A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

While my migration to Linux has been a joy, overall, some bits of craw sticking still occur. One of my favorites - derogatory - lately has been dealing with Wayland issues. If you don’t know what Wayland is, apart from being yet another bad dev take on naming things after speculative fiction, it’s the replacement for the aging X11 windowing system for Linux GUIs. X11 is long-lived and needs a rest on a farm upstate. Wayland aims to be a simpler, more modern compositing solution for graphical display. Without getting into all of the bullshit from Nvidia keeping things from running smoothly (and they are manifold. Jensen Huang is a cultist freak troll who is sucking on the AI nozzle like it’s giving out absolution during the inquisition), it’s the new hotness, but also the new newness. So it comes with a lot of nits for which to pick.

But this isn’t about that. This is about SOLUTIONS. I have had a number of bad driver updates (vibe coding is for mood rings, you capitalist twunts) cause all manner of problems and Wayland is not easily fixed if it gets in a crappy state. Like Arkansas.

Multimon seems to be one of the leading causes of stress for Wayland users, specifically when coupled with VRR and HDR. Not being able to access your GUI is incredibly frustrating, especially if you just lugged a 12 kilo monitor from the garage and are already sweat-raged. Even though you were the idiot who decided it needed to go behind the box of Christmas tat because it was drier. I’m looking at YOU, me.

Unlike a gigolo with bad aim, I won’t be beating around the bush. Here are a few of the error cases I found myself in. All of them were fixed, ultimately, but temporarily renaming the FONTS folder, of all things, in my home directory. It seems that, particularly in KDE Plasma, there is zero fallback for a font subsystem that can’t load a file. Which seems like a HUGE thing to overlook in testing. Hah, TESTING. Ask your parents, kids.

This assumes that you get your session manager screen with no issue, but the command line terminal path can be used even if you can’t get to your normal sign-in screen. Usually.
After a failed Wayland session launch, if you’re presented with just a blank screen and a cursor, you can usually do one of two things. Jump to another terminal than the one which is handling your graphical session (usually Ctrl + Alt + F4 will get you there, but depending on your configuration you may need to try a few function keys to find one open for interactive login), or log in as root or another user account if you have access to the session manager (login) screen.

Once you’re in a working session, be it CLI or graphical, your next move is to use journalctl to see exactly what’s falling on its face. My favorite way to do this is to tail the log and repeat the failing process. But if jumping back and forth between a failed GUI and a terminal instance sounds like a hassle, you can just use “journalctl -b | grep -i “fail”" at a terminal prompt and sift through the messages. You can add “plasmashell” instead of “fail” or just jump right to the speculation and use “libfontconfig.” My particular error read:
kernel: traps: [ProcID] general protection fault ip:[instruction pointer] sp:[stack pointer] error:0 in libfontconfig.so.1.17.0

Which was then followed by a full stack unwind. Google is worthless. But also in this specific case. Most of the responses to similar issues are, ‘did you read the manual and search every single existing forum post ever made everywhere?’ or ‘me too, can’t help you bro.’ Both of which are just the worst kind of ‘pickme!’ answers to a legitimate problem ever. The font failure seems to get lost in the discourse because the failing module call occurs higher up the execution chain. But, Linux dicks gonna Linux dick.

Once you’ve identified that the font configuration library is having a bad day, locate and rename your USER fonts directory. I’m using an Arch-based distro, so for me it’s in:
/home//.local/share/fonts
For some distros it’ll be simply /home//.fonts or /home//fonts and for still others it may be located in the /usr/ directory. YMMV.

Move the folder to another location temporarily, rename it, or if you’re sassy, just delete it. Log out and return to the graphical session (Ctrl + Alt + F1 or F2 usually), or reboot.

Attempt to log in to the broken session and it SHOULD work if you’re experiencing a corrupt font loading situation. You can then add back fonts a few at a time and see if they cause problems. More often than not, the font folder has been carried over from another place or was managed by a font manager at some point. You may find a number of corrupt or nonworking font formats in the folder. I know that pulling Windows fonts, which had zero issue on a SINGLE monitor setup, wreaked havoc when dual monitors were involved.

I hope this helps someone out there. The internet is garbage thanks to agentic sycophant CEOs who want you and your money to not be friends anymore. Most people just give up and reinstall since when you’re starting out with Linux, that’s a valid troubleshooting step. But the answer was shockingly simple. I just had to self serve the whole thing because the social nature of nerds is one of gatekeeping and ‘trial by fire.’ Best of luck if you’re starting out on this ride!

One of the broadly-accepted privacy stalwarts has just turned rat.

https://tech.yahoo.c … -aids-160711711.html

There’s a lot to say about this news. The fact that the service sells privacy as the product even more than the service itself, to the fact that free accounts are inherently more secure than paid accounts owing to this utterly unforgivable loophole in their protections for customers. The fact that aiding an active regime of war criminals is being brushed off as ‘following orders.’ The fact that they are using the buffer stage of rolling over for their own government as the excuse from ridicule. The fact that you are constantly bombarded with upgrade/upsell ads when using the service which all - again - focus on buying privacy and security. The fact that they have a glib, canned response and astroturf trolls on social media trying to steer the conversation into personal accountability. All of it is obscene.

Proton has taken an immediate, reactionary, hostile approach to this being leaked to the news. They call it click bait (it’s not). They call it misrepresentation (it’s not). They have their brand-identifying user base marching for them in social media comments, decrying the person for not obfuscating their own payment methods rather than blaming the person who lied to their user base (they did). They call it anything but a problem for them to solve, violently hand waving to the point of slap fighting.

And as problems go, Proton, despite being A problem, is not THE problem on display here. They suck. Do not think I’m in any way asking for absolution for their utter shittery. Rather, there is an inherent problem with any service you do not personally host. When faced with compromising their advertised ideals, they are only as strong as their board members will allow them to be. Promises are free. Actions are not. Until an event occurs which burns away the facade they’ve built in times of easy sailing, there is never a guarantee that any entity you don’t control won’t immediately cave to any outside pressure deemed too difficult or expensive to challenge. In this case, rather than even test the laws of their home country, the company scuttled the ship at the first sign of a boarding party. Being a Not For Profit just means the decision was made by people who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of defending their product’s core feature, rather than being a fully financial decision in the endless pursuit of more profit. Same outcome.

There’s no solution for this, from the standpoint of the average consumer. Hosting your own e-mail service is no longer tenable for nearly anyone and doing it in an anonymous way is basically impossible. Constantly using throw away accounts means not having a permanent address and basically makes e-mail about as useless as a rain-soaked ValPak stuck to the top of the communal dumpster lid.

There are a few mitigations, but no matter what you do, ultimately anything hosted outside of your control is outside of your control. VPNs? Doesn’t matter what the law is where you end up. With enough pressure, it can all be linked back to you if any piece of identifiable information is involved. Your payment method? Easy. Your originating IP? A little harder, but not by much. Even if you hop and hop and hop, the trail exists. Your only true option for anonymity is burner hardware that you dispose of after use. And that’s economically and ecologically a horrible option. All you can do is make the trail back to you as hard as possible to follow. I know it sounds as if I’m echoing the people who blame the victim for not obscuring payment info, but their action - in this case - is correct. The blame still lives with the company that lied, but in praxis, that’s little consolation. It is, however, a good way to find people to block on social media.

There are a few things you can do to make the pursuit of your information a high enough cost of entry to prevent a free bingo square for the pigs and pigeons who might want to find you. First and foremost, don’t believe a goddamned thing any company says about privacy in regards to selling it to you.

Second, don’t pay for any service you want to be anonymized through an account linked easily back to you. Prepaid cards are an option (bought with cash, preferably). Crypto is about as anonymous as a Zorro mask worn while showing off a chest tattoo of your driver’s license and the world built around it is very similar to these privacy-first services. They do not actually protect you from anything. The manifests for transactions can, with a bit of forensics, bet rebuilt pointing right back to you unless you did the initial buy in a completely anonymous way. If you’ve already got your foot in that quicksand, do what you will. But for people who don’t want to touch it, stick with converting cash to anonymous payment methods in the real world.

Third, use free accounts with false information to run any protest organizations. Don’t use subscription based services that force you to keep a payment record on file. Freedom of speech, and in fact, the entirety of the Bill of Rights has been shown time and time again to not be anything but a promise to gullible customers. Especially when critiquing capitalist dogma or elite class supremacy. You can go online and talk a child into killing themselves or walk into another state and open fire on brown people all you want and it’ll be considered your undeniable right. But say that you think rage-fucking the entire planet into apocalyptic extinction is maybe not so good and your information will be handed over without a second thought. The Mrs. Kravitses of the world are overwhelmingly fascist-leaning and will drop more dimes than a busking hedgehog running into a spike trap.

There are options like co-op service subscriptions where ownership is decentralized among a few people who trust each other or running through the absolute dredges of humanity along side illegal pornographers, human traffickers, and raw milk peddlers. There’s a high bar to entry in understanding things like the Onion network and an even higher bar of technicality in implementing those understandings. You’re still stuck with the first-payment problem, in most cases. Getting comfortable with using cash is still the key element to protecting yourself from payment provider abuse. Laundering your completely legal activity should not be something we are required to do and my hope is that a lawsuit arises from this that costs Proton much more than they would have spent defending the principals they sold. The world does not deal in fairness, though, and the business self-preservation instinct is myopic, amnesic, and very, very stupid, so lessons will likely be ignored even if that does happen. All we can do now is tell people who blame victims to shut their fucking mouths but take their methods and internalize them.

The myth of the anonymous Internet - and it has always been a myth - is slowly fading as the average Internet user watches their protections and rights to be ignored wholly forgotten in the mad rush for capital-building information. While forensics have been able to piece together identifying markers from online activity for decades, the cost of doing that work has gone down substantially in recent totalitarian regimes. In the United States, the fourth amendment has generally held that your privacy, digital or otherwise, cannot be invaded without judicial intervention. Just cause has turned into “just ’cause” overnight with the very public dismantling of checks and balances. Private tech companies no longer worry about rolling over for fascism causing their stock to drop. Humans are no longer their customers. Speculative bubbles are more profitable and if they never have to put the money back into the pot - rather, just hand it back and forth to one another and tip their hats like playground pantomime - they are all the more happy. So why bother saving face when you can get special treatment by playing ball with dictators? That hurdle has classically been the most difficult one to overcome when doing Internet sleuthing and it has eroded entirely.

Palantir and its precursors, along with government programs like PRISM, work their way into boards and halls of tech giants. They use kickbacks, permitting, and all sorts of bribery to make sure that the biggest-named players are all in on the grift of faux security in modern tech. But tech is less secure than it has ever been. It may prevent low-rent script kiddies from scamming your Roblox account, but everything you do on most of your devices can be laid bare in seconds if someone merely decides to look.

Again, this is not new. Logging has been fundamental to computer network interaction since its inception. Things needed for reliable communication over an infrastructure made to carry flustered Trans-Atlantic accents from Pennsylvania-65000 to Klondike-5555 were already being stored so these digital bridges could be created. Endpoints had to be known. Routes had to be known. Owing to this, there was little anonymity in computing from the start. Anonymity was added, intentionally and otherwise. Log files take up space, so anonymity is bolstered simply by not storing this information past the active session. But compression got extremely good, extremely fast. Especially for text. Logs became less and less a storage concern and more one of privacy well before AOL shipped its first disk. For a while, privacy was a top tier feature in online communication. At least, behind the scenes. People love to identify themselves. It’s almost like we are all apes made of existential dread and routine. Because we are. As the net became more ubiquitous, people started realizing the importance of privacy. Not for illicit acts, though certainly those were in the mix. But for every day activities that were becoming more common online. Communication with friends, family, doctors, colleagues. These all needed some protection from prying eyes. Encryption technologies became an arms race against bad actors trying to hijack communications to steal what information they could. At the same time, however, companies began realizing how much of the data flow they controlled and how much that data could be used to create targeting for themselves. Then, they realized people would still pay for services even if ads where part of that service. In some old newsroom storage closet, William Randolph Hearst’s portrait smiled. So began the two-faced deceit of IT security.

All of this is just a long-winded intro to say this: No corporate entity ever has your best interests in mind when making decisions. Only profit. Or reduction of loss. When paramilitary police forces decide to dox you, the ’safe, secure, encrypted’ services you use from publicly traded for-profits mean absolutely nothing. They have your data. They will give it over to the cops. It’s the most financially beneficial stance (on paper), and that’s the only stance they will ever take.

So what is there to do? Break out paper cups and semaphore flags? How can you go to a protest and keep your digital life from becoming Exhibits A-Q should a stormtrooper decide you look enough like his ex or his abusive dad or just that kid he beat up in high school so it’s your day to get zip-tied and paddy-waggoned? Not all is bleak, nor do you have to pull a Full Amish when you head down to the future kettle where the first amendment is “protected” until it’s not. You can do quite a bit to harden your personal security - which in turn makes those around you more secure. It’s work, but what isn’t these days? Work, I guess.

Leave your phone at home

This is one of those pieces of advice that often gets eye-rolled by activists and organizers. But before you dismiss it, hear me out. I’m not saying ‘don’t take a phone.’ I’m saying leave the phone you use as your primary device at home. It is very easy and very cheap to pick up a second phone for recording - one of the most important functions of a phone at any protest - and communication. You can use an anonymous pre-paid carrier phone for emergencies, an old phone you’ve wiped, or grab a cheap used unlocked phone off of any number of marketplaces. Considering the despicable desposability cycle of modern phones, you can probably find a few free ones with some calls to friends and family. A few things to keep in mind:

• Fully factory reset any phone you receive or purchase. If possible, do this offline using tools from the manufacturer.
• If an alternative, hardened OS such as GrapheneOS is available for your device, consider using that instead of stock Android or the manufacturer’s bloatware.
• Try to find a phone that uses a physical SIM card. eSIMs are convenient, but are tied to the device and usually tied to the sales records of the device. A physical SIM lets you swap to another carrier or a prepaid number with ease.
• Keep apps to the bare minimum. When possible, use app stores that do not tie to an account. F-Droid is a good option. Obtainium is very popular as well.
• DISABLE BIOMETRICS. Apart from being way less secure than they purport, biometrics can be used to illegally compel you to unlock your device. Face scans are NOT legally protected. Fingerprint scans can be obtained through force. Set up a complex PIN or password and don’t fall for the false security of biometric login.
• Don’t sync accounts, contact lists, texts, etc. Don’t use e-mail applications. Check e-mail through a private browser session. This is a pain because you have to manually enter security info every single time, but it means that there’s no forensic footprint left on your phone once the session is closed.
• If you need to stream or capture to a cloud service, add a second, anonymized account for doing so. You can always re-share from your primary account later, but there’s no reason to link your activities to verifiable identification.
• Remove data from your phone when you get home. Back it up on a secure drive and remove it from the device. Again, there’s no reason to provide a free map of your whereabouts for potential prosecutors.
• Use a VPN (with manual credentials, not apps). A VPN can help protect you from local scanners, a more and more popular tool for oppressors, as well as provide an extra layer of cover from your carrier snooping on their behalf. Generally, use a VPN from a country with sound data protection laws like the Netherlands if possible.
• Utilize wifi hotspots over cellular data when possible. Many areas have free wifi if you look for it. Combined with a VPN, getting your exact activity trail becomes much, much harder.
• Only give the phone number for the device (if applicable) to a few people you trust. An army willing to use a 5 year old to draw people out of a house will absolutely put pressure on people close to you. People can’t give up your info if they don’t know it, so keep the list as small as you can.
• Use your protest phone for protesting. Keep it on Airplane Mode or turned off. Take it off Airplane Mode AFTER arriving at the protest. Put it in Airplane Mode BEFORE you leave the protest. Cell tower pings can be used to create a very accurate map of your path to and from. Again, don’t give them anything for free.
• If you simply cannot use a dedicated phone and cannot leave your phone at home, consider paring down apps, creating a second profile with very little information and using that when you’re at gatherings, using a VPN, disabling ALL AI tools, turning off tracking metrics (such as “send us data to improve your experience while using the app!” settings), signing out of social media accounts, and following the biometric and VPN suggestions above.

Be comfortable being bored

Excepting a secured phone (if necessary), don’t bring any connected devices with you. No iPad. No Switch. No Steam Deck. No ROG Steam Deck But Worse. If you have one of those handheld retro devices from Anbernic or anything with bluetooth, wifi, or mobile data, just leave it at home. Tablets, smart watches, even many MP3 players - anything that can connect with a wireless service of some type can be scanned and identified and linked to you if found on your person after an arrest. If you’re going to a protest, you’re going to protest. Not to scroll feeds or find epic mounts. Being uncomfortable with being bored is no reason to tag yourself like a migratory whale pod.

Don’t give up your entire identity at home

In your day-to-day life, more and more of your online identity is being added to your digital fingerprint. Platforms can predict, with astounding accuracy, what your next website visit will be. They can pick you out of a haystack of haystacks of users in seconds. Every cookie you accept, every permission you grant…they’ll be watching you.

Use a VPN on your home network. You don’t need to go so far as to tunnel to another country for your day to day use, but just adding one more layer of obfuscation helps. Obscurity is not security, but it’s better than nothing. Use secure communication when available. Set your browser to always use https, in example. Switch off of known problematic messaging apps like Discord to more secure options like Signal. Don’t use AI processing on anything. In fact, turn off AI everywhere you can. If you’re using Windows, [url-”https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-rip-out-copilot-from-windows-11/” target=”new”]uninstall and prevent CoPilot from reinstalling [/url](note - this can change on a whim and they are pushing CoPilot hard, so your best bet is to leave Windows or go back to Windows 10 and use a debloating tool). Switch your search engine to a non-AI backed search such as DuckDuck Go’s No AI service. Remove AI tools from your browser if you use Chrome or Chromium based browsers or Firefox. (Note, beginning with Firefox 148, a single kill switch will be introduced under Settings -> AI Controls -> Block AI Enhancements, but it has not rolled out globally at the time of this writing).

Don’t use social media to discuss your activities at protests. You can obviously be loud and proud about your views, but any insight into the inner workings of direct action will be use to subvert it. There is no virtue signalling in protest. There’s no reason to share intel with the enemy during an active war. Save your mementos in a safe, encrypted location. Once everyone swears they were always against all of this, which they will, feel free to make a wall of dissent. But during active operations, no need to identify locations, organization, or the faces of others for internet points.

Keep your systems secure. Self-hosting can be a great way to withdraw from the onslaught of platform rot, but it can also open you up to attacks. Automated attacks are becoming more sophisticated, or in the case of AI based attacks, more frequent to the point of overwhelming systems. Not smarter, just more waves crashing against the beach. Protect yourself by understanding edge security. Make sure your router is not compromised and is up to date on its firmware. Make sure to keep an eye on security bulletins for software you host and quickly update it if a confirmed security hole is disclosed. This is obviously for more technical folks, but anyone can learn how to lock down their home network in a couple of days worth of YouTube videos and old forum posts.

Stop using Spyware as a Service

The Superbowl ad for Ring really shook the tree in terms of the general public’s understanding of just how perverse and pervasive private spying has become. Convenience has, for at least the last two decades, come at the cost of security. We hand over our details willingly to save a few steps while logging in or to scream into our personal void and have it play back our favorite comfort songs. Ditching digital servants is a minor inconvenience that feels like oppression to so many who are now used to the ease of it all. I promise, it’s really not that hard to pick a playlist by hand. Drop digital assistants from your phone. Doubly so if they’re AI-backed. Get rid of Echos and Smart Speakers and cloud-connected doorbell cameras and app-based light managers and all that BS. You can find replacements that leave all of your data in your personal network for nearly everything. So if you really need the convenience or are in a position where you need these things for accessibility, there are options. Home Assistant is a robust, multi-protocol service which can be locked down, but still control your existing closed-source hardware, in example.

Don’t use sign-in aggregators when you can avoid it. “Sign in with Google” sure feels like a convenient wonder. But what it really is is a single point of access for anyone who is able to get your Google device from you. Like the cops or TSA (cops) or ICE (somehow even more cop cops). Instead, consider an encrypted password manager with a strong master password (not biometric!) and individual site password. Avoid saving the password manager backups on cloud storage and instead, sync them to a folder on your network or an external endpoint you control. Again, passwords are protected by the 4th amendment. Your fingerprint is not.

Stop sharing videos with tracking data. YouTube, TikTok (dear god, stop using this garbage), and many other video hosting sites have a share button that tracks you and then tracks further shares by others who are NOT you. Strip your URLs before sharing them. Use only the required query string data (example - on YouTube, shares usually include an si=(code) element. When you share, remove everything except for the required video ID. When using the fully qualified www.youtube.com, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first ampersand. When using a shortened youtu.be link, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first question mark.
Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g&si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g?si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Become

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g

respectively.

Don’t use photo filter apps, AI enhancement apps, or anything that requires personal data to produce some social token. “It’s fun, everyone’s doing it and I want to see mine!” Nobody is going to care about this shit in a week. Remember BitStrip avatars? Garbage, prepackaged flash art that was reassembled after you handed over the keys to your personal profile? Nobody actually liked anyone else’s but their own. Which means nobody actually liked them. You’d give them enough info to fake a MasterCard support call and get the most dated, ugly garbage to hang on your digital sash. Stop.

The future of capitalism and the future of humanity cannot coexist. We’re living in that tumultuous between-time, when neither side has laid full claim to the next stage of development and both sides are still under the illusion of a false pact. The average person still thinks technology is a service, not a siphon. The average CEO still thinks that there is more wealth to be pumped from a dry populace. One side will crack and separating your affairs now will do nothing but benefit you, regardless of how the whole thing shakes out. Services are built to incubate product. YOU are the product. Your data. Your eyes. Your time. They sell your own atrophied ability back to you in a neatly packaged, completely standardized, wholly unowned-by-you way. Put up as many roadblocks to them getting all of you for nothing as you can.

Some other videos and resources I’ve enjoyed (GDPR protected. Click Play Video to view):

I’m going to make a bold statement.
Leaving Microsoft and Apple is fighting fascism.
See? It’s bold!

In a landscape where both companies are selling out their own employees and customers for a speculation bubble around a wrong answer machine nobody asked for, anything you can do to reduce their grip on the world desktop market is - true facts - a strategy against the regime they fund. Both companies have been openly complicit in, and have directly financially benefited from the Trump administration. Benefited in a way that robs the public chest and in a way that funnels more money from their own customer base up the chain without providing any meaningful goods or services in kind. Hell, Tim Cook got a personal gold sticker from Das Uberstench. And both companies have funneled millions of dollars into his pocket in return. Both in direct contributions, indirect ones via PACs, and by laying the groundwork for theft from the masses on a scale that would have been unimaginable, even by the most mad king, a decade ago. AI is a global grift that is going to kill us all, not because the actual product is dangerous. It is dangerous. But the real danger lies in the speculation capitalist vultures…sorry, vulture capitalists…who carve its name into the heads of the spears with which they plan on hunting us. This is a fire sale. Everyone must go. Leave your belongings. Your offerings. To the gods of industry. They have always wanted to wring all of the money out of the fabric of society and they finally have the proper snake oil to oil the snakes of a totalitarian, dementia-addled Polyp Pot. CoPilot needs you to forget how to open an e-mail so it can justify speculation on compute and DC expansion. Apple will do anything to keep you in their garden of antitrust nightmares and hardware rental disguised as ownership, up to and including literally sabotaging your devices in updates. Google wants to suck every ounce of tracking data from you and everyone who looks like you to feed you, the product, the slop their real customers pay them to feed you. There is no publicly traded company that is your friend. To them, we are all prey. On the gaming side of things, the world is not much brighter. Ignoring Xbox, something the world has been trying to do since the Xbox One, Sony and Nintendo also both wish you’d just die and will them your estate. Nintendo takes every opportunity to raise prices and blame anything but their own profit graphs. They sit on a mountain of patents like a dragon, using their brigade of willing acolytes as shields for any critique. Sony kills support for anything that doesn’t turn an instant quarterly profit with little fanfare. Concord, their much hyped copy-of-a-copy Multiplicity clone of Overwatch lasted from August 23, 2024 to October of the same year; the announcement it was being cancelled coming only 10 days after launch.

Removing ownership has deep roots in fascist ideals. The idea that every single aspect of your life is run by landlords, including your entertainment, is just a small tool in a large toolbox of implements to keep the masses docile and indentured. But all normalization is a win for people who feed on the work of the world through dumb luck or birthright. People will defend their hobbies to, in some cases literally, the death and will take up arms in the name of boots if you mention they’re on their necks. Again, this is all by design. Tribalism is the fire that lights the muskets and sunk cost is the black powder within them. Just go online and say a bad word about Elden Ring or Zelda and see how fast you get your digital teeth kicked in by die-hard dickweeds who spend more time falling on swords in real life than wielding them in fantasy ones.

So, if you love games and hate fascism, what are you to do? Give up your hobby and become an angry person with no outlet? I mean, that’s always an option. Trust me, being a curmudgeon has its advantages. But there are alternatives. A great option, which I will surely write about in the future but that deserves its own, dedicated post, is retro gaming. There are more great games from the past you haven’t yet played than you could get to in ten lifetimes. Another is theft. And while I have zero issue with Triracy, it’s also a piece that really needs a longer deconstruction than is allowed in this post. This post is about gaming on Linux.

Linux has not had the best reputation when it comes to gaming. It has powered the OS for a number of consoles, but up until the summer of 2018, Linux gaming was mostly relegated to emulation, manually ported open-source games and a handful of dedicated releases. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) existed and was useful for a handful of light weight games as well as productivity software, but for the most part if you wanted to game on Linux, you had to get source code and recompile or hope that the game developer decided to do it themselves. But in August of 2018, Proton - a joint venture between Valve and CodeWeavers - was released. Without getting too far into the weeds, Proton is a compatibility layer that diverts Win32 and Win64 calls to Linux equivalents and hosts linked libraries to process anything that doesn’t have native Linux support. Windows runs on the X86_64 platform and code assembled to that instruction set can run natively, provided the functions hosted outside of the application are available to it. Proton brokers all of this in a mostly seamless way, allowing Windows-compiled code to run without overhead under Linux. Proton uses the previous work of WINE to host DirectX, Vulkan, Open-GL, and other game-critical libraries. What this means is, nearly every game which doesn’t require kernel-level anti-cheat can be run on Linux at roughly the same (or sometimes greater) framerates as on Windows. The project is opensource, so you don’t even need Steam to run it. But Steam does work great, as well.

The Good

As mentioned, Steam is a great way to play games on Linux. Everything is mostly handled for you. You can purchase nearly every Windows-compatible game and it should run just fine on Linux with nothing but a click of the Play button. You are, of course, still beholden to Steam at this point. And to be honest, Valve is not your friend either. It’s another corporation. The only difference is, Valve has a scoped purpose and seems to be less driven to take all of your money. Just most of it.

You can, however, use their launcher without buying anything and run games through it downloaded from other sources. Itch.io, GoG (now under less evil management), or even - GASP! - CD-ROM! Additionally, there are a number of very nice, very curated launchers out there. Heroic, Lutris, Hydra, Cartriges…the list is long and full of terrors. A decent rundown can be found here. Heroic is my launcher of choice. It provides hosting for stores such as GoG and Epic, allowing you to directly install your games from the stores without downloading offline installers. The larger launchers also generally include database scraping for cover art, descriptions, and settings, allowing a curated list of games without having to manually launch each one, providing a more console-like experience.

Performance can go either way, but in general, my experience has been better framerates - likely owing to more overhead and fewer spyware processes running.

The Bad

Not all games run as easily as ‘just click Play.’ A number of GoG games, in example, require manually adding symbolic links to older libraries for audio. Some games don’t correctly implement their resolution and you end up with incorrectly scaled, hard to read experiences until you can find the right settings. The Desktop Environment you use (or don’t use) can also have a massive impact on your ability to launch games at the correct resolution the first time. Gnome, in example, generally creates a secondary desktop space and includes this in the desktop canvas sizing response to software. So many games on Gnome will show the native resolution as doubled over the actual native resolution. Window managers and compositors such as Hyprland (possibly made by a neo nazi) have less overhead and provide a better dedicated game experience, but sacrifice usability and desktop functionality for Swordfish-style tiling windows.

Configuration can be a pain with older games, as well. Games that utilize 32bit PhysX calls, in example, require extra install steps and configurations to get the full benefit of a card which supports them. Driver support is hit or miss, with native drivers generally offering the most performance, but less support from the manufacturers than the community gives the open source drivers. Nvidia can be trickier than AMD simply because Valve (again, the very sung hero of Linux gaming) uses AMD in their handheld console, the Steam Deck, and therefor has much more quality control for AMD based gaming. Nvidia generally works, but some games are more fussy about it than others. Controllers can be a mixed bag as the big players are well supported, but some X-Input controllers that work a treat on Windows will have incorrect mapping or bad support on Linux.

Overall, the difficult stuff is usually a quick web search away, but you’ll do better to search old forums or Reddit as live interaction with the Linux community is pretty toxic (another post on the ‘to do’ pile). Once you start getting a feel for how it all threads together, though, you’ll be able to self-serve most issues when they do crop up.

The Fugly

Some games just will not work on Linux. Period. This goes for some productivity software as well. Adobe, being a huge culprit of the latter. This is a sacrifice, or a dual boot setup, you’ll have to make to get out from under Microsoft for gaming. Games from Riot, in example, use Valorant anti-cheat software. This is kernel-mode anti-cheat, akin to a root kit. Frankly, for me, this is a dealbreaker anyway. I don’t want kernel mode code that is not part of the OS doing kernel mode shit. But this does cut out some heavy hitters like League of Legends. And unfortunately, there are no options unless Riot games decides to release a Linux-specific build of these games. I wanted to play Project L (presently 2KXO, which is a stupid name for stupid reasons), but am unable to thanks to this incredibly invasive anti-cheat. I didn’t even want to play it multiplayer apart from couch matches, but it doesn’t matter if you plan on going online or not. The whole enchirito is off the table.

Conclusion

Since moving to Linux, I’ve actually been gaming quite a bit more. The reason is mostly because I’m thinking about it. On Windows, gaming is a given. But when moving to a new OS, it’s often on the forefront of thought to entertain the possibilities afforded you in the journey. It’s not all rainbows and kittens and that one rainbow kitten that might grant wishes, but you can never catch it. But it can be worth the trip just to know your hobby isn’t supporting IDF bombing of children, growing the power of a little dick’dtraitor, or giving your money to a company that Thinks Different by literally making 2026 like 1984 after swearing that’s the ONE thing they wouldn’t do. Your mileage will absolutely vary, as Linux is not a monolithic operating system. But switching does make the…WINE… a bit sweeter, none the less.

TL;DR: Go to https://exiftool.org to get the goods!

Did you know that a picture is worth a thousand words? Thanks to inflation, that’s closer to 33,000 words today. But good luck finding a buyer in this economy.

Photography, a French hobby from the early 19th century - you may have heard of it, has gone from a science afforded only by the elite to being so ubiquitous there are likely pictures of you picking your nose openly available on any of thousands of police surveillance systems installed across the world. What used to require special papers and chemicals and glass now requires a half second of attention from the danger rectangle nearly everyone carries. I don’t mean the ART of photography. That’s art. That’s the eye and composition of human wonder. The process of photography, though, is about as mundane as shoes or pizza parties in lieu of compensation or work-life balance.

In this procession to mundanity, a word worth at least 1/8th of a picture, the processes behind its majicks have been lost on the photographer. In the time of shared butthole rags in outhouses and oil being an annoyance to water diviners, photographers had to be chemists. They had to deposit opaque materials in solution on glass or treated paper. They had to know for how long each stage of development took based on the subject of the photograph. They had to set and enlarge and repeat from negatives. It was a meditative process as much as a scientific one. Today, we can simply double-press a button (poor people’s phones still have buttons. Apple folks probably just speak some incantation and do a little somatic gesture) to bring up an instant FotoMat booth in the palms of our hands.

That’s not to say the lay person knew the photographic process before digital cameras made it a New York rooftop party talking point. The commodification of photography moved processing to a central, abstracted location a century prior. So not thinking about anything but the shot itself has been, for the lifetime of anyone reading this, the norm. And that’s not a bad thing. Not every snap, candid, or interesting dog poo needs to be meticulously developed. Most are simply mementos or memory aids or embarrassment fodder to show to first dates. So when digital photography became something anyone could carry in their pocket, learning the inner workings was never on the list of things people wanted to do with it. Mostly they wanted to take photos of the food they were eating or their genitals. Sometimes both at the same time. What a beautiful world.

Digital imaging brings with it a host of advantages. Ease, access, instant…ness. And a digital file can carry more than just the image. But unlike a hastily snapped Polaroid of your grundle, the data isn’t limited to an unreadable date scrawled in sharpie or a quick description of the scene on the back of a print. The file’s data is normally completely invisible. Because it’s invisible, it’s also often out of mind. The average phone photog isn’t thinking of their precise location being associated with a picture as more than anything but a future convenience. If at all. They aren’t thinking about what data the app they are using adds to the photo - likely from a place of functionality on the part of the developers who made it. Metadata - the information stored in the file along side the stream of bits that make up the image - is extremely useful for quickly categorizing, grouping, searching, and filtering images. The type of data stored varies from camera to camera, from app to app. It can be edited and updated by your photo processing software. Every time the file is piped through something, it generally adds a little more. That seems great, right?

And usually it is pretty great. Especially during the creative process of editing or for organization of your collection. But what happens when you share that photo online? If you’re like me, nothing. It just sort of sits there and nobody likes it and you eat a Cadbury about it. But a couple decades ago, someone who gets paid to create giant buckets for categorizing people for targeted advertising realized that this was another metric they could use to do just that. And in service, applications and cameras began adding more data to that invisible catalog. Advertiser profiles can include information about where you’ve been based on your photo stream without ever having to ask you to enable GPS for their app. Analytical algorithms have made that a much bigger issue as they can start making connections between things at a rate humans can’t even comprehend. They can identify that a specific subject of photography lives at a precise location based on multiple photos with the same coordinates. They can use your editing software to determine if you’re open to subscriptions or if you’re a professional versus an amateur. Large language models can use the information to steal your style by creating a fingerprint that quickly munges all of your work into a bucket to be drawn from should some sad moron decide to fake you in particular. In a world of big data solutions, the free fuel your images provide to corporate data pools can and will be used against you. EXIF was created, like most things perverted through a scanner dimly by our current surveillance state, from a place of good intent. It was meant to do all the things it does that are useful. Like fire. Like leaded gasoline. Like asbestos. The thinking around something, particularly in computer science, generally stops when the goal of the usecase is met. The thinking of bad actors, however, does not.

“So what? They’ve already got my ad profile,” I don’t hear you say because I’m alone in a room with a keyboard right now. Yes, but we have crossed a threshold in recent years of draconian overreach by monitoring bodies. AdSense having a fingerprint of you may not matter right now. But if you say something the government doesn’t like? If you take a photo of an unrelated Waffle House plate while helping a loved one get to a state that allows healthcare? If you exercise your constitutional rights in a regime that illegally demands you do not? You’ve now outed yourself and who knows how many others. This isn’t a game of personal risk anymore. The computation behind these KKKeystone Kop tactics is enormous. And often wrong, but in ways that are never trivial. And digital forensics can create a pretty compelling case from metadata if they really want to place you and a photo taken by you together in front of a jury. When living becomes criminal, unfortunately, we must all “avoid getting caught” just existing. So it’s a good time to start using some tools that make the whole thing less of a free square for Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pals.

There are a number of options for editing or removing metadata on photos. Some editing software allows you to do it directly. But my preferred method is EXIFTool by Phil Harvey.

Not that Phil Harvey. But an equally British one. A Master of Nuclear Physics and avid birder, Mr. Harvey created EXIFTool. A fantastic, multiplatform tool that quickly removes the metadata tying your digital fingerprint to a photo. On the website for the tool, you can find a number of links to external resources concerning EXIF data as well as a full set of instructions for a number of different platforms and applications. I won’t rewrite the site here, but I do suggest clicking the previous link and giving it a read. And a download. There is zero reason to hand over identifying information to corporations who trade in you as a product. Nor to dictatorial governments, dying to kill. This is not, in any way, a means to subvert criminality. Risk is risk. But removing EXIF data DOES make directly linking you to a photo much harder. And moreover, it makes linking people who AREN’T you to YOU much harder. The relationships we don’t know we build in a digital world are uncountable. We connect with people by simply being in proximity under the covers of the global surveillance networks created under the lie of ’safety’ for the other thing. Being responsible with data is a social imperative as our individualistic facades are melted away and we are all made aware that we are fuel. Be a good neighbor and scrub your photos before sharing them.

There are a few caveats, but overall the benefit of removing EXIF data (something I’m still getting into the muscle memory of doing - there’s hypocrisy on this very blog) outweighs the minor inconveniences. Some applications use EXIF data to do rotation. That is, they will retain the image stream as unrotated and apply a rotation tag, honored by most viewing software. So removing the data may result in an image being in an incorrect orientation. For color-managed images, EXIF can contain color attributes which help them to be displayed correctly. All of this is surmountable, but with extra work on our part. A small price to pay, but something to be very aware of if you’re posting things quickly. The more you remove metadata from what you post, more dead ends you introduce to crawling algorithms trying to link every single atom of data to every single other one.