halm

halm, 1 year ago

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

halm, 1 year 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, 1 year 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, 1 year ago

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

halm, 1 year 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, 1 year 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, 1 year 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.