But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'.
From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering.
As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.
With 4 GB ram, Chrome will happily give ~2GB to any tab that requests it in a couple of seconds, leaving me with an unresponsive Windows aggressively paging memory to disk, only to give whatever it finds... back to chrome
Exactly, I usually find that chrome is eating a little more than what it's displayed in task manager in windows ;) I have no idea how it can achieve that to be honest. Restarting it seems to bring back the 5-15% missing ram in my case.
Funny thing, most if not all 'client-side failover' strategies you might find through google or the likes won't work either.
This is because the loaded resource will 'fail' anywhere between x seconds up to minutes, or never! In the meantime the user just sees a blank page, or best case, some 80-90% page that keeps trying to load something...
I've experienced this myself a couple times. Most probably my ISP messed up some stuff taking down whole chunks of 'internet' :)
And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a [email protected] address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)
Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.
So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.
I'm actually planning on renting a VPS soon to use as a personal VPN, dedicated IP, hopefully dedicated bandwidth etc.
I don't have even the smallest idea how to configure one or what software I actually need, BUT, my greatest fear is that I'll end up with a pretty "broken internet" since I won't be using a residential IP anymore.
Cloudflare will just think that I broke into some random wordpress site and started using the server to ddos (who? with 1-2 requests/minute?).
It doesn't look that they implement any kind of serious IP reputation algorithm. I have a static residential address since I remember signing the contract, almost a decade ago, pretty paranoid about security with a clean PC and I never seem to stop getting captchas.
Is PIA a paid only service? I doubt any "hackers" will be using it to break cloudflare sites. On the contrary, I'd argue its users are actually more civilized than the residential folks.
I believe it's wrong to say that users don't care.
Rather, users, don't really have a choice.
From personal experience, linux is still far from actually being user-friendly. And it's easy for me to compare: 1) I haven't had a blue screen on neither my, or my mother's laptop since XP SP2. 2) 6 months ago when I wanted to switch to Ubuntu I had my HDD suddenly die after an update. No mo trying for me.
Besides, these "clueless" users everybody imagines are not the ones making the choices. They resort to their kids, nephews, or that computer kid down the road to reinstall their Windows. And I am not that crazy yet to install linux on my mother's laptop. I bet it won't even work.
Speaking as a past student I'm really glad I started with C.
In the beginning, the fear of getting some random Segmentation fault out of nowhere actually taught me more than any textbook, school or best practices blog could ever do. It also forced me to learn how to use debuggers :)
I would like to see more control options for the end users.
Let users chose if their account can be recovered through a password reset form, let users leave 'secret memos' for support which can't be viewed on the site later, let the users decide if their accounts can be altered in any way by support staff, etc, etc.
In my experience it was the other way around. I signed up with gitlab only because they offer free private repos. Now since I already have an account with them and I don't have to go through the hassle of setting up stuff again, I'm only a couple clicks away from putting some project in the open.
I'm saying this because I don't see any solution. Our data can be sold. Our data can be 'shared' by our less educated friends,etc. Our data can be 'leaked' through all kinds of breaches/hacks/etc from both private companies or even governmental(incompetence, old software).
Treat our public records as public, as an interface to the outer word. Why do we think that our names, emails, phone numbers or addresses are private? What's the point of them being private?
If history serves right, I upgraded to Windows 7 around 2-3 years after it was released, and I still had occasional blue screens or hiccups. About one year later it finally started calming down. Now, in 2016, I could run my machine indefinitely without ever restarting (if not for updates). It's that stable. Going to wait at least 1-2 years before upgrading. I don't trust big companies anymore.
I think the OS itself is stable, but once you throw in a bunch of rushed drivers, a bunch of software that was 'fixed' to run on the newest windows and another bunch of outdated software, then something is bound to break.
In my case, I want a stable OS. Also there's a high chance the Windows 10 video driver for my 4 year old Dell laptop is broken, just like the last 3 versions Dell released for Win7. Only the first one from 2012 has no bugs.
I've got an older dell laptop that came with Ubuntu 12, bought in 2013. I assume everything worked back then, but I needed Windows for school.
Some months ago, wanting to switch, tried Ubuntu 14 and Debian 8. Couldn't get the graphics driver to work on either. Proprietary drivers, other than the ones in the Ubuntu repos, required a mismatch of older/newer library/kernel versions which I couldn't figure out how to get in Ubuntu. The open source driver claimed my hd7670m worked, but in reality I was getting the hd4000 performance out of it.
Everything else worked, a bit noisier though. Either way, I would definitely not feel safe when buying another Linux laptop, proper research is still required.
I find it infuriating how much traction this whole anti ad/tracking war is getting.
People mention there's no choice anymore. Wrong! It's still there, just like it was 10 or 15 years ago. Stop sharing your personal information online and the whole tracking thing doesn't matter anymore.
This analogy seems completely flawed imho. Nobody can get inside my home, or force my door or any of that nonsense, unless I specifically allow them when they ask!
I fail to understand how all these trackers can read my browsing history without me installing <popular plugin> and allowing it access to my browser? Or how are they going to read my contact list from my Android phone, or the one from my Thunderbird? Through thin air?
Nobody took the choice from us, we just happened to open wide our front and back doors, and then complain that random people come in and look through our stuff.
But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'.
From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering.
As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.