Hacker News: Happily2020

New comment by Happily2020 in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

Happily2020 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:12:25 +0000

What wild customisations are you talking about?

As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.

Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.

New comment by Happily2020 in "I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows"

Happily2020 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:27:10 +0000

As a long term linux user, I agree with the comments that essentially say: "you found a hobby and not an OS".

While I see that recommending a different distro seems like more change and more fiddling about, Bazzite is something to try out for sure. As long as you don't have a very complicated usecase, it really does get out of your way and remove a lot of the foot-guns you find on linux.

I really think it's ideal for a gamer usecase, and it's also great for a parent/casual user who does most of their work inside a browser anyway. As a programmer with a big distro-hopping past, I've switched to Bluefin/Bazzite on all my personal computers and things work well. I'm glad to have something that works well out of the box and glad to not think about the OS.

New comment by Happily2020 in "Database backups, dump files and restic"

Happily2020 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:22:17 +0000

For those of you looking for an easy management UI for restic, backrest is amazing: https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest

New comment by Happily2020 in "Graphene OS: a security-enhanced Android build"

Happily2020 — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:03:24 +0000

Private space is identical to work profile. In the past, private space didn't exist and people used work profile instead as a workaround, but now that's not needed.

New comment by Happily2020 in "CryptPad: An Alternative to the Google Suite"

Happily2020 — Sat, 10 May 2025 07:23:01 +0000

Not OP, but I feel like moving from Google to Zoho is just kicking the can down the road. You don't know how these big corporations will change their product or (more importantly for cash strapped organisations like Universities) their pricing structure.

It seems like a much safer to bet to move to an open source project instead. The costs of hosting it would be well known and predictable.

New comment by Happily2020 in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

Happily2020 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:37:43 +0000

Blocking the advertising itself only shields you from the advertising, it still lets these services set up the underlying surveillance/advertising system that harms society (and you) in the long run.

Of course it's not always possible, but it would be ideal to use services that don't have advertisements for anybody.

New comment by Happily2020 in "An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server"

Happily2020 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:35:47 +0000

If you're interested in self-hosting your orchestration server, you can look into Netbird. It's a very similar tool, but has the server open sourced as well. So you have a self-hosted control server with a nice GUI and all the features the paid version does.

https://netbird.io/knowledge-hub/tailscale-vs-netbird

New comment by Happily2020 in "Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week"

Happily2020 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:23:07 +0000

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114230629374651118

> not much will change overall. It's a major step in the wrong direction but without a large direct impact on us

New comment by Happily2020 in "Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google"

Happily2020 — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:31:32 +0000

Container tabs and specifically Temporary Containers are the two things I always miss on non-Firefox browsers

New comment by Happily2020 in "How to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta"

Happily2020 — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 10:05:26 +0000

If I've understood correctly, it might not be necessary to isolate everything in different containers. As long as you block social logins using an adblocker, the total cookie protection in firefox shouldn't allow websites to know what other sites you're visiting.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-firefoxs-to...

New comment by Happily2020 in "Fedora Linux 41"

Happily2020 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 07:55:57 +0000

I've been trying out Ptyxis for a few weeks now and it's quite nice to use with Distrobox or other containers. It's easy to set up profiles with particular docker containers and it automatically picks up distrobox containers.

It also has the "top bar color changes as a state indicator feature". eg: when I run a "zypper ref" the top bar goes red. The multi tab overview can be useful too, and it has a lot of color themes OOTB. These are nice touches.

New comment by Happily2020 in "Millions may rely on groundwater contaminated with PFAS for drinking water"

Happily2020 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 07:11:55 +0000

Going by the pattern of the comment, I would assume this was a typo. Maybe they intended to say: "If it's no problem and we DON'T avoid it = No problem"

New comment by Happily2020 in "Bitwarden SDK relicensed from proprietary to GPLv3"

Happily2020 — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 06:37:45 +0000

The simplest way of doing this would be to export your bitwarden vault in plaintext (as a json or csv) and then store it as a password protected zip file.

This should be easy to encrypt and decrypt on all operating systems, and would make it easy to move your vault to a new password manager.

New comment by Happily2020 in "Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary"

Happily2020 — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:14:18 +0000

I think many "average" computer users spend almost all of their time inside a web browser.

I think that apart from MS Office apps (which don't have a good enough alternative, especially for Excel), most of the other apps that people use are already available on linux, either natively, through electron, or as a web app.

A beginner friendly distro like Ubuntu (especially the LTS version) can be ideal for a lot of people. Reducing the bloatware overhead that Windows brings, increasing performance and battery life, adding privacy, and reducing the likelihood of malware.

New comment by Happily2020 in "Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail"

Happily2020 — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 06:36:05 +0000

Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.

New comment by Happily2020 in "Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?"

Happily2020 — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:36:20 +0000

Exactly this. It is all about how they market themselves. If they had promoted themselves as a social media-ish platform, nobody would be causing a fuss about their encryption.

Neither discord, nor any of the popular IRC clients (HexChat, WeeChat, mIRC) even mention the word security or privacy to promote their products.

Moreover, as Mathew Green mentioned in his blog post, there are many instances where Telegram (or Pavel Durov) has gone out of his way to attack the encryption offered by Signal and WhatsApp. If he were pitting his messenger against discord, why would he be worried about Signal or WhatsApp?