Why should it be? A faulty software update from a 3rd party crashes the operating system. The exact same thing could happen to Linux hosts as well with how much access those IPSec programms usually get.

And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.

You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.

Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.

The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.

They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Tbh, that’s something I can totally understand. Some programs use very obscure savefile locations, usually hidden behind 10 subfolders somewhere under your documents.

You don’t really prefer a lower resolution, you just work within the limitations you have.

Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p

Either your display is really shitty or you need (better) glasses. This isn’t like the difference between 60 and 144hz where its barely visible for untrained eyes.

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

Java version runs flawlessly on Linux and is superior either way.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

If the game is DRM free on GOG it usually only has the Steamworks DRM on steam. That one is so easy to remove that you might aswell call it DRM free since its only use is to make publishers think their game is protected.

There is nothing that Valve could change about this with the current way games are licensed.

All your Steam account is is a collection of lifetime leasing contracts between you and the seller. Steam already forces third parties to give you liftime access even if the game is pulled from the store page, but that contract gets voided once one of the two parties ceases to exist, be it the buyer or the studio that sells the game.

Legally binding the games to your account instead of you also isn’t possible since in most countries you either have to be a real person or a registered entity to form contracts.

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

You haven’t worked in any customer support position, and it shows. The amount of slurs hurled at them is far greater than anything found in a few github comments.

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn’t have a “pirated” flag and something like the product key doesn’t get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can’t be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn’t notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of “don’t fuck with work stuff, ever”.

It’s already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

Even then the snippets you can find in the replies are more usefull than most forums ever were.

Yuzu decrypts the games with your prod.keys which already means circumventing anti piracy measures. Pretty much all countries that care about piracy (EU and US) have anti-circumvention laws that make this action illegal, even if its for your own use of your own games. No matter how stupid it may sound, there is no possible way to ever use Yuzu in a legal way in most of the first world.