Lvxferre

I’ve seen even people in their 40s using them. I don’t think that it’s a big deal, or that it’s too late for that.

No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn’t exist makes me feel stupid.

PEBKAC

Every time that I see this acronym I’m tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember “ah, it isn’t Cyrillic”.

I like them, even for software installation. Partially because they’re lazy - it takes almost no effort to write a bash script that will solve a problem like this.

That said a flatpak (like you proposed) would look far more polished, indeed.

Frankly in this case even a simple bash script would do the trick. Have it check your distro, version, and architecture; if you got curl and stuff like this; then ask you if you want the stable or beta version of the software. Then based on this info it adds Mullvad to your repositories and automatically install it.

It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.

The fourth one installs the software.

Who said that the word doesn’t haue “u”?

Was that my Father that went hence so fast?
Ben. It was: what sadnes lengthens Romeo's houres?
Ro. Not hauing that, which hauing, makes them short
Ben. In loue.
Romeo. Out.
Ben. Of loue.
Rom. Out of her fauour where I am in loue.
Ben. Alas that loue so gentle in his view,

Romeo and Juliet, foglio I, around verse 170

…good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me. No need for a fifth letter!

I’m half-joking with the above, but the word did use to be spelled with “U” instead of “V”. Past then both were taken as the same letter. [/trivia]

9:45, on the “universal social network”: this can’t be stressed enough.

No matter how much Musk babbles about “I wanr an errything app! lol lmao”, Twitter won’t become one. The Fediverse however has the potential to become an all-encompassing social network, with different aspects of online interaction being integrated organically.

There’s a future not too far away where you can share a picture, from an account that you made for video sharing, that’ll get a lot of microblogging toots and spark a discussion in a forum. This would be impossible using Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Reddit; but once the interfaces get ironed out, it will become reality for PixelFed, Piped, Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin.

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.

Hard to say. Like, do “Ivan”, “Giovanni” and “John” count as the same, or different names? What about Latin “Amanda” (to be loved) vs. Japanese 愛/Ai (love)? How do we even count this?

I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.

And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:

• “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
• feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
• context illiteracy
• unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
• “trust me”

Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.

Even if this is a joke, this is a great example of something that happens all the time: people avoiding responsibility by blaming some chunk of software. The electronic equivalent of “No, sir! I didn’t kill that person. The butter knife did it!”

It’s sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you’ll be basically saying “I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being”. (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)

The devs have spoken about this. Quoting Nutomic:

Or you could just put a link to your old account into your bio. So this might be a useful feature, but very very low priority. // More useful could be import/export of settings and subscriptions (also much easier to implement).

So there are plans to address this in the future, so you don’t lose your data from server migration, but migrating the account itself is low priority. (Even then if someone found a way to do this, and submitted a pull request, they’d probably accept it.)

Because the main instance is a drop in the ocean that the lemmyverse should be, so it makes sense to call it a “millilitre” (ml). [inb4 I’m making shit up.]

I hope that ad blocking features are eventually seen as a killer feature, driving Firefox market shares up at the expense of “you can’t even block a fucking ad!” Chrome-based browsers.

If that’s gonna happen or not, I have no idea. It depends on how well each side plays its cards. The worst case scenario is Google boiling frogs (i.e. removing capabilities little by little) while Mozilla fails to advertise Firefox in this regard.