Status Update, April 2022

Well i’ve officially maintained this website longer than my old one now, though I don’t know how much longer i’ll be writing. My website has been down all the time recently (I don’t host my own onion so there isn’t anything I can do about it, maybe i’ll self-host in the future) and i’m not really interested in doing anything anymore. I feel like i’ve gone about as far as I can in my privacy/linux journey and it’s only a matter of time before i’ll have to use Google Chrome and Windows again. I’ve pretty much accepted that it’s impossible to be fully private or anonymous online, even if I did isolate myself from all of society and just lurked everywhere, or even if I never went on the internet at all.

At some point I should probably switch from Void Linux to another GNU/Linux distro or one of the BSDs, but I don’t know which one to switch to (they’re all either bloated with shit like flatpak, snap, preinstalled programs, GUI package management, and automatic updates, or are very difficult to install and use). I previously wrote about why Void Linux was the best distro, but honestly, all operating systems suck (at least the ones i’ve used all suck). I already talked about Void maintainers refusing to include forks of Firefox and Chromium (such as Pale Moon) in their repositories, but another thing I noticed is that there are a lot of outdated packages, at least compared to other rolling release distros like Arch. If you go on Repology and compare some of the repositories, you can see that Void Linux does poorly compared to Arch and Gentoo in having the most recent versions of packages and not having as many vulnerable packages. This is mostly a security issue and not a usability one, and all distros have this problem since there’s no centralized package management (if there was it’d probably be bloated like snap or flatpak and would have a GUI and automatic updates, so we’re probably better off without it). I should be monitoring every single package on my system and checking to see if the package is up-to-date or not, checking whether packages have security vulnerabilities, and compiling everything from source, but all of this would take so much work and time, so I might as well just forget all this and go back to Windows (and be forced to create a microsoft account).

At least back when I was a normie who didn’t know anything about privacy, I was fine with Windows, Google Chrome, and every mainstream service including social media, YouTube, and Steam. It was convenient, I didn’t have to do a lot of work, and I could interact with other people instead of just lurking. Now everything has changed and it’s becoming harder for me to keep up this privacy/linux journey. Maybe I should just give up and go back to being a normie like I once was. Maybe I should have never started to begin with.

At some point i’ll probably make some changes to the homepage and CSS and once that’s done i’ll update all the pages on this website to keep things consistent (and while i’m at it, fix any mispellings). I’ve been writing everything in markdown then converting it to html using pandoc, which really hasn’t been any less work than just writing the html. I might start using smu instead since it doesn’t have any haskell dependencies.

That’s about it for now. I’m not going to talk about what I plan on writing so I don’t feel obligated to write anything. Everything I wrote about in my last status update I’ll still write.