Same. Will give this one a try.
Finally installed this tonight to grab some raw drum audio to tinker with. Definitely much faster.
Got the pro version of CCleaner the other day. An offer I didn’t resist… Gave the thing a test drive. Now I have to log on everywhere I go, this site included.
Well, here I am… luckily I saved the inexplicable code I needed to get access…
That’s weird, it must have deleted your browser cookies.
It did. That’s by default. But since it was the Pro thing whatever, I for once let it had a go. It only got rid of half of it. I was hoping it would do some intelligent thing, like getting rid of cookies I haven’t used for a long time, saving the ones I use on a daily basis. Probably expected some AI thing to do some clever stuff.
What a crappy feature, it’s not as if there’s not a thing right in the browser to delete cookies so you would assume it’s going to do something different!! I manually manage mine every now and then just to avoid malwarey things like google cookies someone else okayed onto the system (baah, pesky kids! 
).
I’ve been using Firefox for years. Due to some hicups on YouTube I gave Google Chrome a testdrive, and it seems to be more stable. I may do a total transfer.
I wouldn’t, specifically because Google made Firefox hiccup on your system while using an one of their Alphabet products. During lockdown the only browser that would work properly and consistently with Google Classroom was Chrome.
The deliberately break things for other browsers, or don’t bother testing them as first class citizens, to make people think that Chrome is better.
Well I’ll be damned. If so, this is fucked up.
Google is an American company, right? Probably some law against it being sold to the Chinese.
Google are like 90s Microsoft of the internet. They’ve constantly used their power to ignore standards and standardisation, doing their own thing and letting other browsers chase them. Even something “nice” like making 1000s of web fonts available to lazy web devs who don’t serve them locally means that another X% of the web is dependent on Google services to operate.
Playing info bot here
Same reason it was a big deal (in a bad way to many people) when Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation.
Same concerns for BASH on Windows.
Funny enough, some previous moves by Canonical for Ubuntu felt very Microsoft in nature (before the publicly announced partnership), which resulted in lots of criticism from Ubuntu users and Linux users in general.
I’ve got no time for Microsoft any more, it’s a shame 'cause there are lots of good people who work for them but the direction they are taking Windows in isn’t good. I just want an OS.
I think Linux in some flavour or other is safe enough, there’s enough anti-Microsoft and Unix FTW sentiment out there for a well-supported fork to happen if it’s looking like they have too much influence.
I’m sure there are lots of good people at Microsoft. Windows without the privacy issues and other relative issues could be great. And same for lots of other big companies and their products. It seems that the business model has morphed over the decades from, We’re going to make a great product and therefore make a profit from it, to We’re going to make great profits and therefore we need a product to do that. It’s really a damn shame that so much talent, skill, and drive is being wasted by leaderships of big companies to make things worse for people on the whole, whether it be an operating system or healthcare.
Yup.
It seems that they are tightening things up, forcing Edge on users in Win11 and adding all sorts of fluff to Edge. I suppose they’ve seen Alphabet and Apple get away with it and conclude that the 90s are over and they can’t be accused of any unique badness any more.
Bounced back to duckduckgo from startpage a week or so ago. It’s nuts how a search engine will be better than another for a while and then give crap results after some time. Oh well. Just have to bounce when needed. And comparing recently to google just to see, holy crap google has turned into such a propaganda machine.
Yeah, Google have lost the plot. They should change the text on their Search button to Lecture Me.
I’ve been using FairMail for a while on LineageOS, it’s available on F-Droid ‘store’:
With Pro you get different notification sounds for different email accounts and filters you set on them. Good for ignoring irrelevant stuff.
It hides tracking images and it can strip tracking elements of links in emails if you want too.
Oh, dark mode looks much nicer than the light mode screenshots.
Got to say that Termux is handy on the phone as well. Can run things like ‘yt-dlp’ as well as all sorts of other command line tools.
FairEmail looks nice. Never was a fan at all of Thunderbird. And Termux is definitely nice to have if you have a rooted phone. Following a link from the FairEmail site, I saw mention on https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/ of a couple of search engines that I haven’t heard of before. Metager and Mojeek. I’m going to try those out over time and see how their results compare to Duckduckgo.
Any of you tinker with math? I always find myself coming back to it, probably because my math ed was limited, spotty, and broken. I have been using Geogebra for a while now, and ever so often I’ll fire up Octave and remember why I never stuck to it for too long. Octave is really powerful, but my wants for math software are pretty basic and more about graphing than anything, so Geogebra is just easier to get on with.