halm

halm, 8 months ago

Don’t worry, the joke is that the graph doesn’t have anything to do with popularity, it compares the OSes’ respective current versioning numbers 😉

halm, 8 months ago

“Self” … “Dost”?

Idk, that looks strikingly like a no-brand Freedom box, except there are no specs to judge by. Just some super iffy, nondescript sales pitch. “That’s it, yes indeed”!

halm, 8 months ago

If you want a little bit of hand holding to ease you into Arch, Endeavour OS is a pretty smooth distro that makes the install and configuration easier.

halm, 8 months ago

There is osalt.com, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as up to date as alternativeto.

halm, 8 months ago

I mean, neither of you is wrong. On user privacy, Apple is probably the least worst of the big providers. At the same time their business model is to lock in users to their platform and hardware. “Once you’ve gone Mac you’re not going back” is the result of a deliberate design choice on Apple’s part.

Sounds to me like OP is aiming to bypass the entire corporate cloud service mess by going self-sufficient via FLOSS?

halm, 9 months ago

The only thing that drives people is money.

Hundreds of thousand of unpaid open source contributors would have a word about that. In fact, millions of voluntary workers in other fields, too.

You’re right that companies contribute to open source as well, and that their motivations are probably self serving. Your conclusion doesn’t hold water, though.

halm, 9 months ago

Also: generosity, altruism, compassion, kindness, curiosity, exploration, principle, idealism, etc, etc.

IMHO, money is something that exists in the world and that I need to live. It’s a necessary evil, not a universal human driving force. And believe me, I’m neither rich or even financially afloat.

halm, 9 months ago

For more information please reread.

halm, 9 months ago

At least it used to be spelled with a k instead of c, so it looked like the name of an old Eastern bloc brand of tractor or something.

halm, 9 months ago

You’re supposed to pronounce it “May kill if”

halm, 9 months ago

I remember when I could install Friendika (yes, that long ago) on a low spec web host. Probably 15 years ago, and it didn’t last.

Like you say, it ought to be the easily self hosted alternative to Facebook. The one you could suggest to your non-techie relative as a Fediverse gateway. Yet after a couple decades of development, it’s still esoteric and awkward.

halm, 9 months ago

I’ve found that for me markdown is the very simplest, yet versatile way of typing out stuff quickly and regularly. And it’s not bound to any one software or platform, so I use Markor on my phone and Geany on my laptop.

halm, 9 months ago

It’s flattering that you think anybody knows what all of those acronyms actually stand for. I’m semi-certain of NASA, the rest could just be made up for all I know (as a non-native English speaker).

halm, 9 months ago

Wait till you hear about ghoti…

halm, 9 months ago

Justice for the colonists of LV-426! ✊

halm, 9 months ago

If you’re really only making phone calls, the built in location tracking is probably the biggest issue? AFAIK, you can only use an off the shelf iPhone with an Apple account, and a similar Android phone with a Google account, so your location will be tied to and referenced with those.

Apple have branded themselves as guardians of their users’ data, so many consider that a safe assurance. YMMV but it may be slightly better than Google’s Dodgier approach. When in doubt, go to settings and turn everything off you don’t use, location services foremost.

You may want to disable other apps that come with your phone as well. Basically anything you don’t use. I don’t know how much data can be harvested from background services of an app that doesn’t have a user signed in, but at this point I’d err on the side of caution. Plus, as you say, your position can always be approximated by your mobile carrier through the cell towers you’re connected to, but that goes for dumb phones as well.

Personally, I only use Android smartphones with custom ROMs like LineageOS without installing the Google apps or services framework because I Just Don’t Use Google. Instead I install microG to spoof the GSF to apps that require it. That’s a privacy compromise I can live with because I use my phone as an internet device as well. Needless to say I take privacy precautions on an app level as well.

halm, 9 months ago

2012 was 11 years ago, so out of curiosity: do you still have the same smartphone, and why are you still using one if it hasn’t improved your life?

halm, 9 months ago

Yup. And again, millions of iOS users take that as assurance of Apple’s trustworthiness. In this game, we all need to choose who we trust with our data 🤷

halm, 9 months ago

I’m not even going to ask when the last security update came out 🤣

halm, 9 months ago

Agreed. I have ageing hardware that I upgraded to its maximum 16GB RAM, and I manage to browse the web and do basic office work with that. The most memory intensive work I do beside browsing is in GIMP, and I simply set some sensible virtual memory for that to work.

Just use a light DE, or even scale back to only a WM. People insisting that KDE or Gnome are lightweight are exactly the same who claim that 32GB RAM is a minimum. Yeah, it is when even your desktop environment is bloated 🙄

If you’re a gamer and can afford the hardware upgrades to stay at the current bleeding edge, go ahead. I keep an old box alive and make it work instead.

halm, 9 months ago

And if the sentence feels sparse you can drop “which” in there wherever, because apparently it’s just filler now.

halm, 9 months ago

A bit late to the party, but especially for an older machine I’ll take Openbox any day. I still have some low range 2015 laptops running just fine where something like KDE would choke them up completely.