E: refunded Mirror’s Edge, it was running at like 5 FPS on low settings.

In the future try checking ProtonDB before buying/refunding. For Mirror’s Edge in particular, it seems all you have to do is disable PhysX.

ProtonDB is an amazing tool, everyone should check it out!

I certainly increased my playing hours because of the steam deck. It’s the best purchase I made in years!

I bought Dredge and Nine Sols!

There are dozens of us!

My argument is not targeting people who pretty much don’t have a choice.

It’s that those who can afford a choice, and sometimes even complain they’d rather support green/fair/local businesses… they aren’t ready to pay the greater prices for those products. They want green/fair/local but cheaper than amazon, that’s never going to happen.

The problem is that users are reluctant to pay more for the same product.

In my country the difference in price for a dozen eggs laid by free vs caged chicken is 1 euro. The caged chicken live their entire life in an overpopulated cage and are never allowed to walk outside. People don’t care, they’d rather save 1 euro.

Companies like Fairphone seem to advocate for the values you describe but they can’t possibly provide the same price of those other “dirty” companies. While most people sees the benefit and appreciates the values of such a product, they just aren’t willing to pay more for an inferior product spec wise.

We don’t know. We don’t have access to what’s running on their servers.

Aren’t they audited, tho?

(yes i know that the source code is available, but there’s no way to check if that’s the same thing running on the servers)

But isn’t this true for most services, such as Matrix as well? Nothing assures that a Matrix instance is running the exact code on git.

Usually the government goes there a just takes whatever is in the rack they want.

But if your threat model is the goverment, aren’t all services affected as well? If they want to take element’s servers, they will. If you selfhost and they want to take your server, they will?

The problem is that you have to trust them.

I feel like in communication apps you’re always going to have to rely on trust. Even if you self-host in a Swiss server, with the best intentions and security practices… Other people are going to have to trust you. You trust yourself, but others might not.

And what metadata is Signal leaking? As far as I know even their notifications are not sending the message.

The government seizing an entire batch of amazon servers seems unrealistic, but the data would be encrypted anyway. Do they even store messages on servers, anyway?

If everything is e2e encrypted do servers actually matter?

This is what’s so great about Linux, you can use whatever the hell you want.

Flatpaks provide some cool security functionalities like revoking network access to a specific application. Maybe you care about this, maybe you don’t.

My personal policy is to always install from the repos. Occasionally something is only available in flathub, which is fine for me. I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and diatributions and totally respect the devs using a format that just works everywhere. If I were to release a new Linux app, I would totally use flatpak.

You can use any firefox fork on Linux and any other firefox fork on Android. They sync fine.

I actually do own an external usb sound card, this problem doesn’t happen there. I don’t use it because it has a severe crackling/static noise constantly playing, I could also never figure it out. My luck with audio in Linux is just not there. EDIT: after further testing, it also happens there but I REALLY have to boost both the mic and sound volume. But it happens, which is scary.

I was imprecise in the description of my connection. My headset only has one of 3.5mm who has both micro + headphone combined, like the one you use on your smartphone. I think it’s called TRSS. I then use the Y cable that came from with my headphones to split it into two separate 3.5mm connections, one for input and another for output. When I disconnected my headphones, the Y cable remained connected to audio card. It appears that the Y cable is the source of the problem.

If I only use the microphone jack of my Y cable, and connect my speakers to the sound card output, it works fine. The should outputs the the speakers, the input comes from my microphone and it doesn’t loopback.

I’ve tried a second pair of Y cable but the same is happening. Both are oficial Beyerdynamic cables, maybe swapping to another brand could fix it?

At least now I can make some sense out of the problem, even if I’m unable to fix it. I opened a bug report on pipewire as you suggested but I doubt anything will come out of it. I think I’ll just buy a non-ancient USB sound card and see how that works out for me.

Any idea on how I could possibly debug that?

I use a Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro with a Vmoda Boom ProX microphone. It connects to my internal audio card via a normal 3.5mm jack. The problem happens even after I unplug them.

I use a Happy Hacking Keyboard 2 for programming, love it so much. Just rebind your caps lock to a modifier of your choice (I like control)

I’ve used Mullvad VPN for almost a year and it’s amazing. I only switched to Proton because I use all their services.

First off, do not buy a blue yeti, ever.

Thanks a lot for this. It’s quite a popular microphone so I always wondered if it was any good.

It seems like I’m pretty screwed either way. I’ll look up these condenser mics anyway! Thanks!

I’ve tried a bunch of configurations, a bunch of noise supression software such as NoiseTorch or EasyEffects but nothing seems to work. It either sets a threshold so low that I have to speak very loudly for it to activate or the mic just picks up her voice near perfectly.

In Microsoft Teams there’s a “disableAutoGain” flag, which I have enabled a long time ago. It certainly helps, otherwise teams will just boom my microphone input to 100% gain every time. It helps but doesn’t solve the problem.

I’ve tried a bunch of configurations, a bunch of noise supression software such as NoiseTorch or EasyEffects but nothing seems to work. It either sets a threshold so low that I have to speak very loudly for it to activate or the mic just picks up her voice near perfectly.

Thank you for pointing me into the right direction, I’ll take a look at Cardioid microphones!

Different people deal with things in different ways. Some (most?) people feel like learning linux is undesirable or a chore, while others embrace the sense of discovery and exploring a new and exciting thing. After using Windows for decades I don’t want the same experience, I want something completely different.

Before I installed Linux I played a bunch on a virtual machine. I installed several distributions, desktop environments, hardware compatibility. I ended up landing on EndeavourOS more than a year ago. Never borked my setup, never had update problems, never had a problem I couldn’t solve (more like Arch Wiki solving it for me).

I like to learn things by doing things, I like to fail fast and learn from the mistakes. EndeavourOS provided the exact experience I was looking for and would recommend it to someone with a similar mentality. I wouldn’t recommend Arch (or arch based distros) to people who aren’t tech savy, but people make it seem more complicated and brittle than it actually is.