Waterfox is sold out officially, it is part of the corporate world

We had dedicated much energy in the past,  2 years ago, to advocate for Palemoon and you should at least read the piece about the NoScript parody, and how we gave up on it for specific suspicious reasons (still holds unchanged, Palemoon has branded NoScript as “dangerous” because it breaks pages).  We had seeked refuge at Waterfox, retaining some old firefox functionality and ensuring us it is blocking all of Mozilla tactics of robbing you of private data and feeding it to “who knows who”.

Waterfox officially was sold by mr Alex Kontos to System1, a UK payperclick ad company, which it would be absurd to believe that it wouldn’t utilize the browser’s ability to feed their other interests with private data.  Or why else would they buy to promote their own browser, to make all others break while they are getting robbed?

Thank you Alex for your sincere efforts and sleepless nights of coding, all these years, it has been a great ride, and it is too bad it had to crash in such a bad time for browser variety and period.  Goodbye and good luck for all that you had done up to now.

Trident + void + zfs one step closer to 1.0

Trident project released a beta image following their alpha releases in the past two months.

For those who missed this developing transition, of Trident leaving its TrueOS/FreeBSD base and moving to linux using Void as its base, here is a summary of what you are missing.  It has been a common story for a distribution being fed-up with linux development, developers being consumed to modify their software around systemd-functionality, and have moved to some form of a BSD-unix base.  As far as we know there hasn’t been an effort to leave BSD to come to linux.  So Trident is drawing its own path making it now a 2 way street.  Here are a couple of juicy quotes of their late announcements:

2020 OS Migration

2019-10-14

…Currently, Project Trident is based on FreeBSD and uses the TrueOS build framework. Over the years, we have accumulated multiple long-standing issues with the underlying FreeBSD OS. Issues with hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users…..

How does systemd prevail if it is so crappy?

Is reddit’s r/linux just a front of IBM’s marketing agents?  Under what remote logic would an announcement for a 5 year old distribution be removed and how could it possibly violate r/linux strict code of ethics?

Obarun: New for December …. upgraded yes, new not at all.
Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/linux.
Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose

Those are the same tactics utilized across news-sites that appear to be “objectively” promoting linux in general, forums of systemd-only distributions, social media rooms and pages. The idea is to portray linux to new users inquiring about linux while on MSwindows, MACos, Android etc. as a systemd related operating system ONLY.

Arch Linux 2020 – what’s there to be happy about?

Happy new year facebook fans and Arch friends (friends of who? we don’t know, not us, not on facebook, not in the past and not in the future, but you must have friends amongst yourselves).

Some of you may have taken the previous post about abandoning Arch as a joke, since most of what we do recently is promote Obarun, an Arch based distribution with s6 and 66 init and service management.   When we published that article we knew nothing of what Hyperbola was planning to do (we assume it was discussed within the community) or whether they were going to give-in to the pressure and incorporate arch’s pacman and packaging methodology change into their distribution.  (Note: Hyperbola may be based on Arch but has its own separate repositories and rebuilds everything on their own to ensure everything is Free).  All of their free packages, as far as we can tell are still compressed with xz.  The bomb was set and it will go off soon (in open/free software tradition of timing kind of soon).  Hyperbola is not just leaving Arch, it is leaving linux, for OpenBSD.  But this is not about hyperbola, it is about Arch….     or skip to here if you are in a rush!

Devuan revisited and its repository maze

What distrowatch calls Debuan 2.1 in its weekly is also listed as a “fixed” release.  Since when is anything based on Debian perceived as fixed unless it intentionally had its package management software released. Alternatively any live “image” is fixed unless you update its software.  Should someone clarify what such terms mean to Distrowatch?

See, we can even defend the honor of those we openly have disliked in the past.

Devuan’s, not debuan’s, repositories for its 2.xx series based on Debian Stretch, is Ascii.

Next edition which is called Beowulf is still under testing, pkgs for which can be found on

http://deb.devuan.org/devuan/dists/testing/
http://deb.devuan.org/devuan/dists/beowulf/

or

http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/testing/
http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/beowulf/

Where to move to after Arch-Linux-based non-systemd systems?

VD, HIV, STD, Zstd

The deeper issue here is “what is the relationship of Arch-Linux and Orwell?”

Two of the most common intrusive sites reported by linux users that are placed on top of the list of a firewall, so nothing goes in and out between their machine and those sites’ servers, are Google and Facebook.  Google on the one hand, in order to play nice against the free/open software community, has been contributing resources, information, and free/open software to improve their image.  MS purchased github, IBM purchased RedHat, or should we say they made their relationship more formal.  Some developers have fallen for it.  Facebook on the other hand is notorious of flooding the machines of their innocent and unsuspecting users with questionable code.  Facebook not only knows who you really are, what you really like, what you think and what you are interested in, in the vast majority of cases they know in real time your exact location and may even have the capability of keeping track of your moves.  Simply if you have an account on facebook and accessed it once through your “smart” phone, they know.  If you access facebook from your desktop, but on smart phone you only use your google account, they know.  They, they, who is they?  If you are really asking we can go on comments for as far as you can take it.

Are you confused about debian/antiX/MX/devuan/Refracta editions?

Debian 10 Buster became stable a few months ago, the rest of the systems had to follow but took their time.  This is done every two years and creates a wave of confusion, especially those on forked versions of Debian, like antiX, MX, devuan, refracta, etc.  Even more dangerous and confusing it is if you are using testing and although testing during debian stretch was buster it now becomes bullseye, while your antiX/MX/Devuan is testing alongside Buster still.

After antiX announced 19 (Marielle Franco) as its current stable branch, MS followed its mothership the week later (a few days ago), while Devuan/Refracta are still chasing Stretch (Debian 9), what they call Devuan 2 or ascii.

So here it is, to take the confusion away from numbers and names:

Debian         *   Debian       *  AntiX/MX   *  Devuan
the last good1 *   7   Wheezy   *    13       *  0  beta-testing
old old stable *   8   Jessie   *    15       *  1 jessie (old-stable)
old stable     *   9   Stretch  *    17       *  2 ascii (stable)
stable         *  10   Buster   *    19       *  3 beowulf(testing)
testing        *  11   Bullseye *    21       *  4 chimaera (next testing)
unstable       *       sid      *    sid      *       ceres