If you already know your ins and outs of the Firefox about:config and policy templates and have set up your own comfy Firefox then Zen isn’t going to do you much good. But for people who use power user browsers like Vivaldi (or even shiver Opera GX) and want to find a Firefox equivalent that meets their needs ootb then Zen is a good option. I taglined it as the “Better Vivaldi to your Chrome” since the reason people would use a program like Vivaldi is for the UI enhancements. The issue of course is that both Vivaldi and Chrome are proprietary programs using a dominating web engine.

Zen isn’t as hardened ootb like librewolf but I think it will bring a lot more people over to Firefox because of its presentation.

it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones

It is a shock for sure when I first used it, but you get used to it since the vertical tabbing is integrated with the Zen workflow (split view, side panels). It also frees up some space for navigation since you’re able to collapse it.

Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted

Interesting, I might have to look into this later

Does Sync work properly

Yup Sync works the exact same on Zen as in Firefox since Zen is just Firefox at its core. You just sign in as normal and your tabs should be there

You also mentioned add-ons not being enabled by default.

There are no pre-installed extensions (as compared to Librewolf which has ublock pre-installed), all firefox compatible extensions are compatible with Zen minus the ones that obviously clash with Zen’s design like vertical tab extensions. Just install them from the addons store as you do normally.

is the DRM-content playable on all Linux machines regardless of distro?

Yes, Mozilla handles the Widevine licensing for Linux but you’re locked to a lower level of DRM (720p instead of 4K afaik). There are extensions that re-enable HD content that just spoof your user-agent (your browser’s identity) to mimic a Windows or Mac machine.

Is it safe - am I not giving my Mozilla ID to a third party?

• https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy
• Zen is just Firefox with a heavy paint job, so all the security issues are handled by Firefox and not the Zen team.

The cycle of violence

This means that for everyone else, this information is irrelevant.

True, when Microsoft tells its customers that their computers can’t upgrade to Windows 11 because of “hardware requirements” they were obviously not lying through their teeth, totally not because the margins are higher when people buy new computers (and the bloody yankee mining supply chain can continue at full speed).

It’s not like x86_64 laptops keep advertising AI capabilities through their new NPU units and thus can do the same thing as ARM snapdragon chips.

The software is proprietary, what they tell you is what they want and are willing to tell you.

Never stop , Never lose faith

Maintaining the GNU agenda is our topmost priority

If I were to explain it more specifically (sans people are dumb level takes), when something is part of the dominant hegemony (Windows has almost become synonymous with the personal computer, something still connected to a Pax Americana mythos) and people aren’t educated on different options then all people have are anecdotes and personal wisdom. Windows as a brand and as a force in computer technology warps everything around it, not the other way around. That’s why we see so many conflicting opinions on Windows, there’s not a leg for people to stand on and judge their experiences objectively. People’s lives depend on the very thing that’s hurting them.

Add a huge splash of US hegemony to the mix and you can see how Silicon Valley is the technological Hollywood of the world. Communal efforts to create software for the common good is one of the main ways to combat this because it gives us an external vocabulary outside of the silicon valley ideology that’s taught to us. I only really started to understand how computers work when I delved into free software projects.

Good correction, I’m not a Windows user anymore and I defer to this YouTuber since he seems the most knowledgeable. No one is infallible and I don’t want to maliciously spread bad info

But yes, I see, good thing to know that in order to disable recall I need to use an arcane cli command or use a Windows feature most people don’t know about.

Windows is a pain in the ass to work with but at least it warns me before i format the boot sector.

Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian) also warns you no? But in any case, it’s a learning curve just like any other. Stick with it for a couple more months and it’ll go away I promise! Linux only gets better over time.

Windows 10 hits end of life next year, so Windows 10 users will become the Windows 7 users of today as software and updates slowly stop coming to them.

Microsoft could also just… forcibly update your machine. It’s their operating system after all.

What’s your point here? That volunteers not financially backed by the US regime don’t magically have the capacity to reverse engineer the dozens upon dozens of blobs that get added to the kernel every release cycle? Or that they’re even trying at all? Both aren’t a good look for whatever you’re trying to say

they’re not adding anything of value.

Now you’re just being vindictive towards others and I really don’t like that. It doesn’t cost anything to not be unkind towards people’s contributions. You’re free to criticize the approach but I draw the line at the idea that it is worthless because none of this work is.

Is it really a fork if all you do is take upstream and remove the blobs?

Yes that’s what a fork is, a disagreement with upstream’s direction and taking your own measures. Git is a decentralized version control system that allows for this.

What code has this fork created that makes it novel?

Deblob scripts and regularly checking the source code for complying licenses. They regularly follow upstream kernel releases and are the first ones to signal license issues and inconsistencies.

Have they tried to replace those blobs with open source drivers?

I should have been more specific. Virtually all drivers in the upstream Linux kernel are licensed under a libre license. However, manufacturer firmware (small amounts of code designed to “unlock” the device’s capabilities) are distributed as a binary blob that gets loaded into your computer (you’re allowed to redistribute the firmware in binary form, but not anything else). The Linux kernel’s upstream (aka Torvalds and other high level maintainer’s own trees) allows the use of nonfree firmware for device support (AKA getting your foot into the door). In short, no modern computer device that people use regularly is free from private tampering. Who are these “private” tamperers? The US-led digital empire.

If you have a machine (or more likely, a virtual machine) that doesn’t require device firmware, then linux-libre is the superior kernel as it subtracts the space and attack vector costs of nonfree firmware. We aren’t at that point yet as CPU microcode is far too important to give up on physical hardware, but for nations in the Global South with the engineering capacity, linux-libre does all the work of de-westernizing the kernel.

The kernel has already been forked. The Linux-libre project maintains a completely-blob free kernel and people gave them shit over it. Why develop more kernels? why not centralize development? Now we have a clear example of why not to do that.

This seems to be an attempt to stifle Russian hardware development from occurring in upstream. This means nothing to the actual downstream developers who will have their own kernel tree for their users in Russia.

Love to see all the “POLITICS IN MY LINUX???” losers start flame wars over being proven wrong.

Inb4 Chinese devs get removed for “compliance”, maybe they’ll just go mask off next time and say the real reason.

• “If the Russian maintainers meet the compliance requirements then they’ll be back in”
• “What are the compliance requirements?”
• “My lawyers have told me not to say.”

Good job Mr. Torvalds, you are the master of being subtle. Not even RMS would do this and that’s the biggest F-you I can give Torvalds.

GNOME said anti-white racism isn’t real and the chud Linux community fucking IMPLODED style. Super based af but those chuds are the loudest so people get negative impressions of GNOME (and the GNU/Linux community) because of those chuds.

There are people here who say that GNOME is a copy of MacOS I want to let you know that you that you are deeply unserious, one desktop is functional and the other is MacOS.

Same thing with people who say KDE is a Windows clone like Windows 11 didn’t just steal KDE design language but made it worse because unlike KDE which is unified, just a few clicks in Windows you are suddenly transported to 2010 with the old Windows control panels, and Windows users vastly prefer the older menus.

Linux desktops are superior to their proprietary rivals. We may not have Adobe (lmao who needs that shit 🥴), we may not have HDR (not yet, check back in a couple of months or half a year), we don’t have display mirroring (okay that one is valid) but our workflow is far superior.

He’s a Finnish millionaire so he’s closer to demsucc than ML but even demsuccs can shut down reactionary assholes. I don’t think he would spew propaganda uncritically though like most liberals.

Europe is a weird place politically compared to the US.

More like we ran out of luck due to the failing US medical system, he was a piece of shit but he didn’t deserve to get fucked over with his mental health like that.

The whole thing doesn’t depend on him it’s just that he’s the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) of the Linux kernel and everyone pulls from his git tree. Linus just reviews and approves patchsets sent to the kernel to his tree and people trust his judgement.

There should really be corresponding kernels besides Linux but so much of the development and hardware bring up is focused on the Linux kernel.

Funny that GNU Project founder Richard Stallman wrote about this exact thing a while ago.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html

I don’t know what more to say to other people anymore. It’s like talking to blueanon sometimes when I bring up free software and protecting your rights. I hope the entire western tech industry collapses into oblivion.