Well said. And I think there’s more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.

Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people’s will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it’s similar in German.

I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.

I was waiting for this! Debian is great. I used it for years. But IMO it’s not polished enough for normies. The website is fugly and the onboarding funnel assumes too much knowledge. The installer, last time I tried it, was glitchy and unintuitive. I think that techies underestimate how offputting even ostensibly minor issues like this will be to ordinary users. Also, Debian has a ton of unmaintained packages (altho I gather that something is being done about this). Debian is fundamentally amateur in the best and unfortunately worst senses. I think a Linux flagship distro needs to be more pro and systematically thought out. For that, it’s always going to help to have a big company or organization behind it.

Exactly. But I would go further. I think Linux needs flagship distros with big solid institutions behind them, and it needs us to support those distros by using them. I know this is not an popular opinion here.

I see those flagship distros precisely as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Well then you haven’t been following it closely. As someone else said, the reason is simple: the Snap version is more recent (like it or not) and in Ubuntu apt is configured to take into account Snap packages.

Exactly. Enough with the inane conspiracism.

Because not everyone wants to spend their time babysitting an OS and Ubuntu has a 20-year track record of dependability.

I keep making the incorrect assumption that everyone

Nicely concise description of bubble-dwelling.

“640k should be enough for anybody”

Absolutely fair.

Interested in the answer too! Of course, you could get the same result from a 5-buck VPS with zero maintenance and rock-solid reliability (my solution). But sure, 5 bucks is 5 bucks. And also, encryption is optional if it’s your own device.

No apologies needed, I thought you were quite civil. People have different opinions and I’m circumspect enough to see that my own views and values are just the mysterious product of my culture and conditioning, there’s not much absolute in right and wrong. Nice talking.

The military penal code however, does indeed have life imprisonment

Interesting. It figures. And Breivik will never be truly free, I get that. But in a sense his punishment is a lifetime of ostracism, which is pretty terrible for a human being. What’s more interesting to me is that almost nobody was clamoring for capital punishment in Norway as they surely would have been pretty much anywhere else.

On Hitler, yes of course I know I have an unconventional take. But I really think most people are not thinking straight. If you have a principle, you stick to it, you don’t drop it because “wow that one was so bad”. My principle is that it is not right to tie down a captive human being and forcibly snuff out their life. The abstract fact of what they did or didn’t do is completely immaterial. For me, capital punishment is a moral abomination of the first order. End of story.

Did you know that the Norwegian shooter (who killed a very large number of unarmed young people with an automatic weapon in 2011) is already 2/3 of the way thru his sentence?

This was my point. Americans didn’t understand this and still don’t. Cultures have different conceptions of what purpose is served by punishment.

Not at all. Of course, I’m not American so my starting point is not that people are locked up for years for the tiniest offense

So it does! OK so this is pretty close to a decent solution after all (the ideal one being IMO exactly the same thing but native to the OS). Thanks for the correction.

Yes true! Forgot about Obtainium. Personally I’m not much tempted because all it does is swap out F-Droid for Github (i.e. Microsoft) as the middleman. But I agree that it’s definitely a win for convenience.

PS: Turns out Obtainium is source-agnostic. Good news.

I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?

After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer’s compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the “web of trust” principle, which is why you can trust your bank’s website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?

As you and others have said, privacy is just much harder on mobile than on desktop. Mobile hardware and software is generally closed-source and locked down. On a tiny screen web apps are also at a genuine UX disadvantage to native apps, which offer much weaker privacy protection.

The pragmatic not-quite solution is to do roughly what you’re doing already. NB: maps are actually pretty easy - many people find that OsmAnd and Organic Maps are superior to the corporate options.

But the optimal solution is to move some of your computing back to desktop, i.e. probably to a laptop. This way you get more control over the hardware and software. And it’s already some kind of privacy win just because the thing is not in your pocket all day. It’s really not that hard and you might even find you appreciate the change! I did.

IMO the big sticking points are the messengers and transport tools - these are where you get genuine convenience from corporate spyware in your pocket. For all the rest, I’m not convinced, personally. For mapping and fitness etc, there are F-Droid apps which work great offline. For everything else including banking, just do it in your web browser while seated comfortably at home. As far as I know, no bank except Revolut insists that you use its app. If you want to do NFC payments, that may require a locked-down OS but not an app and it can be done in airplane mode (I do it regularly).

There are ways to get better privacy on mobile but nothing approaches the benefits of just using your mobile less and your laptop more.

Yup, messaging was the original killer app for mobile computing and nothing has changed. Just being able to arrange a rendezvous while out and about, hard to deny that this one was progress. Added to that are a couple of newer use cases like ride-hailing and payments (tho this latter doesn’t actually require a connection). But most applications are not better on a tiny screen on a street corner IMO, and the fact that several billion people seem to disagree is more explained by social media and addiction than anything else!

I’m not a luddite, I do actually have the thing in my pocket and use it too. But as you say, the point is balance and moderation.

Yes of course. But it requires a Pixel. A bit of a pact with the devil if you ask me.

GrapheneOS and LineageOS (I once used CyanogenMod) and Replicant and so on are great. But even better, I argue, is to migrate one’s computing back to the desktop. I know this is not a not a winning argument, I’m used to getting eyerolled when I suggest it, but my personal experience is that it’s not just feasible but better. So I’m sticking to my guns! But everyone should find their own path to privacy.