On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 12:56 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 10:55:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
continues in 5 mins...
Yes ... I could not join ... I had set up a jitsi meeting early y/day evening ... Firefox could not see my webcam it could a few days ago - but was updated on Saturday - which, I suspect, is the issue - nothing else changed.
yep, almost certainly. there is a dial-up link (which was in the calendar invite)
That FF update also brought in new options "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" and auto-set to on ... I do not recall that I was asked :-(
sigh.
Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with jitsi). I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.
it's not - not really. it's ubuntu-based, which is known for more repeated consistent privacy-violations than any other GNU/Linux distro. i strongly recommend you *not* to use anything based on ubuntu. aside from anything they enable background updates by default without your consent and knowledge.
debian is extremely strict about privacy violations: they don't tolerate them, at all. however they do allow people to choose foot-shooting by adding the nonfree repos, which is a good compromise.
sadly though they over-rode common sense *and blatantly disregarded the results of a major poll/vote* by making systemd the default. if you make a "base" install (netinst minimal) followed by "apt-get install sysvinit sysvinit-utils" then you can follow that up with "apt-get remove systemd" and *then* use tasksel to install a full desktop (or just do apt-get install task-lxde-desktop or apt-get install task-mate-desktop) you should be good to go.
if you want something that's *guaranteed* to be free of systemd yet has all the "modern" features expected of a GUI desktop, try "trinity desktop", hosted by pearson computing. it's KDE 3, and because it doesn't have all the crap that's worked its way into QT5, it's lightning quick to start up on modern hardware.
21 years ago i deliberately chose fvwm2 and do not install a "desktop" *at all*. i log in at the console, have created a suitable ~/.xinitrc (which includes fvwm2 at the end, non-backgrounded), and run "startx". i *do not want* anything that f***s around trying to tell me how to "manage" files, or where to click to start programs. i am perfectly capable of typing "firefox &" in an xterm, and when i got bored of that (about 5 years ago), i set up a script to do it for me, as well as starting 8x 80x65 xterms on the same virtual screen.
l.