Whenever I need a bootable USB I always go for ventoy, much easier to just copy over the image.

That said, if you’re having a lot of trouble it might be something else, say a bad USB, port or image. I’ve had devices that can’t recognise particular usb sticks or from a particular port for no apparently reason. Sometimes its just cursed.

Very True, I have had some good use out of ghostarchive. When it works. There’s also self-hosted options like archivebox. And Several paid solutions like perma.cc. Kiwix/Zim too although that’s focused on wiki’s themselves & offline storage/access so not as useful for sources. But yes I’ve found none get consistantly good archives as much as archive.org or archive.today.

I have not heard of etched, but I do tend to avoid a lot of the crypto stuff.

Its also concerning if any of the archives suddenly going down & the data isn’t backed up. I know the storage requirements alone makes good backups unlikely, but with archive.today looking so volitile I wonder if one’s going to be needed.

Edit: added links & spelling

I think the future of wikipedia looks a bit bleak if they drop archive.today now. They need a decent archiver to function. Internet archive is good but its a single group hosted in the US, plus any site with a paywall isn’t surviving on the internet archive very well.

They’ve needed good alternative for awhile and the need is just growing. I wish public libraries could fill the gap but its probably not realistic. We’ve had legal deposit requirements for non-print media in various jurisdictions for awhile but i’m doubtful how effective it is, nor is it convenient to access or use for wikipedia.

oh yes that makes a lot of sense for server stuff. I imagine that may be quite useful for general use & maintenance too.

I’m too caught up thinking of consumer stuff.

EU Regulations are directly applicable to all member states, so its not needed to transpose those into domestic law for them to be used. Some countries’ constitutional setup mess with this(like the uk eh pre-brexit I guess), but in general regulations are as important if not more than domestic law.

Directives can be directly used in domestic courts but only under certain conditions. The defendant/respondant needs to be a public body and the transposition deadline must have passed. Its basicly ‘you failed to implement it in time — tough’. Also if they’re not implemented correctly. But in general yes, they’re only instructions for the members to pass domestic legislation.

I think even on a technicality both are law. Sorry if this was a bit padantic.

oh and yes I’m not aware of any EU legislation on admissibility of evidence. But, not really my area :/ I think there have been proposals for cross-border stuff but can’t remember what became of that. If you know any in force i’d be interested in reading that? thanks

I’m intrigued how that would work with some styles of plug that disconnect before coming out of the socket like the uk type-G plugs. Unless they’re not touching the socket itself and connecting somewhere else? I have no idea, i’m not an electrician.

KDE connect is amazing, I’ve used it way more than I thought I would.

In this case I think its probably a hallucination, but in the future people are absolouitly going to try optimising for ai search. At this point, it seems a natural progression for businesses doing seo(search engine optimisation).

How blatently catfishy that would be i’m not sure…doing it outright like that I don’t think would be as effective. Especially with FOSS stuff, the market for people looking for that and won’t check is unfortunately quite small.

If you want something that looks different you wanna find a different desktop environment(DE), most of them are avalible on most distros. I’d pick a distro then a DE that they offer. You could try these DEs you haven’t already tested:

• Cosmic, think tilling + gnome-like interface. It softens the learning curve for a tilling WM a lot if you’ve got other options. Fedora has a spin with this in if you liked fedora.
• Budgie but can be quite similar to others
• MXLinux with Fluxbox could be an interesting choice, its usually used on low end devices but its pretty snappy on anything else. Or Fluxbox on any other distro but MX is the only thing I can think of with it as an install option.
• If you don’t mind something older, you could look at CDE or NsCDE, although I can’t remember how involved the install process is.

Other than that, your options for non-tranditional desktop environments are probably just other tilling ones(i3, hyprland, ect) or scrolling(like niri). Or customising one of the others, KDE can be very flexible for that. You’ve gone through a lot of the main ones.

As for distros, there’s a lot, most will have the same set of desktop environments though. So, the same look and feel one you get past the install and package management etc…

If you don’t mind going outside linux land, haiku can be fun. Completely different OS though…

…edited but kept a note, it was bugging me.

I remember that case, yeah apple does some good here. I remember 404media running a story about iphones rebooting preventing unlock by police recently( 1 and 2 ). I guess you/they really don’t want any present established for that.

yea, its a blow to uk user’s privacy & security but not caving. Caving would be implimenting a backdoor. Title was a bit of an annoyed initial reaction, sorry there… maybe best to improve it, i’m not sure?

yeah I admit ‘apple caved’ was kinda just a gut reaction ‘apple bad - encrypted backup good’.

If they fully caved we likely wouldn’t have known about it, they’d have just put in a backdoor and given themselves and/or the uk encryption keys. Denying encrypted backups because of this is probably best.

You could argue apple does have the resources for a a legal battle, but you also can’t really expect them to do that. They’re not liberty or big brother watch. I doubt that would go well in domestic courts anyway, after that, the ECHR could be sympathetic on proportionallity & art.8 grounds but its a lot of effort.

maybe I should edit the title?

thank you, those pictures pain me