If there’s one thing GrapheneOS is good at, it is calling people out.

Users cause issues. Programs cause issues. Connecting it to the internet causes issues. Having a computer causes issues. Better turn your laptop off and throw it on the garbage.

Oh well

It definitely takes time, and stable distros should exist. Wayland has been the clear choice moving forward for 7 years though. It feels like Mint & a few others are just stalling at this point.

Wayland: display server. The thing that shows the visual stuff on screen. Wayland=new and more features (features explained below). X11=old but stable and takes time to transition from without bugs.

HDR: high dynamic range. If you have a really nice TV or monitor, this gives you better color accuracy. Make sure you have good brightness levels with brightness cranked up, or it will counter intuitively look worse, like the brown filter PS3 era of video games.

VRR: variable refresh rate. When you run a game, some parts are harder to render than others due to increased detail and things happening in the screen. Thus, your frame rate will dip, making a noticeable jittery effect that is not smooth, especially if you have a high refresh rate monitor. My monitor refreshes 165 times per second to detect changes, and if the frame rate goes from 140 frames generated to 90, that is very noticeable. VRR syncs the refresh rate of your monitor to the GPU itself, so it knows exactly how many frames it will be getting. My monitor will refresh 90 times for that second that I got a frame drop instead of 165, which drastically decreases the jittery effect of the dropped frames. You can still kind of tell, but it is more smooth and responsive in terms of what is happening on screen.

Heterogeneous displays: monitors of different resolutions.

Fractional scaling: this allows you to set display zoom at different percentages on different monitors, as well as setting non-integer scaling (integer is 100% to 200%, non integer is 100% to 125%). This is important because 100% scaling is often too small on high resolutions, and 200% is comically large. Also for the multiple monitor scenario, most people have a new monitor and their old monitor as the secondary. For example, 4k will require 150% scaling at least to be readable st most screen sizes. 1080p will look too zoomed in at over 100%, and not match the look of the other monitor.

In summary, most of this is going to matter only if you are a gamer or watch HDR content like movies on your computer. Having matching monitors despite non matching resolutions is pretty nice though. But if you have matching monitors or 1 monitor it doesn’t matter either. Hence, Mint is not a good choice for a gaming or home theater situation, but its hyper focus on being stable makes everyone else like it more because they never do anything different unless it is for sure going to work. At this point though, most distros are using Wayland with no issues.

And Arch is for trans people. Damn, when will they make a distros that straight people can use? 😔

The fact that it exists might, even if uncommon. It was already in question for many developers due to the bad press and minimal effect on sales.

That being said, as someone who works in IT, please don’t use a hypervisor to run pirated software if you have absolutely anything important or of note on your computer. You shouldn’t even run your an admin account as your daily driver on Windows. MAYBE if you have a separate computer just for gaming and disconnect it from the internet. Maybe. There are other things to play or pirate though.

That would include not installing Nvidia drivers though, no?

I’m not Muslim, though I do have some general knowledge of their teachings. I don’t think that this is a topic that can be answered only with scripture, since it was not directly addressed. You pretty much covered the two schools of thought in the topic.

But consider this: Jesus (considered by most Muslims to be a prophet) says in Matthew 23:23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

You see, based on the above, my perspective is that if you are using (any) scripture to justify an action, you’re probably doing religion wrong. Personally, I agree with the Muslim idea that knowledge should not be hidden, I think it’s an important addendum to simply “not lying”. I don’t believe in intellectual property as a concept. But…someone or many someones did work for many hours on the end product.

Is paywalling, say, GTA V “hiding knowledge”? I believe in game preservation and all that, but ultimately, no, that’s a little silly to say. It’s a luxury. An extra thing we do for entertainment, not to better oneself. Is it WRONG to pirate? I don’t personally think so (I’m subscribed to the piracy sub) but it’s certainly suspect, and at the end of the day we shouldn’t be spending too much time on luxuries anyway.

Has the government banned an educational book, or perhaps it simply isn’t sold in your region? I would have a hard time condemning that from any perspective, and I think the author of the book in most cases would encourage you to pirate, because they want you to have the knowledge within.

There was a book I was reading about personal internet privacy, and within, he mentioned that many people pirated earlier versions of the book. The author said basically “I can’t stop you from pirating the book. Maybe you can’t afford it. Maybe you don’t trust the value without seeing it first. Just know that I am considering not updating a new edition because I am getting less and less sales. If it ever becomes not worth it, then resources like this will not exist.”

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. If you respect the work being done and want more of it, you should pay for it, if possible. If you want more things like that thing, you should pay for it. If you want to prevent further degeneration of art into lowest common denominator slop, you should pay for it.

There are times where pirating (or similar things like adblockers) may be more moral than not doing it. YouTube has a lot of important knowledge that should not be gate kept, but Google is a very immoral company, and so are companies that advertise heavily. Ad blocking is the moral thing, as well as the best from a privacy and security perspective, even the FBI recommends using them. So at the end of the day, it’s a complicated topic, but you should consider “what would Allah do in my situation?” If good people create something with their hard work, he would reward them. If it is avoiding association with bad people by pirating, or finding a way to bring knowledge and wisdom to the masses, maybe he’d pirate.

I dont think piracy is that bad, and I don’t have qualms about not giving money to mega corporations, especially for content that rarely makes them or the actual creators money years after release. But if you’re really worried about morality, the question should not be “is it THAT bad?”, it should be “what is the moral line of action in this situation?”

Interesting, are their really no other major differences than the container images? Have you ran into any additional hurdles with the atomic experience? You may have convinced me to try Bazzite or SecureBlue.

Do you want push notifications from your browser? If so, then probably. Unified Push is a trusted, commonly used alternative to Play Services push notifications.

It is technically fully community driven though. And if you moved it up you’d need more squares. No way in hell is it on the same level of corporate as Ubuntu, or especially Android.

There’s an argument that it would be between Fedora and Ubuntu, since being immutable makes it more locked down and you are beholden to the devs to push out important updates like drivers. Then again it is basicallt customized Fedora Atomic so if we’re counting “Fedora” as an average of all Fedora versions, maybe not

The problem with universal clients like that is that it inherently breaks encryption, shares it with a third party, and then MAYBE re-encrypts it correctly. And it does not prevent the third parties like Discord or whatnot from having access to your messages just because you run it through Beeper. It still goes through them. It’s not even particularly more convenient. You still have to create an account with the other provider, and often times this can only be done by downloading the app.

So there are a lot of downsides, and the only upside is not having as many apps installed, and I doubt you’re hurting THAT bad for storage.

It’s cool because online based chats have more features but are more susceptible to enshittification. A federated, online based, encrypted open standard like Matrix is the future.

Congrats! I know too many foreigners to get rid of WhatsApp. I try to count my blessings that it’s not WeChat or Facebook Messenger that inexplicably became popular worldwide.

Lol definitely not a bot. I’ve always been more of an Apple hater due to the ecosystem and business practices, but they’ve turned it around a lot in the 2020s. They’re still a trillion dollar company and not to be trusted, but yeah, they make great laptops.

I main Linux on my desktop and old laptops, like I mentioned. You can say ARM doesn’t belongin laptops but Apple has proven that’s not true. They outperform just about any chip, with battery life efficiency that is not even approachable by any other laptop chips. That’s just the facts. You can spend 3k for a laptop chip that is as good in performance as an M5 (which costs 1k), or you can get a Snapdragon chip that is almost as good as an M5 for efficiency, for over 1k. But not both. That’s where we’re at. Intel especially is asleep at the wheel. At least AMD is making good desktop CPUs still.

I’m also excited for RISC V, I’m considering getting one on an SBC to make a CyberDeck out of. It’s not come as far as ARM yet but it’s promising and we need an open standard.

It’s sort of a loaded question. Depends on threat model and what you’re trying to accomplish. Apple is frequently the “good enough… I guess” privacy and security choice, believe it or not, but heavily skewed towards security. And at the end of the day, iPhone privacy comes with an asterisk that Apple may keep others from spying at a mildly acceptable level, but Apple themselves will know a LOT about you. iMessage is E2EE (from iPhone to iPhone) but do you trust the trillion dollar company to not have a backdoor? I don’t, they’ve proven they scan content in messages.

You can mitigate privacy AND security concerns with GrapheneOS on Android. I do this and use JMP instead of Google Messages/RCS. This is the move on GrapheneOS, because Google Messages/RCS is not fully implemented, and hotfixes often break due to Google’s changes. You could also try a Linux phone, but usability has mixed reviews. These are the best options.

If that’s not an option, it’s almost better to just stick with iPhone, since other custom ROMs often have security tradeoffs in the name of privacy, and stock Android has HUGE privacy tradeoffs in the name of security.

So, assuming you are sticking with iPhone. iMessage is more secure than SMS, no doubt there. And since SMS security is not there, the privacy of the content of the messages are in question if it is intercepted. Although, these days, intercepting SMS usually require a targeted attack, and targeted attacks are almost always through social engineering. Note that iMessage will also use SMS if texting a non iPhone. But it is more common to go iPhone to iPhone vs using an app with XMPP to another app using XMPP, so in practice iMessage is more secure. Features are slightly better on iMessage. Sometimes I miss being able to edit my texts, not having them be split up into multiple messages, and group chat is slightly simpler (assuming everyone is on iMessage, if not it goes right back to the same functionality)

Are you worried about approximate location data from your mobile provider? If so, JMP is a great choice for that, since you can sign up for some carriers anonymously, and you won’t be using the phone number they provide to you. You can even get a data only Sim card. JMP almost entirely prevents SIM swaps. It’s harder for governments to pull your cellular location data and tie it to you, though they can get it from Apple depending on the situation and if they know to look specifically for you. Some websites scan your device info, which can include your SIM phone number. Even JMP itself, when I went to sign up, offered me numbers to choose from that were the same area code as my SIM card number. Only…I specifically picked an area code for a state I’ve never been to. So if you use that SIM number, many sites that will be able to tie it to your real name from public records or people search sites. Lastly, JMP can give you multiple numbers for half the price of the first, which can be pretty useful for dating new people you don’t trust yet, spam, restaurant wait lists, calling a company anonymously, selling stuff locally, etc.

Money wise it is about the same. JMP costs extra money on top of your separate SIM bill, but since you don’t care about your SIM number, you can constantly get new customer deals that usually last up to a year, and further obscures your cellular location history.

All of this assumes you have a factory unlocked phone. If it is locked to a big name carrier, it becomes harder to sign up anonymously. If you have a carrier locked phone, may as well stick with iMessage.

Tl;Dr: JMP is a fairly significant privacy boost at a slight security decrease and slight feature loss, but there’s a lot more to it.

A trusted streaming box without ads. It will stream far better and not monitor you.

I meant more if you have knowledge about something that wasn’t publicly known. This was 7 years ago and got btfo’d, hence the article about the firings you posted. Also everyone I know turns off Siri because it is useless.