This was my point exactly. A VPN may just as well be used to spy on your traffic rather than secure it. And that’s why I’d be upset, personally: because I don’t trust brave or the company behind it.

But I think the main thing people are up in arms about is the fact that they didn’t ask for it. :)

To answer your original question: yes I do think people are genuinely upset with this.

If you take your office installation example, you’re installing a suite of applications. You’re not just installing excel, you’re installing the office suite so you’re bound to get all the applications in the suite.

Meanwhile, this would be like installing the office suite and getting a service installed along with it, that can monitor outgoing network traffic without them saying anything about it.

The main two reasons I’d be upset with this if I used brave was: They installed it without saying anything and It’s something that’s inherently a privacy and security risk. Even if brave themselves don’t do anything malicious with it, doesn’t mean that someone who’s found a potential exploit in the VPN service won’t.

Also just as an aside, I also absolutely despise “GeForce Experience” and there are ways to fetch the drivers as standalone packages without getting the telemetry spyware installed alongside them.

Sweet, here’s a quick explanation! RPM is a package management system (the thing that keep tracks of all your installed applications and their dependencies). Distros which use RPM are commonly bundled together as “RPM-based”. Examples include fedora, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux and openSUSE to name a few! :3

WM stands for window manager, it’s an application which only job is to keep track of all your application windows, their position on the screen and their state (minimized, open, etc.). Examples include i3wm (which is what I’m using), Kwin, mutter just to name a few!

DE stands for “Desktop Environment”, which is a bundle of a bunch of different applications. A DE comes with bundled with both a window manager, but also stuff like application launchers, notification handlers, toolbars, file browsers, etc. Some common ones are GNOME (which ships with mutter for window management), KDE (which comes with the Kwin window manager) and XFCE (which uses the xfwm4 WM).

When it comes to a base fedora install you can either install the regular fedora desktop (which comes with the GNOME desktop environment) or you can install one of their “spins” which is fedora but with other DE/WM choices. You can read more about that here: http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ You can also switch DE/WM after you’re done installing, too :)

So in short a DE is a pre-packaged solution which includes all the utilities and tools to make your experience more smooth and integrated, including a window manager. Meanwhile a WM is either bundled with a DE or installed standalone (like i3wm), and when it’s installed standalone it allows for a more customized and personalized workflow, where you as the user dictate which utilities you want to use.

I hope this cleared up some confusion! ^^ let me know if you have more questions, I love talking about this stuff! :3

Thanks! I’m really happy with it. We pretty much exclusively run rpm-based distros at work so I feel right at home. What DE/WM are you going for? ^^

So, I know this is an old post but I just want to say that this comment made me feel very valid. Thank you :)

It’s soo good!! I’m gonna buy more next time I go shopping, it’s so nice to have it at home for when you just can’t be bothered with dinner ^^

It’s tortellini! Pasta filled with mushrooms, covered in store bought “4 cheeses” flavoured pasta sauce. Quick and easy meal because I had a lot of work to catch up on in the evening.