both Windows and Linux for me.

Modern Mac hardware is excellent. The software is good too, but’s more a matter of taste. Not everybody likes how macOS works but Asahi Linux has made incredible progress so it’s a daily driver option for some already.

Apple’s entire software design philosophy is god-awful. There’s only one way to do things and if you don’t like “The Apple Way”, fuck you. “It just works” only works for very basic normie stuff. If you try to do anything advanced, it most likely won’t work and it’ll give zero feedback as to why.

I despise their business model, their design decisions, and their walled garden. I will agree that the OS is fine. I was forced to use a MacBook at a software development job in the past. It being UNIX was a big point why I didn’t immediately hate it. I will still agree with the other users and say that their hardware is pretty nice and well thought-out (not praising the anti-consument measures like soldered RAM). Still, I would personally never buy their devices due to the aforementioned business practices.

Because it’s mainly a measure of how much people use Macs. Apple products were always significantly more popular and “hype” in the Anglo world than anywhere else. 5,5% global vs 16% in USA, for example

It’s a work in progress. We’re getting there

Have you actually tried to install it on Linux? I’d bet it would work.

You gotta have your old files! But man does NTFS suck ass

I only use Linux and I want Windows to just stay out of my way or it’ll pay, listen to what I say.

I want to use Corey in the House Linux

Yeah but then you can’t run Xbox Games Pass or anything fun like that.

Lovely, thanks for the reminder on massgrave. I made the switch to Linux and haven’t looked back, but there are some games that require root kits that I’d like to play so I was considering virtualizing Windows and this would be perfect.

Thanks. I’ll look into that. My current version had been pushing me to update, which I’ve been postponing and I’m guessing is free, but I’m not sure it’ll give the choice of version. My work computer just updated to W11 Enterprise literally this morning, so I’ll get myself used to it here before making the leap.

My home PC is purely for personal entertainment, so less of an issue, but there’s little to no Linux support for my simrig hardware.

Oh wait hey you’re on my instance. Cool! We’re such small one lol

Vivaldi? (Sort of continuation of Opera, run by it’s former CTO.)

I use LibreWolf (FireFox fork) + Ungoogled Chromium

Why should you? What are these certain features?

I personally haven’t had to use a chromium browser for anything yet since my swith to Firefox. Only to test a render bug in chromium that Google hasn’t bothered to fix in over 9 years for a case that works correctly in every other browser.

I’m out of the loop. What are the many problems with Mozilla?

I saw you mention the Mr. Robot extension in another comment. That looks to be a bad decision but what else are the “many problems?”

Brave also ticks all of them?

at this point, Firefox’s development is not very much more open than Chromium’s

Good for you. I actively refuse to use it or any of its derivatives to avoid endorsing Mozilla by giving them market share. Additionally, I find that Brave just performs better (and needs one extension less to be functional).

Just block with unlock 🙉 why choose browser based on a ad block feature that is worse (injecting own ads/adware and therefore trying to dictate who is allowed to grab your attention) than the ad blocking extension?

I recommend Firefox, due to best compatibility with uBlock (fuck manifest v3) and additionally have a DNS filter in your network, like pihole or adguard.

On the go, use wireguard VPN to always be digitally home, and get your ads blocked (as well as tracking organisations) like that.

Of course that’s not possible, the issue here is being aware and not caring and in some cases supporting it for convenience and selfishness.

If fascism was a passive philosophy that didn’t hurt anyone then you might have a point. But as you can see recently it’s extremely dangerous and ruins lives.

You may not want to mingle with politics, but it doesn’t have the same view.

Kirby vacuuming blended spinach 🤮

im pretty sure you can disable a ton of stuff in the options menu

im just simplifying it, they have other methods at thier tools. since recently it come to my attention they also indiscrminately shadowban too for no reason at all/. V3 captcha, browser, time and date, location, components. they detect vpn quite easily now,

It was wordplay, yes.

You trust microsoft implicitly no matter what they do, I get it.

Brave: injected affiliate links once, then apologised for it too. Developped a search engine to be less dependent on big companies

Mozilla is spending money like crazy, just like Wikipedia, has little to no democratic system which makes people fork the stuff they make, and prefer to use the money from donation to buy trips all over the world to educate about privacy and shit while they proceed to keep adding more telemetry and BS in firefox

They also make it close to impossible to install plugins outside their plugins website, which I’ve heard has some strict rules and take a lot of time to approve stuff. Closed garden bullshit again

Tradeoffs have to be made. Android is an example of that…

Chromium can be worked on by anyone, it’s just that it’s too costly to do

It’s an image every few seconds. Not that piracy is currently even interested in tech that reencodes the content.
And for training, copyrighted stuff is already everywhere; AI tools seem to be limited on the output side rather than raw training data.

I think it’s a compounding issue, primarily of Google products just kind of being the “default.”

Google pays to be the primary search engine in Firefox, on iOS, and sets themselves as the default on their operating systems. They, wherever possible also set their browser as default. Yes, Chromium is open source, but they have the ultimate final say, and no one seems to have the interest in forking it. This puts Google in a similar position that Microsoft was in in the 90s and early 00s, where they can essentially hijack the web and force their ideas through whether others want to or not.

We saw this with Google forcing Manifest v3, all Chromium-based browsers essentially just had to follow suit. That was just Manifest v3 however, who’s to say what else they’ll do?

Then there’s my tinfoil hat worry that Google essentially being the window to the web for so many people, on an OS, browser, and discoverability level is just overall a cause for worry. That’s not even considering their communications and media platforms.

I’ve been dosing too much tux, doc. My mind’s all FOSSY.

Yep, and you also have to be in a specific state of mind to be okay with “features” like something that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC.

diagnostic

I think it is useful to send crash reports, but the user should have power over it (see: when macOS generates a crash report, it asks the user if they would like to send it)

engagement measuring

That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent, and I consider that malicious. There are ways to do that with consent. See: Steam’s annual hardware survey

And how do you know it’s not malicious in nature? I’d like to know what your definition of “malicious” is if you’re just fine with letting a Corpo run system look at everything you’re doing.

not malicious in nature

Haha, sure thing William

Well, semantically yes, not all telemetry is spyware. However regarding Windows telemetry it’s indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed.

The crux is that Windows telemetry is opt out, opting out can’t be done during installation, and historically opting out wasn’t sticky. Additionally some Windows telemetry is still being sent despite opting out.

That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.

Microsoft is known for making things “optional” at first then eventually forcing it down everyone’s throats. Removing offline accounts is one of them.

It’s not so much the technology itself is malware, but its behavior replicates that of malware.

Optional like how it reminds me every 3 days that it wants my info for “customization” purposes, and I can only sleep the notification for another 3 days instead of telling it to fuck off?

They have been so predatory, at this point no one should see anything they do as benefiting end users.

Actual optional things are disabled by default.

I believe they are talking about Windows, an OS that is spyware and no one should use

An example of Windows being spyware not standard telemetry is the Recall feature. A feature that doesn’t just tell you how the OS is used but actually takes screenshots every few seconds

I gave been wanting to go on linux mint for almost a year. Its time I fucking did it.

Edit: I have been doing a lot for privacy, but it just isn’t enough. For example I wanted to use venice.ai… but I didn’t just use a tutamail email, I even used a prepaid credit card. I live in canada where you don’t need to attach your name to a prepaid card, meaning it is as anonymous as possible if you want to buy something with a card (and yes, I paid for it in cash and it was activated by the store).