I like getting updates and new features? My computer isn’t new by any means. But I tinker with stuff, sometimes bleeding edge technology. Other than that I don’t really care. Rolling release, Debian Stable… I’m fine as long as it does the job. And for half the stuff it doesn’t even matter. I can write a letter with a 5yo LibreOffice or answer mails with any version of the mail client. Just give me modern, up-to-date tools when developing software, and it doesn’t hurt if the slicer knows about my new 3d printer from this year.

I use LibreWolf on the computer and IronWolf on the phone. Both modified versions of Firefox, both Free Software. Not sure what they do with AI, but as they’re both aimed at privacy, I’d expect them to disable AI features which send data to external services.

Grok is tuned to view Elon Musk as its God, Lord and Saviour, source of truth… And deny the holocaust. So naturally it’d say things like this.

Edit: And grok.com doesn’t. It says it would NOT flip any switch to kill 16M innocent people. Maybe this is just the persona it assumes on X… If someone doesn’t like it, I’d recommend to quit X. Try Mastodon or Bluesky instead.

Even if this is the piracy community… I think this holds true in several aspects of life. Availability of information, Freedom of speech, political freedom, privacy… Unless we fight for freedom, it might just go away.

I don’t think it’s allowed to request or directly recommend or link to pirated content in this community. Can’t be too specific. See the rules in the sidebar.

Mostly I can’t be bothered, or Roblox won’t run, or some stereotypes about Linux being difficult.

Thanks! Learned something today. Last time I opened port 53 to the public it didn’t take long and I was sending out several Megabits per second in DNS traffic. Constantly. Mostly querying the same few things. But I guess I had it the wrong way round and that wasn’t the target. Or I’ve seen a different attack type… Guess I can now try again with the new knowledge.

Seems knot-dns has DNSSEC turned on per default. But what’s all the IP addresses in the config for, if not to offer recursive lookup? That enables an amplification attack. I think they’ll do lookups to put strain on other servers, not necessarily your zones.

By the way, when self-hosting open DNS resolvers, add some security measures and monitoring or your shiny new server will mostly deliver DNS amplification attacks to people after a few weeks. That seems to be missing in the config here.

Thanks. I still don’t get it. But I guess that’s alright.

Can someone explain the joke to me?

Yes. I mean for most stuff we probably don’t need a complicated debate on definitions. I think we could do it for most desktop apps without further questions, like a browser, instant messenger, camera app, video editor, games, 3d printer slicer… They could all just do it and also not get permissions on the entire home directory right away. And we also have the groundworks for it. Linux has cgroups, thread isolation… permissions to use the webcam. There’s just the stuff in the middle missing and then we can’t build on any programming interfaces with the desktop apps.

Did it solve these issues with delivering Matrix instant messenger notifications and emails right away? And what’s the internet browsing and occasional social media doomscrolling experience? I don’t think the Librem5 hardware is substantially faster than my Pinephone? So I suppose it’s similar to mine with a Firefox which is rudimentarily optimized for touch but then the 3GB of RAM and slow processor make it somewhat not nice to use? Can you listen to a podcast via standard bluetooth headphones and there’s still some juice in the battery after 90mins? I’d love to try it. Especially if they solved those annoying issues. But seems the PureOS Pinephone ports have all been abandoned a few years ago…

Yes, good job at explaining the app lifecycle. I brushed over it because I had no idea how to phrase it in a concise way. And it’s really the million papercuts that stopped me from using the Pinephone. I tried.

Connected standby is already somewhat possible […]

Yes, it’s a very crude way, though. In practice I never got the messages from my wife to bring milk on my way home. I’d read them a few hours later in the evening after unlocking and tinkering with the device. What worked well is tell people to send SMS or call, because that reliably wakes up the device. But then people forgot they were supposed to communicate with me like in the 1990s.

[…] sandboxing and permissions figured out pretty well with Flatpak […]

We do. That’s how some modern distros like Fedora Silverblue work. But then it’s somewhat problematic with phones. These packages are supposed to come directly from the various upstream projects. And then the phone distros can’t patch them any more to deal with the peculiarities with the inconsistent ecosystem. So we’d either need to have a good platform first and all agree on it, or repackage everything in a way unalike how Flatpak is done today. And then it fills up storage fast with all the runtimes and dependencies and a phone has limited storage available.

I think hardware wise, that leads us to re-invent the laptop. Not a phone by any means. We need a large SSD for all the Flatpaks, lots of RAM to keep the software running in the background and a large battery stapled to it because none of it is energy-efficient enough.

It ain’t easy… I think we’re making (slow) progress, though.

Phone quality on my Pinephone is nice except when it isn’t. We have a largely Free Software baseband running on the modem. You can tell it to run a high samplerate and it does VoIP and 4G. On the flipside it doesn’t always work and there were issues with additional stuff like echo cancellation, which then takes away from the experience. Openmoko was great as well. I think it was so very open, people could do silly things with the phone network. But then it’s old tech by now and the 2G (GSM) phone network is obsolete and they turned off the cell towers in most areas by now. And I think the software on it didn’t really translate to the phone generations after that. Afaik the entire software stack didn’t carry over and we’re using different dialers, messengers, calendars etc now.

Nice Thinkpad! I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on one of the more recent Thinkpads. But the other suggestions here are fine as well. Mind an older Laptop with a spinning harddisk inside might not be as snappy as a people expect these days.

And the software side of it is the really annoying part. We’re missing so many components: Connected standby, an app lifecycle management, maybe sandboxing and a detailed, user-facing permission system. And then we need to go ahead and rewrite all the important Linux software to use these (not yet existing) interfaces.

I own a Pinephone, and I feel the Linux phone is within reach since the Nokia 900 (and its predecessors) and that was in 2009, so 16 years now. I believe any effort is very welcome, though. We badly need a good and free operating systems for this important device we all carry around and use hundreds of times each day.

Not sure about the guides, but there are entire distributions specifically made for this: https://www.thinstation.org/

I’ve heard they have government-approved VPN providers. And companies there use VPNs for their job. They’ll also do business on platforms which are blocked on the regular Chinese internet. Of course business is guided by the communist party so you might have someone keeping an eye on your company VPN (mis)use. People who went there told me they’re more lenient with foreigners. Your European/American company’s corporate VPN might work well, you might also experience connections being dropped and the Great Firewall messing with it. And there are some attempts at circumventing blockage, like TOR’s Snowflake, though all of this is a cat and mouse game, some (illegal) thing works for a while and then they shut it down and you’ll move to the next one. Though as a citizen of an oppressive regime you’d better think twice before engaging in a cat and mouse game with authorities.

Didn’t they just release their Ryzen AI Software as a preview for Linux? I think that was a few days ago. I don’t know about the benchmarks as of today, but seems they’ve been working on drivers, power reporting, toolkit and have been mainlining stuff into the kernel so the situation improves.

I think CUDA (Nvidia) is still dominating the AI projects out there. The more widespread and in-use projects sometimes have backends for several ecosystems and they’ll run on Nvidia, AMD or Intel or a CPU. Same for the libraries which build the foundation. But not all of them. And most brand-new tech-demos I see, are written for Nvidia’s CUDA. And I’ll have to jump through some hoops to make it work on different hardware and sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s not optimized for anything but Nvidia hardware.