Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you’d get more peers (which doesn’t matter if you’re just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.

The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

72 hours? No problem. Always have a big bag of rice on hand and you’re done.

I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”

One more idea… If you’re willing to temporarily add the Debian testing “deb-src” repository to your sources.list, which should be slightly safer, then there’s a chance that this might work: https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation

Seems not completely crazy, unless MX has its own way to do that.

Yeah, I see that MX test is not based on current debian testing (trixie) but also bookworm. So I guess you’ll not find the package in MX repos until it makes it into AHS. Apparently there’s a PPA that some people use, that might work.

Ok, it didn’t seem clear if you were on Debian 12 or MX. I’m not sure what the relationship between them is, but mesa 25 seems to be in trixie only since 13 march.

Maybe you could use that package from debian testing on the MX version of testing if you wanted to live dangerously.

At this point in the debian release cycle your easiest course of action would probably be to switch over to debian testing. It’s quite easy to do if you’re in debian 12 and wanting newer packages is a legit reason to do it. It should be getting reasonably close to being stable by now I would guess.

You’ll need a newer kernel than is currently in debian stable as well, but that is actually quite easy to build and install. Building mesa I don’t know about, but it will have many more dependencies and could be a lot of work.

Oh yes I did fail to include a full catalogue of all the base instincts it obviously appeals to — but it’s as if people are eating a giant pile of shit for breakfast, and you’re helpfully explaining that well, we all need to eat.

oh I would quit X, but I’d miss [ politicians / my friends / the latest gossip / the hottest memes / Stephen King ]

It might’ve seemed to make sense in 2016 but that bullshit doesn’t fly any more. It no longer takes any imagination or courage to see it for what it is. There are no more excuses.

I used to think that the worries about social media algorithms exerting some kind of profound mind control on the users were overstated, but holy fuck, what kind of perverted sci-fi brainwashing power does twitter have that people are still using it even in the year 2025?

It’s not as if humans slavishly obeying the algorithms was a much better situation than robots doing it. They’ve just sped up the process and it can only hasten the demise of the new technofeudalist content mills.

The Pirate Bay is perfectly fine for that sort of thing.

It’s too bad that “The Great Reset” they have in mind is just tearing down democratic institutions and handing all power to fascists, because a reset that was truly great might be worthy of consideration: All debts cancelled, all bank balances zeroed, all existing copyrights and contracts annulled, ownership of homes falls to those who live in them, ownership of factories and fields are granted to those who work in them, and after a period of great confusion we start again from there.

“not that bad” — a very comfortable and well-decorated prison. But you can’t blame pixelfed for every poor choice its users might make in their lives.

Good luck GNOME users! If Xfce ever added a donation button I would not be donating again.

Oh yeah, I remember debian’s Firefox used to be called something else for trademark reasons some years ago. I wonder how much linux market share firefox lost as a result. Not sure what changed, I guess in that case Mozilla must’ve come to their senses. I was mostly an ubuntu user in those days.

… lwn has the story: https://lwn.net/Articles/676799/

Telemetry can be turned off without modifying the code. I don’t know about the legality of it, maybe in the case of Firefox the other things they do are also at most build options rather than code changes. But generally distros are allowed to make changes to the packages they distribute, that is how free software works.

I wonder if mine would’ve been counted there. Even before I switched to Librewolf, Debian disables most of the telemetry.

Welcome to 2014