It could be private or could be not. But in a world of total financial surveillance and initiatives like ChatControl, I doubt it will be really private.
If a person is smart an has personal opinions about everything or if they are a person of power I won't trust them. Because how can I prove they are a true believer and not a liar or sociopath?
If a person is average human who thinks what the crowd thinks then I won't care.
Better not having different regions at all.
Silent Payments are just stealth addresses for Bitcoin. There already be some earlier implementations, for example PayNim in Samourai Wallet. But the new thing is finally a general standard proposed for wallets.
It allows to create new Silent Payment address which never appear on the blockchain. Instead, the sender of a transaction will derive an unique regular address controlled by the recipient. Similar to Monero yes. The only thing it gives: one cannot naively check the balance or the transaction history of a SP address.
If it will be adopted it can improve privacy on Bitcoin slightly, but... It's a completely client-side feature which does not require protocol changes and could be implemented like from the day one of Bitcoin. Silent Payments are new only because it uses Taproot, and the previous thing was BIP 47: Reusable Payment Codes, which has about zero usage. Just because bitcoiners don't care much about privacy. There is only a small minority of users who cares.
For more serious privacy hidden amounts are a must have feauture. And in the past at least bitcoiners were strongly against it, because they care about transparency, audibility and trust to the system more than about privacy. Potentially, some privacy protocol can be implemented on L2, but L2s are often centralized and cannot withstand governmental pressure. But in theory yes, they could have strong private payments on L2, but this rather won't happened on L1 in near decades. Even on Ethereum where such protocols are possible for few years now, projects are still in development.
In short: the problem with privacy in Bitcoin is not technical, it is more about culture and a lack of demand from the Bitcoin community. Imagine that bitcoiners will promote some strong privacy improvement for which Binance and other exchanges could delist BTC, or the protocol will become more complex for understanding by an average human.
Net-zero in 2030 is a lie. Google, Microsoft, whoever, - doesn't matter. It's only five years left. I don't even think that bigcop can go from increasing carbon emissions to decreasing before 2030.
A person can consider a thing as awesome or not, and can change the opinion based on a situation. Sex is also like that. But sex is one of the things which influence thinking and behavior much. Is fear awesome? Is pain awesome? Something like that.
I will use it. I don't care what others think. People can use su, sudo, doas, run0 by their choice, and I don't see why we need a common opinion about it.
Maybe they are new users who miss Windows, so they are trying to find reasoning to stay on Linux. I as an old user have no more any special emotions about Windows. I play with it form time to time. But the OS is quite conservative because of its market monopoly and I don't find anything new and interesting in new releases. It is not special about Windows, all consumer OSes are kinda stabilized now, and corporations do not want to experimenting and build new things.
So, I don't hate Windows, I just don't find it interesting for me. I use and will use it on a separate machine for some niche tasks, when they require windows-only software.
Also: https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/112717330526232080
And to build independent browser not sponsored by google is a soft of an ideological motivation. If only it is not a pure marketing lie. There are no technical reasons for being sponsored by Shopify but not by Google. I would say there is no much of an ideology either.
And other things about the project are also concerning me:
- It uses Qt for UI, while modern browsers can draw UI with their own engines. A redundant dependency which also will harm modularity and embeddablity.
- Modern browsers have complexity of operating systems. It's just a waste of resources to build an independent browser from scratch, but not to make the engine reusable.
This is a poor choice.
The other things: It's so independent (from google), but already got sponsorship and changed the landing page to a typical landing of a startup. This independence is populism. Just enough one for feeding their adepts with promises. I won't be surprised of possible advertisement integrations made "for maintaining independence".
NGMI.
I wouldn't assume the right strategy for inputs. To an outsider they are all indistinguishable, but the sender, an exchange for example, can mark operations (withdrawals) done with the same account and store that information. Every input has 16 potential members selected from the blockchain. But if tx has many inputs, and each input has among the ring one previously marked input associated with the same exchange account, it will be likely that tx was created by the person with that exchange account. If the person later will try to deposit this coins to another account of the exchange, probably exchange could link two account, at least as potentially linked. So input aggregation can give additional hints for EABE attack.
Probably, it is better to aggregate inputs earlier, before churning, and don't mix churned coins with unchurned. But Monero need more general improvements as FCMP/FCMP++.
No. Regular payment transactions with change also have two.
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/1415 https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/5399
I would say better to pay more attention to inputs and input aggregation and to avoid it if possible.
Btrfs snapshots are already used in openSUSE microOS which is branded as immutable. And AshOS generalizes it for any kind of distro: https://github.com/ashos/ashos . I think it is nice middle-ground for regular distros, which does them more reliable.
But for me, immutables are more about separation between the base system and the apps, where the base is not only immutable, but image-based: ostree, A/B partitions, systemd-sysupdate. And the apps are distro-independent: flatpak, containers, and so on. So apps are upgraded independently from the system, and one doesn't need to upgrade the system just to have apps updated or vice versa. Btrfs snapshots doesn't solve anything here by itself.
It is quite opinionated though.
Oh, I see also by their screenshots, that Bluefin also spoils the UX of GNOME with custom extensions. So I will consider it the Manjaro (or Mint) of immutable distros.
Silverblue is an official Fedora edition, almost exact Fedora Workstation, but immutable. I use it. universal blue is a third-party project and their images are bloated with additional "features": packages, drivers, etc. Bluefin contains Homebrew for example. It's how they describe it, but I haven't tried it to say more precise.