As a #Palestinian doctor living and working in #Israel, in the midst of a longstanding conflict, I learned during my studies and work that injustice has been done to many populations living here. The occupation and coercion that Israel exercises over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and the policy of discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel cause serious harm to the right to health of these populations. Control over territories, expulsion, dispossession, violence, restriction of movement, establishment of settlements and apartheid cause great suffering to the population, prevent access to medical care and directly affect their health.
I’m one of many Palestinian doctors in Israel. We’re being persecuted – but we won’t abandon our oath | Lina Qasem-Hassan
Lina Qasem-Hassan Wed 30 Jul 2025 08.00 EDT
As a #Palestinian doctor living and working in #Israel, in the midst of a longstanding conflict, I learned during my studies and work that injustice has been done to many populations living here. The occupation and coercion that Israel exercises over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and the policy of discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel cause serious harm to the right to health of these populations. Control over territories, expulsion, dispossession, violence, restriction of movement, establishment of settlements and apartheid cause great suffering to the population, prevent access to medical care and directly affect their health.
We’ve promised to provide equal care to all. Now we’re being punished for speaking out against the killing of medics and patients in Gaza, says Palestinian doctor Lina Qasem-Hassan
As a #Palestinian doctor living and working in #Israel, in the midst of a longstanding conflict, I learned during my studies and work that injustice has been done to many populations living here. The occupation and coercion that Israel exercises over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and the policy of discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel cause serious harm to the right to health of these populations. Control over territories, expulsion, dispossession, violence, restriction of movement, establishment of settlements and apartheid cause great suffering to the population, prevent access to medical care and directly affect their health.
I’m one of many Palestinian doctors in Israel. We’re being persecuted – but we won’t abandon our oath | Lina Qasem-Hassan
Lina Qasem-Hassan Wed 30 Jul 2025 08.00 EDT
As a #Palestinian doctor living and working in #Israel, in the midst of a longstanding conflict, I learned during my studies and work that injustice has been done to many populations living here. The occupation and coercion that Israel exercises over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and the policy of discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel cause serious harm to the right to health of these populations. Control over territories, expulsion, dispossession, violence, restriction of movement, establishment of settlements and apartheid cause great suffering to the population, prevent access to medical care and directly affect their health.
We’ve promised to provide equal care to all. Now we’re being punished for speaking out against the killing of medics and patients in Gaza, says Palestinian doctor Lina Qasem-Hassan
As a #Palestinian doctor living and working in #Israel, in the midst of a longstanding conflict, I learned during my studies and work that injustice has been done to many populations living here. The occupation and coercion that Israel exercises over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and the policy of discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel cause serious harm to the right to health of these populations. Control over territories, expulsion, dispossession, violence, restriction of movement, establishment of settlements and apartheid cause great suffering to the population, prevent access to medical care and directly affect their health.
We’ve promised to provide equal care to all. Now we’re being punished for speaking out against the killing of medics and patients in Gaza, says Palestinian doctor Lina Qasem-Hassan
No ceasefire will erase the smell of blood that clings to our memories. No ceasefire can bring back those we have lost. No one can compensate the orphans or widows. No one can delete the massacres, the death traps disguised as aid centers. No one can erase the images of bodies in pieces, of blood soaked into the floor, of children crushed beneath rubble, of injured and amputated people, of infants and fetuses killed in their mothers’ wombs, of starved people suffering from malnutrition. No one can make us forget the taste of nothing during starvation and the feeling of helplessness in front of seeing our futures destroyed.
Will Gaza Ever Know a Real Ceasefire, or Just a Pause Before the Next Bomb?
Huda Skaik July 30 2025, 7:00 a.m.
No ceasefire will erase the smell of blood that clings to our memories. No ceasefire can bring back those we have lost. No one can compensate the orphans or widows. No one can delete the massacres, the death traps disguised as aid centers. No one can erase the images of bodies in pieces, of blood soaked into the floor, of children crushed beneath rubble, of injured and amputated people, of infants and fetuses killed in their mothers’ wombs, of starved people suffering from malnutrition. No one can make us forget the taste of nothing during starvation and the feeling of helplessness in front of seeing our futures destroyed.
Israel (supported by Western powers and vassals) will never stop because the motivation behind it is lebensraum plus VC investment, and they're all amoral sociopaths. Would chattel slavery have ended in the US by just asking nicely? Or because the WASP man developed a conscience, randomly?
All this "Palestinian recognition" is just wind, lies and spin for internal optics, so people quiet down about the genocide for a second while they 'get the job done'.
No ceasefire will erase the smell of blood that clings to our memories. No ceasefire can bring back those we have lost. No one can compensate the orphans or widows. No one can delete the massacres, the death traps disguised as aid centers. No one can erase the images of bodies in pieces, of blood soaked into the floor, of children crushed beneath rubble, of injured and amputated people, of infants and fetuses killed in their mothers’ wombs, of starved people suffering from malnutrition. No one can make us forget the taste of nothing during starvation and the feeling of helplessness in front of seeing our futures destroyed.
On 9 July, Austrian parliamentarians passed a highly controversial bill legalising the deployment of state-sponsored spyware, known as the Federal Trojan (Bundestrojaner), to enable the interception of encrypted communications.
The Bundestrojaner bill would give law enforcement agencies the power to install malware on private devices (such as smartphones or laptops) to monitor encrypted messaging applications.
It would do so by amending several laws, including: the State Security and Intelligence Service Act; the Security Police Act; the Telecommunications Act;the Federal Administrative Court Act; and the Judges’ and Public Prosecutors’ Service Act.
The plan sparked widespread concern among privacy advocates, cybersecurity experts, and numerous civil society organisations.
The day before the vote more than 50 organisations, including Statewatch, wrote to legislators.
A joint letter (pdf) called on them to “vote against this dangerous instrument of state surveillance and against a historic step backwards for IT security in the information society.”
Legislators in Austria’s lower parliamentary house, the National Council, voted in favour of the bill, 105 to 71.
The interior minister Gerhard Karner, described it as a “special day for security.” Support for the bill came from the governing parties – the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), and most members of the liberal NEOS party.
Two NEOS MPs, Stephanie Krisper and Nikolaus Scherak, broke ranks to vote against the measure, alongside the Greens and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ).
On 17 July, the Federal Council – the upper house of the legislature – voted by 40 to 19 not to object to the bill, completing the parliamentary process.
The bill now awaits unanimous approval from the governments of Austria’s nine states before it can become, a constitutional requirement triggered by the inclusion of certain provisions on the administrative judiciary.
Nevertheless, opposition parties and civil society organisations have said they will file legal challenges against the measures.
Government officials insist that the spyware will be restricted to targeting messaging apps and that broader system-wide searches will not be permitted.
However, technical experts have repeatedly warned that such limitations are practically unenforceable in real-world applications.
Spyware with the capability to intercept encrypted communications inevitably provides access to a wide array of personal information stored on the device, including photos, files, emails, contacts, and location data.
Critics note that this effectively bypasses all existing security protections, raising serious questions about the proportionality, necessity, and legality of such intrusive surveillance powers.
The current legislation includes some procedural safeguards, in an attempt to respond to critiques of previous state trojan proposals.
These include an extension of the review period for the Legal Protection Commissioner (from two weeks to three months), and transferring the authority to approve spyware deployment from a single judge to a panel of judges at the Federal Administrative Court.
However, the Legal Protection Commissioner is part of the Ministry of the Interior – the very same ministry that authorises and deploys the spyware – raising significant concerns about impartiality and conflicts of interest.
Furthermore, the intelligence agencies themselves conduct the mandatory trustworthiness assessments for the Commissioner and their deputies, further undermining the potential for effective and independent scrutiny of surveillance activities.
The bill was approved in the National Council despite extensive opposition from a broad range of civil society groups, professional bodies, and public institutions – including bar associations, universities, municipalities, press freedom advocates, and medical organisations.
Following the vote, civil society organisations describing the law as institutionalising state hacking by deliberately exploiting software vulnerabilities.
In a joint statement, they said that the government should be working to close these gaps to protect citizens from cyber threats.
The Bundestrojaner has a long and contentious legislative history in Austria. Initial attempts to introduce similar surveillance powers date back to 2016, but they were repeatedly rejected or delayed due to sustained criticism and concerns about privacy violations.
In 2019, Austria’s constitutional court struck down an earlier version of the law, ruling that surveillance of encrypted communications constituted a serious breach of fundamental privacy rights protected under the constitution.
Austria is set to legalise the use of highly-intrusive spyware by state authorities. The government has justified the law in the name of monitoring encrypted messaging applications.
This doesn't help with the type of exploits they're talking about (eg; Pegasus). Those gain access to your device itself, thus giving access to all apps on your device.
And just like that Austrian citizens will be the target of every hacker group on the world as the state malware will be a weak link in every device's security layers and once they crack it, they'll have deep access to thousands or maybe even millions of people's devices depending on ho w broadly police decide to deploy it (likely on every device of every person who is arrested, detained, or has any contact with police for any reason like perhaps just visiting prisoners or entering government buildings to renew a passport.)
deep access to thousands or maybe even millions of people's devices depending on ho w broadly police decide to deploy it
Maybe read the article before you post?
I get it, germans have tried to get Bundestrojaner through again and again, only to have explained why it's a bad idea. But still, it's not about mass surveillance.
I'm going with how police work currently in the US as a baseline. In the US, many jurisdictions require that you surrender your phone as a blanket policy, and if you refuse to unlock it, many have software to hack it. This has been determined generally to be legal as simply being detained or entering restricted areas is considered probable cause for a search, just like a physical search of your person or purse or whatever is legal.
Assuming Austria does something similar and now they additionally can install illicit malware, I think they absolutely will as a blanket policy.
Unfortunately, it has become the norm in the UK and much of the EU as well. I don't know Austria well, but ive heard it has a strong right-wing leaning in the police force, like most. Police will always prefer control due to the nature of the job and humans will always prefer easy solutions to their goals.
sounds like it's not supposed to be a general use tool, but instead for counterintelligence only:
The Ministry of the Interior anticipates submitting around 30 requests per year for the surveillance of unencrypted messages and between 5 to 15 requests for encrypted communications. If there are 30 instances of encrypted message monitoring within a single calendar year, the Interior Minister is obligated to inform a permanent subcommittee of the National Council, which is the directly elected chamber of the Austrian Parliament.
Each surveillance method will require case-by-case approval from the Federal Administrative Court. The process involves a legal protection officer from the Ministry of the Interior, who will have three business days to respond to any request. Following that, a panel of three judges from the Federal Administrative Court will review the case. In urgent situations, an individual judge may grant approval, supported by a 24-hour judicial service system.
If you have Windows, they can absolutely coordinate with Microsoft for stealth installs. If you’re using Linux, it’ll be a little tougher, but not impossible. Your processor (and probably bios) have government backdoors built in.
Really your best defense is them not caring enough to monitor you at that level. If you’re a target for surveillance by an intelligence agency, there’s absolutely nothing you can do.
The interior minister Gerhard Karner, described it as a “special day for security.”
This might be a Hollywood association with German accent, but feels like a really ominous quote. Like that sadistic guy in round eyeglasses in the Indiana Jones movie.
Been using the CLI more and more and for whatever reason it gives me more dopamine than using apps with a GUI and I'm curious about what else is out there since I was a windows user til 6 months ago.
Discovering ish and the ability to use alpine linux on my iphone, also has me curious if there is anything useful/fun out there that isn't openssh, ranger, and ffmpeg. (a-shell is still updated and comes with those two by default but doesn't have access to alpine repo and apk, uses its own iphone based thing) Tho im curious about cli tools/apps in general to use on my pc or over ssh, not just those that could be installed on my phone
I mostly use ffmpeg to convert video and compress stuff for size limits (so I can convert before sftp when away from my pc after the render finishes) Ranger file manager on phone since it can easily exit at a path, and yazi with the shell script that lets it exit at whatever path your on on pc.
Will update this list as people comment. - Conversion/Compression: ffmpeg - Email: mutt, neomut - File management: mc, nnn, ranger, yazi, sfm - File editor: vim, neovim - Git: lazygit - Piracy: ani-cli (anime) rip (music) - Pdf Management: pdftk (pdftk-idk, or stapler) - Python: rich, pythondialog, textual - Docker management : lazydocker - Performance monitor: btop, nvtop (nvidia), ncdu (disk usage) - Network management: nmtui - Web browser : browsh (firefox backend) - Video downloader: yt-dlp - Shell scripts: dialog, whiptail - Misc: netpbm (plaintext image creation) If you can't comment this post seems to be bugged for me at least, says I've deleted it and I can't reply to anyone.
inotify-tools has command-line utilities that can be used in a Bash script or a Bash one-liner to make arbitrary things "happen" when something "happens" to a file or directory. (Then the file is opened or written to or renamed or whatever.)
I probably should mention rsync. It's like a swiss army knife for copying files from one place to another. And it supports "keeping files syncronized" between two locations.
Of course, there's tons of stuff that you pretty much can't talk about Bash scripting without mentioning. Sed, awk, grep, find, etc.
Also, I totally relate about the terminal giving more dopamine. I kinda just hate going on a point-and-click adventure to do things like image editing or whatever. To the point that I've written a whole-ass domain-specific-language to do what I want rather than use Gimp. (And I'm working on another whole-ass domain-specific-language to do a traditionally-GUI-app sort of task.)
A bunch of GNU tools have added JSON output and it's so good. Like, GNU column can take tabular data and convert it into JSON really easily. It's like the perfect text stream.
You can save tons of time by adding aliases to your .gitconfig such as 'ga $fname' (where "fname" would be files you want to add) the alias for git add. You can also do the same thing with gc, gs, etc and if youre like me and you write dozens of lines of code a day, it can save you a lot of time.
helix . modal text editor similar to vim, but with less configuration required
Not only less configuration required, but also semantic navigation (jump around the AST directly with simple keybindings). I can't use a code editor without it now.
semantic navigation (jump around the AST directly with simple keybindings).
just searched up abstract syntax tree in helix, and i learned about syntax aware motions. how had i never heard of them before? they look very useful! thanks for mentioning that
Well, seeing them in the list like that rubs me the wrong way. 😅
Both of those come with a CLI, called git and docker respectively, which is the official way of using them. These CLIs might not be particularly sexy, depending on who you ask, but they're decent enough and worth learning, even if you go the lazy* route, since online resources all just explain the official CLIs and you might find yourself one day administering remote systems where you can't install additional software...
I rely on cli tools for a lot of things too. Here's a list:
tmux: terminal multiplexer zsh (with fzf zsh completion): shell fzf: fuzzy finder doas: sudo replacement bat: cat replacement fd: find replacement advcpmv: cp/mv replacement eza: ls replacement zenith: htop replacement trash-cli: trash management neomutt: email client (notmuch is a most recommended addition) neovim (and plugins): text/code editor buku: internet bookmarks manager tut: mastodon client ucollage: image viewer udevil: (un)mounting removable devices and networks without a password magic-tape: youtube search/download and more rofi: used with scripts to do a lot of things pass: password manager yazi: file explorer iwd: wireless manager khal: calendar and webdav sync with vdirsyncer taskjuggler: complete task manager newsboat: feed aggregator fwupd: firmware updater chawan: web browser ncmpcpp: mpd-client duf: disk usage abook: contacts manager
I have some of them detailed here. This GitHub also has a long list.
Feel free to tell them why and help fill us in on whats better lol, im sure no one minds finding better, or is it because youd rather use an app or website?
If you aren't aware, pbm represents an image with plaintext, which makes it great for when you want to easily create an image with code
I recently learned there is a whole suite of CLI tools which work with the format. Like conversion to/from png, scaling, and overlaying one image on top of another.
Good old nano is something i use a lot, although i am considering finally giving micro a try, heard a lot of good things about it, and i want something with a bit more features in the terminal, but i really hate vim keybinds. I also really like rmpc, which is an mpd client with album art support, though i am not using it anymore at the moment because i realized mpd wasn't really what i was looking for when it comes to music players.
Edit: also want to mention cyanrip. Really good cli cd ripper with a lot sane defaults, easy to use, and in terms of accuracy probably the closest thing to EAC on windows.
s-tui is also great. It's a tui stress testing utility. I still use it every now and then even if it's just to test if my fan curve is actually working by putting some load on the cpu.
I prefer dua over ncdu, specially when called interactively (dua i), since you can explore the results in parallel before it finishes scanning, while it updates asynchronously.
Oh boy. This is a rabbit hole which, once you fall into, there's no coming back out.
There is a world of terminal software. You can, quite reasonably, get entirely rid of X (and Wayland) and live in the console. Honestly, the reason I don't is only because there is no fully competent terminal web browser (although there are some quite good ones), and because anything having to do with graphics like photo management, or vector graphics drawing, is really where GUIs are useful. But for everything else, terminal clients are almost always superior.
Choosing a good terminal emulator is important, and the best one right now is Rio. It's fast, smaller memory footprint, and less CPU use than Wezterm or Kitty, and it supports ligatures, iTerm, and SIXEL graphics.
In that goes tmux, because it works over ssh and having consistent everywhere is handy, because it survives terminal and window manager crashes, and because you can open multiple clients in different windows on the same tmux session.
In that runs zsh, because it's the best shell. It's backwards-compatible to bash, but has a ton of extra features.
I'm conservative about replacing standard POSIX tools with new fad tools, because grep is literally everywhere (even BusyBox) and new things usually aren't; but ripgrep and fd are such nice improvements over grep and find I've been unable to resist. Helix is currently the best text editor. However, having a good familiarity with grep, find, and vi is IMHO critical, because they're the foundations.
My media player is ostui, which is an ncurses SubSonic client with synced lyrics and cover art support. I use catnip for visualization, because it uses less memory and CPU than cava. For task management I use a bespoke script (tdp) that use fzf with todo.txt files. I use gotop for system monitoring.
I try to use chawan for terminal web browsing, and it does do CSS layout better than most, and supports sixel image rendering, but it's often a chore so I mostly browse in Luakit, which is a GUI program.
rook is my secret service tool that uses a KeePassXC DB as the backing store, and provides credentials to everything that needs them.
vdirsyncer syncs my calendar and contracts to a VPS, and thence to my phone
mbsync syncs all of my email from my IMAP server, and I use notmuch to index and tag it
khard is a terminal address book that uses standard vcard directories
lbb is a super-fast address book search tool which also works on vcard directories
khal is a TUI calendar app, which works with vcal directories
aerc, which someone else mentioned, is a fantastic TUI email client that can use notmuch.
tasker is what I use for scheduled cron control; it uses standard crontab files.
devmon and udevil handle automounts of USB media
mosh is a UDP-based ssh, with interruptable sessions and network resilience
mpdris2-rs is the agent I use to hook up various media control tooling to ostui (which supports the mpris protocol) and other players - mpris is a sort of standardized glue for media players.
gomuks is an excellent TUI for Matrix
weechat is a TUI for IRC. I prefer gomuk's interface, but you can get a Matrix plugin for weechat if you want to use only one. I find I often have to restart weechat because otherwise it end up eating all of the memory; there's a memory leak, or something in it.
syncthing-daemon for syncing between almost everything
restic for backups
dinit handles all of my user task management, because systemd is fucking broken for user tasks. dinit is a better init system.
Almost every application I use is a cli or TUI client. The exceptions are the web browser, for reasons I've explained; Jami, which doesn't have a CLI client; Factorio, which is a game; and darktable for photo management. I'll also occasionally open Gimp or Inkscape for graphics, vlc for movies (which I could probably watch in the terminal, now that I think of it), and I usually view PDFs in a GUI client such as mupdf.
My philosophy on software is to use standards wherever possible. I avoid programs that insist on using their own DBs when there's a perfectly good standard, such as ics, maildir, and so on. It's just another form of vender lock-in. Hence notmuch (maildir), khard and lbb (directory of .ics), khal (directory of .vcs), rook (KeePass DB), and so on. This drives most of my tooling choices.
The suggestions in the comments are all nice, but the biggest game changer for me was nushell. Once you understand how it works there is no going back. I have saved so many hours already.
When going to other communities, respect their rules AND our rules when they are more restrictive. Do not give cause for others to de-federate our instance please.
I originally provided this an alternative to the broken AUR packages.
However, it seems that Arch users would rather use broken packages and
keep complaining to me instead of their packager. I spe...
He has a point. Package managers are extremely stupid. Installing stuff on Linux is stupid. We need a 15th standard. Or one making all the existing ones work together.
That's basically what I do on Linux anyway except you have to give the install permissions and occasionally to tar -xyzabc and then build something and then add it to your path and then create a shortcut and then give it an icon.
Reform voters think the new party co-founder is more intelligent, trustworthy, hard-working and principled than the prime minister, suggesting Starmer’s attempts to woo the right aren’t working. Rivkah Brown reports.
Does anyone know if these is an open source and privacy-focused alternative to xTiles? A friend of mine showed me this site where it's like Notion, but more visual and easier to use. It's looks really cool, but I wanted to know if there was something similar that's private and open source.
I looked into Logseq a while and saw comments that it was a little buggy, but that was awhile back, so I'll take a look at it again. Appflowy looks interesting at first glance, so I'll look further into it and see if it's a good alternatie. Affine seems to be interesting as well and could be a contender, as I see they have a vision board.
All these are great suggestions that I'll look further into. Thank you!
I'm setting up a computer with linux mint debian editon, and the computer is going to be used by a lot of people who sign in via AD. I have custom display settings (background, pinned applications, theme, custom menu icon) that I would like to apply to all users, but right now they only show up when I log into the account that I set it up on.
Also, is there a way to get a custom firefox esr config to apply to all users as well? I want to remove pocket and make duckduckgo the default browser.
Side-note: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, so you might not need to adjust that config. I'm not sure, how they handle disabling it in browsers, but given that the backend has already been turned off, presumably they would disable it even on ESR with some update...
Potato historians, scientists and promoters are featured here including authors Redcliffe Salaman, History and Social Influence of the Potato, Lucienne Desnoues, All Potato, Wilhelm Volksen, The Potato in Art and Literature, heirloom potato variety preservationist Donald MacLean, French scientist A. A. Parmentier, American potato scientist and World Food Prize Laureate John Niederhauser and potato art impresario Jeffrey Allen Price.
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“(1) GENERAL DUTY.—In order to reduce the proliferation of the unlawful sale, distribution, or manufacture (as applicable) of counterfeit substances and certain controlled substances, a provider shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2), and in any event not later than 60 days after obtaining such knowledge, submit to the Attorney General a report containing—
“(A) the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, and electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider;
“(B) information described in subsection (c) concerning such facts or circumstances; and
“(C) for purposes of subsection (j), information indicating whether the facts or circumstances were discovered through content moderation conducted by a human or via a non-human method, including use of an algorithm, machine learning, or other means.
WTF? We're gonna be required to narc on people struggling with addiction now, even if they're trying to quit? That's bad for everyone involved. I sure won't be hosting nothing in the US again if this passes.
Noooo, AI mods and Admins on every platform will do it for you. You, as a mod, simply have to maintain plausible deniability that you were illiciting more details and not warning people about not sharing info.
You know, just like being trans - keep your questions about everything a secret or you'll be arrested.
In practice, it's impossible to determine the purpose of purchases. If someone talks about their experience of buying from a dealer without further context, you'd have to narc. Or, you open yourself up to legal liabilities.
Besides, people buy on behalf of others all the time. People share with others. Substance use is often not a solitary activity. This law would create a situation where it's risky for you if you do not narc every time.
The bill suggests that violations may be “discovered through content moderation conducted by a human or via a non-human method, including use of an algorithm, machine learning, or other means.” Automated snooping on people’s private correspondence should constitute unlawful search. Fuck that.
Basically, if you've ever posted anything about a controlled substance online, the new Palantir - powered super-surveillance state will hold that data until it's ready to either use it to fuck you harder, or as all they need to fuck you if they don't like you.
No (at least not per the language of the act) . Paragraph 2 which it references does not include cases of possession or purchasing for personal use, or personal use itself etc. You have to have spoken about specifically making or selling fentanyl, meth, or prescription pain meds or stimulants (and falsely claiming to be a doctor).
Trump does a ton of drugs! I know a guy who'd been at parties where he personally witnessed Donald snorting huge, fat lines of cocaine. That's not even counting all of the crack he'd smoke. Enough to kill a horse. He'd send out his people and they'd come back with just pounds of cocaine and crack.
What he really like, though, was Angel Dust. Man, that guy could put away epic amounts of Angel Dust, and then he'd stumble around the room groping anything with legs. I heard that when Donald Trump was on a dust binge he'd break out his stash of the child pornography, drop trou and just start wacking it there in front of everybody. Christ, Donald Trump loves his angel dust and child pornography.
Big piece of this is paragraph 2 referenced, which reads:
“(2) FACTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES.—The facts or circumstances described in this paragraph are any facts or circumstances establishing that a crime is being or has already been committed involving—
“(A) creating, manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or possession with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense—
“(i) fentanyl; or
“(ii) methamphetamine;
“(B) creating, manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or possession with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense a counterfeit substance, including a counterfeit substance purporting to be a prescription drug; or
“(C) creating, manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or possession with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense an actual or purported prescription pain medication or prescription stimulant by any individual or entity that is not authorized, which includes an individual or entity that falsely claims to be a practitioner.
Hmm how long until Hollywood sees this and demands the same of anyone discussing engaging in online piracy?
Also an interesting thought. What if this isn't actually meant to get all drug producers or users talking online but the companies? This could be meant to be used as a threat and a sledgehammer against the tech companies. Basically they pass this, let them rack up not reporting anything for months, years, then come and hit them with a lawsuit demanding internal moderation logs and data and threaten to rake them over the coals for thousands of built up violations BUT then they offer to instead drop all that in exchange for them changing their moderation policies in a certain political way to suit the administration and some token reforms to address the law which won't be scrutinized further if they comply with the political censorship wants.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn't been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn't it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tech itself. Your issue is with capitalist relations and the way this technology is used under capitalism. Focus on what the actual problem is. dialecticaldispatches.substack…
AI has become as a deeply polarizing issue on the left, with many people having concerns regarding its reliance on unauthorized training data, displacement of workers, lack of creativity, and environmental costs.
I read your link. I think my main issue is the framing as though AI is just a new tool that people are afraid of similar to the introduction of the camera.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It's a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists. It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful. The creative process isn't just about the final image. There's choices, mistakes, revisions, and personal investment, etc. No amount of super long and super specific prompts can do this.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a "flawless" AI generated piece. Statistical approximation can't imbue a piece with lived experience or subvert expectations with purpose. It is creative sterility.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop. But I think framing creative folks' objections as an act of self preservation as though we are afraid of technology is a bit of a strawman and reductive of the reality of the situation. Although there are definitely artists that react this way, I admit.
It is true that new tools reshape art. The comparison to photography or Photoshop is flawed. Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process. In the link you provided the argument is made for a pro-AI stance using the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself. That's where their argument falls apart.
As for democratization goes the issue isn't accessibility (plenty of free, nonexploitative tools already exist for beginners) and that is something that could be improved. AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists.
There's little evidence that this is fundamentally different from how our own minds work. We are influenced by our environment, and experiences. The art we create is a product of our material conditions. If you look at art from different eras you can clearly see that it's grounded in the material reality people live in. Furthermore, an artist can train the AI on their own style, as the video linked in the article shows with a concrete use case. That allows the artists to automate the mechanical work of producing the style they've come up with.
It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful.
That's what makes it a tool. A paintbrush or an app like Krita also lacks intention. It's the human using the tool that has the idea that they want to convey, and they use the tool to do that. We see this already happening a lot with memes being generated using AI tools. A few examples here. It's a case of people coming up with ideas and then using AI to visualize them so they can share them with others.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece.
If we're just talking about pressing a button and getting an image sure. However, the actual tools like ComfyUI have complex workflows where the artist has a lot of direction over every detail that's being generated. Personally, I don't see how it's fundamentally different from using a 3D modelling tool like Blender or a movie director guiding actors in execution of the script.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop.
Right, I think that's how these tools will be used professionally. However, there are also plenty of people who aren't professionals, and don't have artistic talent. These people now have a tool to flesh out an idea in their heads which they wouldn't have been able to do previously. I see this as a net positive. The examples above show how this can be a powerful tool for agitation, satire, and political commentary.
Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process
So do tools like ComfyUI, if you look at the workflow, it very much resembles these tools.
the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself
I do photography and I disagree here. The photographer looks at the scene, they do not create the scene themselves. The skill of the photographer is in noticing interesting patterns of light, objects, and composition in the scene that are aesthetically appealing. It's the skill of being able to curate visually interesting imagery. Similarly, what the AI does is generate the scene, and what the human does is curate the content that's generated based on their aesthetic.
AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
Again, AI is a tool and it doesn't magically remove the need for people to develop an aesthetic, to learn about lighting, composition, and so on. However, you're also mixing in mechanical skills like operating the camera which have little to do with actual art. These tools very much do empower people to create, but to create something interesting still takes skill.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes. Your examples you provide don't teach those skills. Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want. It can train on my own style of [insert medium]. But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush. But when you use a thought limiting tool like AI it gives you limited results in return. It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on. Artists develop a style over years, it changes from day to day, year to year, AI cannot evolve, yet an artist's style does just through repetition of creation. AI creates the predictive average of existing works.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity. You can't train AI to develop a new concept or a new idea, that's reserved to humans alone. It's that human intangibility that's yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you're never going to get that from a limited tool like AI. If sentience is achieved, you'd have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes.
I think was pretty clear in what I actually said. I think AI is a tool that automates the mechanical aspect of producing art. In fact, I repeatedly stated that I think the intention and creative thinking comes from the human user of the tool. I even specifically said that the tool does not replace the need for artistic ability.
Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want.
This is just gatekeeping. You're basically saying that only people who have the technical skills should be allowed to turn ideas in their heads into content that can be shared with others, and tough luck for everyone else.
But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush.
That's completely false, you're either misunderstanding how these tools work currently or intentionally misrepresenting how they work. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn how a tool like ComfyUI works and what it is capable of.
It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on.
What it's trained on is literally millions of images in every style imaginable, and what it is able to do is to blend these styles. The person using the tool can absolutely create a unique style. Furthermore, as I've already noted, and you've ignored, the artist can train the tool on their own style.
AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation.
Yes, AI can evolve the same way artist evolves by being trained on more styles. Take a look at LoRA approach as one example of how easily new styles can be adapted to existing models.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity.
With all due respect, I think that you simply haven't spent the time how the tool actually works and what it is capable of.
It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI
Replace AI in that sentence with paint brush and it will make just as much sense.
If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
You're once again ignoring my core point which is that AI is a tool and it is not meant to replace the human. It is meant to be used by people who have sentience and a critical eye for the specific imagery they're aiming to produce.
Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner
I hate it when AI is used to replace the work an artist would have been paid for. But uh, this is a random open-source forum; there's no funding for artists to make banners. Rejecting AI art -- which was voted for by the community -- just seems like baseless virtue signalling. No artist is going to get paid if we remove it.
But like if you want to commission an artist with your own money, by all means go ahead. You'll still most likely need another community vote to approve it though.
That doesn't change that real artists who made real art will have had their work used without permission or payment to help generate the banner. I'm with OP.
If I drew something myself, those artists would also not be paid. I can understand a deontological argument against using AI trained on people's art, but for me, the utilitarian argument is much stronger -- don't use AI if it puts an artist out of work.
Yeah, but if you drew it yourself then they wouldn't expect to be paid. Unless you plagiarised them to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim, they would (at worst) just see it as a job that they could have had, but didn't. Nothing of theirs was directly used, and at least something original of theirs was created. Whereas AI images are wholly based on other work and include no original ideas at all.
You haven't explained how it would be different in any way. Human artists learn by emulating other artists, and vast majority of art is derivative in nature. Unless a specific style is specified by the user input, AI images are also not plagiarised to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim. The only actual difference here is in the fact that the process is automated and a machine is producing the image instead of a human drawing it by hand.
Real artists use uncited reference art all the time. That person that drew a picture of Catherine the Great for a video game certainly didn't list the artist of the source art they were looking at when they drew it. No royalties went to that source artist. People stopped buying reference art books for the most part when Google image search became a thing.
A hell, a lot of professional graphic artists right now use AI for inspiration.
This isn't to say that the problem isn't real and a lot of artists stand to lose their livelihood over it, but nobody's paying someone to draw a banner for this forum. The best you're going to get is some artist doing out of the goodness of their heart when they could be spending their time and effort on a paying job.
Real artists may be influenced, but they still put something of themselves into what they make. AI only borrows from others, it creates nothing.
I realise no-one is paying someone to make a banner for this forum, it would need to be someone choosing to do it because they want there to be a banner. But the real artists whose work was used by the AI to make the banner had no choice in the matter, let alone any chance of recompense.
So what's the solution for this board, they should just put up a black image? Should they start a crowdfunding to pay an artist?
It's a really bothers an artist enough they could make a banner for the board and ask them to swap out the AI. But, they'll have to make something that more people like than the AI.
Not sure where I'm doing that - have been having some pretty interesting conversations with others tbh. My point is that you wouldn't outsource that decision to ChatGPT, so why is the creation of a banner image outsourced to one of these inherently dehumanizing systems?
AI has become as a deeply polarizing issue on the left, with many people having concerns regarding its reliance on unauthorized training data, displacement of workers, lack of creativity, and environmental costs.
Will read your link, but when I saw the phrase "democratising creativity" I rolled my eyes hard and then grabbed this for you from my bookmarks. But I'll read the rest anyway
Edit: yeah so that piece starts out by saying how art is about the development of what I'm taking to be a sort of 'curatorial' ability, but ends up arguing that as long as the slop machines are nominally controlled by workers, that it's fine actually. I couldn't disagree more.
Elsewhere in a discussion with another user here, I attempted to bring up Ursula Franklin's distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. AI is, to me, exemplary of a prescriptive process, in that its entire function is to destroy opportunities for decision-making by the user. The piece you linked admits this is the goal:
"What distinguishes it is its capacity to automate aspects of cognitive and creative tasks such as writing, coding, and illustration that were once considered uniquely human."
I reject this as being worthwhile. The output of those human pursuits can be mimicked by this technology, but, because (as the link I posted makes clear) these systems do not think or understand, they cannot be said to perform those tasks any more than a camera can be said to be painting a picture.
And despite this piece arguing that the people using these processes are merely incorporating a 'tool' into their work, and that AI will open up avenues for incredible new modes of creativity, I struggle to think of an example where the message some GenAI output conveyed was anything other than "I do not really give a shit about the quality of the output".
These days our online environment suffers constantly from this stream of "good enough, I guess, who cares" stuff that insults the viewer by presuming they just want to see some sort of image at the top of a page, and don't care about anything beyond this crass consumptive requirement.
The banner image in question is a great example of this. The overall aesthetic is stereotypical of GenAI images, which supports the notion that control of the process was more or less ceded to the system (or, alternately, that these systems provide few opportunities for directing the process). There are bizarre glitches that the person writing the prompt couldn't be bothered to fix, the composition is directionless, the question-marks have a jarring crispness that clashes with the rest of the image, the tablets? signs? are made from some unknown material, perhaps the same indistinct stuff as the ground these critters are standing on.
It's all actively hostile to a sense of community, as it pretends that communication is something that can just as well be accomplished by a statistical process, because who cares about trying to create something from the heart?
These systems are an insult to human intelligence while also undermining it by automating our decision-making processes. I wrote an essay about this if you're interested, which I'll link here and sign off, because I don't want to be accused again of repeating myself unnecessarily: thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai…
Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.
What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.
The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.
In this case, there's no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.
Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.
Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can't replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don't necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don't need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.
It's worth noting that the argument regarding massive energy consumption is no longer true. Models perform better than ones that required a data centre to run just a year ago can already be run on a laptop today. Meanwhile, people are still finding lots of new ways to optimize them. There is little reason to think they're not going to continue getting more efficient for the foreseeable future.
Fair point, but I do think that until we see more widespread adoption of renewables in the US and other heavy-polluters, energy use in general is a hot topic we are already beyond capacity for. There needs to be a real qualitative leap to green energy some point soon, and we can't just rely on the PRC to electrify the world if the US is intent on delaying that shift as much as possible.
I've often heard that China is authoritarian, particularly due to events like the suppression of student protests in Hong Kong. However, I'm curious about more recent examples. Conversely, I've been hearing about the UK's Online Safety Act being used to target Wikipedia editors and silence protests, which raises questions about authoritarian tendencies there as well. What specific examples do you have that demonstrate whether these countries are authoritarian or not?
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
The UK has multiple political parties and free democratic elections. Just because the current government passed a law you don't agree with doesn't mean the country is authoritarian.
IMO, Apple is the least bad option because they don’t sell your data to anyone else. They absolutely gather every speck they can about you to use for their own purposes, but I do not believe they sell. Not nearly the way Google monetizes you, at the very least.
I would consider GrapheneOS instead of iOS. GrapheneOS provides full compatibility with Android without Google, and you can optionally install Google Play Services. Apple is as bad as Google in some aspects.
As for your main questions, these are my suggestions:
I'm installing a second disk in my desktop, and I'm going to install Linux.
I've had dual boot on all my machines since forever. As in decades. I'm an old hand. Perfectly happy in a terminal.
I have Mint in (on?) my laptop because lazy.
I'm asking about QOL. The only "Gaming" I do are flight Sims, and although I haven't tried, I believe X-plane is Linux native. However, I do use some apps which are not Linux native, so I'd need some form of wine or performant VMs.
The PC is a Ryzen 9+64Gb, so it should handle a lot of things quite well.
I've been playing with both in VMs, but I can't get a feel for what my virtualization and wine use would be.
BTW, I might do an install of both, maybe side to side, without commitment to either, and then decide. It's going to be a blank slate install anyway.
It's worth it to note for people switching that your network printer is unlikely to have usable scanning functionality with flatpak scanners you install (unless something has changed in the last 6 months since I tried last)
This is very ymmv when it comes to Linux and proprietary hardware, not a bazzite only issue. For what it's worth my brother printer / scanner works fine on bazzite.
Is your printer network attached and scanning via flatpak packages?
Network printing works fine, USB printing and scanning works also, it is just anything having to use saned that flatpaks can't seem to use
I have hopped through multiple distros and I have never once had scanning not work on a "normal" one after correctly setting up saned. Only bazzite because of the flatpak/system split (also why any embedded programming needs distrobox)
I don't know if you've read about atomic distros yet, so here's a link to that. Personally I'd pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don't like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn't flatpak/distrobox/homebrew, but that's not a dealbreaker for many, it's just a different way of installing software that ensures the operating system doesn't get packages installed that can make it unstable. I wouldn't be too worried using OpenSUSE in particular as it has excellent snapper integration that makes it very easy to roll back any changes made to the system that might cause said instability or inability to even boot to desktop (especially with grub-btrfs set up).
Similar benefit. Snapper and BTRFS on OpenSUSE means anytime you make a change to the system (add or remove packages, alter boot stuff, services etc, all through GUI tools (or CLI if you like the terminal)) the system is snapshotting the changes and addingvit to the grub menu as another boot choice.
OoenSUSE is highly stable but should something go wrong by your own meddling you can be back to working just by a reboot. If the system is as you want after the boot to an older snapshot you issue sudo snapper rollback, that tells Tue system to keep that branch as your default
What @BCsven@lemmy.ca said, anytime you add or remove or update your system snapper does a little snapshot which makes it incredible easy to boot back into a system that works. BTRFS makes it so easy, as compared to EXT4. And yeah Timeshift is still just as valid I guess but unless you make timeshift backups every times you install or remove something, it's hard to compare the two.
I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew
In atomic distributions you would install non-sandboxed programs in a layer that is applied on top of the base system. When your system is updated, that layer is applied back on top of the updated system. The only possible breakage would be if what you installed depends on a dependency in the base system that has been removed or which is no longer compatible.
They both worked fine for me, but installing almost everything through yay on CachyOS instead of having to deal these on bazzite (link below) was a huge QoL change for me. That and the sheer amount of documentation for arch is just awesome.
To me, this was a mess and was convoluted. It helped me learn a ton, but if you want simple and need more than just gaming on steam, it's not worth it imo.
You can just install through yay on distrobox on bazzite. Again, laziest distro ever just copy paste whatever the devs give you for install on an appropriate distrobox. No need to worry about what distro you're running.
Idk that installing a different OS to install software is better than installing another os to install software. I feel like that would just be keeping up with updates on two or more separate OSs, but with that said, I've never used it aside from just goofing around a little trying to get some theming stuff to work, which did not.
To each their own though, would be a great solution for someone that doesn't want to uninstall their current system because they've sunk time into it or other reasons.
Distrobox has very little overhead and runs the app as natively as possible, last I checked my overhead was like 50mb of ram. It's kinda like WINE but for distros.
Yeah, I probably gave Bazzite less of a chance because I had so many issues installing it. I believe I had to wipe my other Linux partition to get it installed in the end.
It took me ages to get it installed as it couldn't cope with my EFI (I have multiple boot partitions). I had issues getting games running once I had it installed, but I can't remember what specifically those issues were as I spent longer fighting with Pop (WiFi driver issues).
Honestly, so far I have had no issues at all, I just run an update every now and then. I assume it'd be more difficult if this wasn't a gaming-specific partition, as that means I haven't installed much else.
I installed OpenSuSE Slowroll yesterday. I felt underwhelmed by their bad documentation. Their nvidia installation driver wiki was wrong, and resulted in the drivers not working (not all packages were pulled through via dependencies). I opened a bug report and they did a few changes to the wiki very fast (thanks to a nice suse engineer), but the overall wiki page remains utterly convoluted. And I'm mentioning this because even if you might not have to deal with nvidia, the rest of the system receives the same care. YaST is an eye sore with the worst UIX ever designed by man. And after installing the drivers and updating the system, now systemd takes 1.30 minutes to journald it -- out of nowhere. It's just a weird distro, with no attention to detail for end users, imho.
Regarding Bazzite, is a gaming distro. If you only play 1 kind of game that works with Mint, stay with Mint (or Debian-stable).
Wine will never work properly for apps. Sure, it manages to load a few apps, but they are crashy. Reimplementing the Windows API is a massive task that won't finish for decades. So I suggest you use Linux-native apps instead. I moved from Photoshop to gimp3 too, even if I had the last non-subscription version on CD and it kinda worked with wine (but not really). Same with Affinity Photo, that many people suggest to run on wine, it's super crashy on wine. So, avoid windows apps via wine. Games do work because they use very little of the windows api.
In other words, stay with what you know works without headaches (Mint), and move to native Linux apps, and Steam for games. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I'm comfortable with the terminal too, but I don't enjoy having troubling installations. I'm at age now that I want things to just work.
I have seen your posts here for a few months and you are far more knowledgeable than I am in Linux. However, I have to say I disagree here. I did use Slowroll for two months and found no problem, nor a need for much wikis, if any... now, I dont have nvidia so maybe that is why. The main developer of Slowroll is awesome (personable and reachable) and his professionalism is what make him not categorize his Slowroll as stable so it is not listed as such. He has previously mentioned the challenges he is facing with the concept, but that can be addressed in due time. Most people in OpenSUSE should use either Tumbleweed or Leap for now.
Regarding OpenSUSE, it is a tad behind Fedora in refinement but minimal. Its biggest handicap, however, is its small footprint in the Linux marketplace, yet still amazing what they had pulled off with their limited resources.
Your beloved Mint, oh gosh, how much I tried to like it, but aesthetics and lack of flexibility kills it for me. It is, hands down, the less problem free one, no questions, it is what I recommend most for someone that need a set-it-and-forget-it distro, Mint is still the one. But I just cannot work happy with Cinnamon, even when first started in Linux. One system in the same ubuntu branch that I found almost as reliable as Mint, but with fairly new KDE, is TuxedoOS; more stable than Kubuntu, a bit less than Mint, and close in freshness as Fedora/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
I use Bazzite with multiple monitors. Can you clarify what you mean when you say another distro might meet OP's needs better if they have more than one monitor?
I figured it's possible. I didn't think there is an easy way, at least that I could tell, to switch the out of the box configuration to use more than one. At least from the gamescope UI it boots into.
I thought it might be a limitation of that compositor.
Personally I love OpenSUSE and don't like atomic distros. But my first instinct is to recommend the familiar. Mint should be able to do what you want as well as the other two.
Wine is still a thing, but most people prefer Proton for gaming.
The easiest way is to install Steam and play your games through that. Non-steam games can be added with "add a non-steam game", and then you can choose to launch them with proton though the settings for the shortcut you created.
I can count on one hand the games that havent worked for me using this method, and it applies to any distro. I've never even considered doing a full VM for a game, i'm not even aware of a game that would work under a VM but not Proton.
Check out ProtonDB to see if your games work, and if any tweaks are required.
I suggest Mint, don't know if you've tried it but it seems like the best choice.
Bazzite is a gaming focussed distro and if you don't really game you don't need it. I tried using OpenSUSE and it's really apparent that they're focused more on system administrators than desktop users (and system administrators are the only ones they monetize).
In all seriousness, do you actually have any problems with Mint? Can't really answer if we don't know what you're dissatisfied with in your current setup. I myself tried OpenSUSE because I wanted to give KDE a shot.
I've used mint for ages. Most flavors, and tried most DEs. I use Mint in my laptop currently.
It's like jeans. You can wear them for ages, for most every situations, but at some point you may decide to give chinos a try. Also comfortable, versatile, but different.
It feels like this is a coordinated ‘long game’ to banning vpns. Kids bypass ‘safety controls’ using a vpn, therefore vpn must be banned to keep kids safe
How many fingers am I holding up? Mathematicians around the world are rushing to check millennia of calculations, as the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has explained that their discoveries aren’t as concrete as we thought.
It is, and the purpose is to prepare for war. In each country the excuse is different, but in all of them people are getting an everincreasing restriction on internet use. See UK for reference
First off, I can't believe YouTube described its content as "high-quality", because most of it isn't. Second off, what the hell did Google expect? They've been doing a piss-poor job at reviewing their content for years and even when they actually do, they don't do it because they want to make the platform more comfortable for kids to use or anything virtuous like that, it was to make the advertisers happy. So yeah, now the governments are involved, tough shit.
If parents won't do it, someone has to. I have young daughters and the sexist shit that youtube keeps showing young boys has me so nervous for their futures. Youtube in my house is only accessible on the living room TV where I am fully aware of what they are watching.
I was excited when I found out there was a link aggregator (read: I was obsessed with reddit-like forums) that divorced itself from the controversy or the alienating political idealogy of the lemmy developers.
However, other than that, I can't understand piefed.
1) The project seems unorganized. The first google result for "piefed" is the piefed.social instance and not about the project. I had to go to "About" then click on "PieFed" just to get to this link the project page. For lemmy? The first link about lemmy the project is about the project not an instance. Point to lemmy.
2) Lemmy uses rust which, like the main devs' political idealogy, may be polarizing (see Linus vs Rust Devs). Piefed uses, well, python. Yes, there is a learning curve to a new language, but rust is statically and strongly typed whereas python is duck typed. Also, it appears as though pip is one of the tools used in the installation which has been prone to supply chain attacks. Yes, more people know python. But that isn't necessarily a net positive and I wouldn't consider that if I were choosing the stack. Another point to lemmy (for me)
3) Piefed is on codeberg/forgejo. Lemmy is on github. Point to piefed.
4) Piefed doesn't have controversial devs (supposedly Lemmy does). Point to piefed.
So, as much as I want to like piefed, I'm having trouble really choosing it. Can someone add on why they use piefed over lemmy? I really want to like piefed.
Yeah, we're working on a fix for this... because piefed.social runs on the latest changes, we get zero notice when the API is changed. Thankfully piefed.social will be staying on 1.1 until 1.2 comes out, so this should happen less in future 😀
To some extent. The ones I've tried don't seem to use the block lists on my piefed account. I still need to poke around more to see if I can find one that's usable.
On the bright side, the mobile implementation of the website is surprisingly good. It's mostly usable as a PWA, which is what I've been doing so far.
Edit: It may just take time. After posting this I checked again and Voyager now has my blocked items. The others may as well.
Any mobile issues I saw seemed mostly tied to PWA being a bit weird. Even those were issues were well-behaved compared to other sites I've tried to use as PWA, even on desktop
the topics are really handy. like I look at comics pretty regularly. Without it I would need to go to dozens of communities and check for updates. Yeah you can be subscribed but if a new one comes out you will need to come across it and add it and also sometimes I just want to look at things around limited topic rather than everything im subscribed to. then I love the config options. in particular to not blur nsfw. I get so annoyed at the things people mark that way. Oh no. girl is showing to much ankle in this picture. I can also block by keyword but its limited. then I like this option which darkens bot posts a bit compared to standard ones so its easier to tell at a glance. Its pretty active to which I like. When I started I chose kbin and really like how active earnest was. Now one thing I I browse on the web and so most of the things I like are gui related which if your using an app does not matter so much.
For the communities I started, I like how the tags/hashtags function in sidebar word clouds.
The people here are engaging, helpful, supportive.
I'm no programmer but piefed seems to yield really fast response times from those who are building it.
It's bare bones but it works that way efficiently.
I never started a community on Lemmy so I don't know it quite as well.
I like the styles available for Lemmy but I think piefed will eventually come around in that way.
Keyboard navigation works on piefed. I'm grabbing my news scrolling through feeds a lot lately and this is basic usability I want to see in my RSS feed readers or Lemmy aggregators, etc.
They're different and have relative strengths and weaknesses. Despite being a contributor to piefed, I moderate a handful of communities on a lemmy instance and don't really have intentions of moving them. Overall, piefed is a lot less "mature" than lemmy, which makes sense because it is a lot newer of a project. It is getting better now about being more stable, but there are plenty of things that are still changing quite rapidly, especially on the api front.
As for python/pip/typing, I just don't see this as the major issue that some people seem to think it is. We aren't adding dependencies willy-nilly and the framework in which we are working (flask) is a very mature one that has stood the test of time. The fact that python is used for the project has tremendously helped the project in that it has allowed for a large number of contributions from many different people. Frankly, if piefed wasn't in python, it would not be nearly as feature complete as it is now thanks to the wide range of contributions we have received from folks.
I think OP is just focused on the tech layer, which is fine, but as a user, these are the things I love about piefed:
Feeds (groups of comms) and Topics (curated groups of comms) -- instead of just Communities on Lemmy
Scheduled posts, so the server will post my "Daily Game" entries for me every day (No bot needed!)
"Moderating" view next to Subscribed, Local, All -- so I can quickly see all activity on the comms I moderate
A list of "Related Communities", whenever you're in a post
Flair for your posts in a comm, though only other piefed users can see that
Excellent devs who listen when you report issues and are working hard to improve the service over time
Annnndd, the default web view (desktop and mobile) is fine, really. I thought it would be a problem when I had to leave my beloved lemm.ee account but no. It's fine. I GTD with them; it's really fast.
Like others said, OP, just sign up and check it out. I think you'll dig it.
Don't forget that PieFed supports polls where Lemmy doesn't. And PieFed also supports blurring photos using spoiler flair instead of just relying on NSFW tags as Lemmy does. And the crosspost feature where you can view comments from all communities at once from wherever it has been posted into.
Many people made many good points, so i'll just add that according to this blog, Piefed is less resource intensive server-side (for now at least) than Lemmy.
I think I kind of like Python and the Flask framework. Sure it's duck typed. Other than that the Flask framework is very mature and battle tested. Minus a few quirks, it's laid out with some thought, is relatively nice and straightforward to use and once we leverage the advantages it should help us prevent some bugs from happening. And I think in practice, it serves us well. PieFed has a good track record compared to the average open-source project. It's nice to participate in the coding. Lots of things have been laid out in a very good way from early on. And it allowed us to move very fast.
(And I think in web development, a lot of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities aren't due to language, but complexity, frameworks and the lot of moving parts. I mean it's not the programming language that protects from an SQL injection. It's more convoluted/complex pieces of code that open up the entire server. I don't know the Rust web application frameworks, though. So I can't make any statement on how easy it is to write vulnerable code there.)
PieFed was able to migrate the vast bulk of my Lemm.ee community's posts over here before that instance went down for good. It was quick, easy, painless, and has helped immensely in re-starting my community here.
The scheduled post feature as mentioned is hugely useful, and something I plan to use more often when I get a little more organised.
As mentioned, the instance here seems blazingly fast, perhaps due to the project being relatively small-ish at the moment.
When our site-runner / dev has talked about what it's like running the place, it's sounded to me like it's been a remarkably low-fuss, non-stressful experience. Compare that to what the poor Lemm.ee site-runner went through, and it sounds like night & day.
There's still a couple minor issues I'm hoping to see improved, such as: 1) as a community founder, I'd like the ability to be able to edit posts, especially my own that were earlier migrated over; 2) my old co-mod who's on another instance now is waiting to be able to be added as mod, here.
~~(However, afaik your instance must receive activity so that said activity can be federated to other instances. That's why you can comment on dead instance comms, but they never will be seen on other instances. Take lemm.ee for example.)~~
~~Also, as davel said, the instances page seems to be broken, and that doesn't seem to be a frontend issue as not even lemmy federation state checker is able to query it, so either something is wrong at the backend or your reverse proxy config.~~
Sorry, forget my previous comment. It seems to be a bad design choice in the frontend. The backend is working fine, probably.
Your instance is not federating with other instances, and this definitely is because someone manually turned off federation or changed the federation mode (otherwise your community and its posts wouldn't have appeared on other instances).
The comment on the jlai.lu instance seems to be there because someone manually fetched it. That would explain why "your instance did not receive the activity but federated it over to other instances".
Go to the admin page in the lemmy UI and turn on federation. If you selected "Allowlist" or "Blacklist", select "Open" as the federation mode.
Then comment or like posts from other instances, ideally a popular community so your instance starts federating with lots of instances faster.
Though I think that's what happening, this wouldn't explain why 0d.gs shows that your instance successfully keeps receiving activities from it. I wonder if there is no check being done for that.
Go to the admin page in the lemmy UI and turn on federation. If you selected "Allowlist" or "Blacklist", select "Open" as the federation mode.
All I see is a "Federation enabled" checkbox that is checked, an "allowed instances" list that is empty, a "blocked instances" list that is empty as well, and a "federation debug mode" checkbox that is unchecked.
I don't see "allowlist", "blocklist" or "federation mode".
So I have been using mint on my other pics with little issue. Wanted to try something different. Got pop all setup, it does work pretty well and is fun (other than God awful pop shop) but I keep gettung an issue that seems to be totally unique to me.
No Nvidia.
Amd fx 8320 (yes. Its shit but was free) 12 gb ram Radeon ellesmere xfx rx580
My issue. After varying times of usage. Either running vms, gaming. Browsing web, doesn't matter, ill get pink diagonal squares across the screen, full freeze up, kicked to the login screen, and then I am not able to log in at all until I hard shutdown.
I just put a bunch of stuff on this pc and would rather not have to switch back to mint. I am thinking it's maybe my graphics card driver but I am unsure how to see. I do have the correct popos for my hardware.
I know there is logs but im unsure where.
Edit: ofc amd drivers should be native so that shouldn't be my issue.
Edit for anyone who may see in the future: I fixed the issue temporarily by throttling down the wattage allowance to my gpu, using LACT. I will need to get a higher power PSU in the future. Thanks all!
The graphics glitching could just be from a kernel bail of some sort. List some specs of your machine, that would be helpful.
Another thing: what's your PSU wattage?
Edit: checked, and your CPU can draw 125W, while the GPU can draw up to 250W, so if you don't have at least a 400W PSU, you could have some problems. Maybe consider under locking just a tad, or locking the GPU at a lower clock to prevent big power draws. That might help. Would hurt to check the temp on that GPU as well.
I would ask for a healthy margin above 100%, especially if you're bringing an older PSU. There are a ton of variables for determining what is needed, but if your TDP on those 2 items is pushing 400W, we should be aiming for 500+ with an 80 Plus certification.
This definitely plays like a failing PSU to me as I experienced similar issues when mine started dropping on one of the 12V rails with similar hardware (fx8350, r9 290) several years ago.
Huh, well the fact that you're just logged out suggests that the DE either encounters an unrecoverable error, or the system runs out of resources and has to kill some userspace processes to free them up and your DE just happens to be one of the things it kills, which can leave it in an unrecoverable state.
The pink squares do suggest a gpu-related problem however, it's possible that your gpu is either overheating or doesn't get enough power from the power supply. What gpu temperatures and ram usage are you seeing before the freeze? And what power supply are you using?
Not an answer to your question. Just some perspective. I've come to be more patient with FOSS. Perhaps it doesn't always work how I want, but unlike proprierary options, it belongs to me. Something to think about when something doesn't go your way.
I just put a bunch of stuff on this pc and would rather not have to switch back to mint.
If you move that stuff to a partition that’s different from where root lives, switching operating systems shouldn’t be a problem. You can just mount the data partition on your new OS, if the need arises.
If your distro ships with the tool inxi, you can dump a lot of data about your system with inxi -Fazy. Folks might be better able to help you then. The -z flag filters sensitive information.
That's a pretty neat tool. I'll definitely be using that for future troubleshooting.
My only, minor, gripe is that it shows kernel parameters which can contain the UUID of the LUKS partition containing your sysroot. This isn't a factor in most people's threat model, but it's worth pointing out.
Also before buying a PSU, make sure it's from a reliable brand, has at least 5 years warranty and then see what the smart people with equipment say about the specific model you're looking at. PSUCircuit is a good resource for this.
PSU Circuit is here to provide clear and standardized analytical insights into power supplies to help consumers know what they’re actually buying and if it’s worth their hard earned money.
Sponsorship Inquiries: partnerships@linusmediagroup.com
I was using it with a 3070 just fine. Not necessarily sold on it, but so far so good.
I mean it's dead, (for now) because my CPU died to the fate of belonging to the wrong Intel generation.
Now after finding a lottery ticket I will buy a new board and CPU, and a new GPU next in priority (since it does still work, but I won't be buying Nvidia or Intel anymore.
Personally, unrelated to OP, I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I built a silent PC, with fanless heatsink. Couldn't find a source here for fanless power supply so bought a 750w that doesn't spin fan till 30% wattage use. PC uses 15w at idle and about 23w for normal computer stuff. 45w if I push it with video rendering or other workloads. 700w doing nothing 😀
Have any other distros been tried on this box and do the same issues present with them? I think the recommended PSU combined with an RX580 is 600W, so you might try swapping PSUs. Another option if you don't have a spare to test with is to undervolt the GPU. If it stabilizes at that point, it would suggest the PSU needs replacement. At least that way you wouldn't be dropping money on a hunch.
Another good indicator of that being GPU/PSU issues is the fact you mention not being able to get past the login screen. Both X11 and Wayland (especially Wayland) crank up the VRAM usage at that point due to compositors caching and whatnot
I've been running with an RX 580 on my desktop with Debian Testing for three years, and I've had no problems like this.
I'm running with a 750W power supply, so I'm inclined to agree that the the OP should pop open their PC case and check their wattage. Assuming this is an ATX box, it's probably just a matter of removing two screws and sliding off the side of the case and reading the wattage. If it's a reasonable wattage and it's still giving issues, then try the aforementioned undervolting.
So, running furmark gets me the pink squares and crash after about 3 minutes. Gets 60 fps the whole time and sits around 70C. I am thinking psu seems likely.
ofc amd drivers should be native so that shouldn't be my issue
I'm curious, what's an example of non-native drivers?
Driver bugs exist, it could definitely be a hole in someone's testing. I would assume the number of people running PopOS (and whatever build of mesa their release is on) with that specific GPU is pretty low. Maybe try the amdgpu-pro driver and see if the issues go away (or change, heh)? Not sure what the recommended way of installing it on PopOS/Ubuntu/Debian is.
Ah, I think you mean non-free or just non-open source.
Something being "native" means it's compiled for your specific hardware, ex. an x86-64 binary running on an x86-64 CPU. An example of non-native is an x86 binary being emulated on an ARM CPU, Java bytecode running on a JVM, or Python code running in an interpreter.
But your drivers are all definitely all running natively on your hardware.
Just to clarify, this almost certainly won't be better on Mint for several reasons. One, PopOS! and Mint are both based on Ubuntu, so they would likely run into a lot of the same issues. I also have an RX 580, and while I haven't used either of these distros on that machine, I have run Debian Testing for several years, and since both these distros descend from Debian, I have run similar package versions and would likely have known years ago if a major bug occurred for my GPU.
As said by @Mordikan@kbin.earth below, I would be inclined to check the power supply, and maybe even make sure the PCIe card is properly seated.
Cranking my gpu wattage allowance shuts the pc down about instantly. Lowering it lets it run furmark for longer. I am guessing psu. Its a cheap cyberpower case that likely has the og crap psu
I didn’t even know there were still cases bundled with power supplies! But yes, in general, throughout the history of PC building, I’m pretty sure included power supplies in any brand tend to be very low wattage. The power supply probably isn’t even broken - I’m just guessing the PC’s was upgraded to an RX 580, and the RX 580 was more power hungry than the original graphics card and the power supply just wasn’t designed for it.
Just a tip - next time you build or upgrade a PC, use this tool to estimate what power supply you need; newegg.com/tools/power-supply-…
You can get a 700 watt PSU that should work in the $50-70 range, although honestly, it might be worth it to go a bit bigger so you can cannibalize it for a future build when the time comes - even the RX 580, which is newer than your CPU, is getting a bit old and I hope to replace it if I build a new PC in 2028.
Oh yeah, the cheap ones do, and this was just a second hand pc I got for 40 bucks to have for messing around with. The psu may not even be name brand as there's no labeling at all on it.
Right now, throttling the wattage allowable from the card has fixed it! I ended up using LACT for this, which works perfectly.
Yes im very behind in the pc world. My brain still thinks 4 gigs of ram is massive, ha. My main pc is another rx 580 with a little bit better fx proc and 16g ram, and it does an excellent job for everything I do. The proc is definitely a bottleneck though. Maybe ill go am5 next year
Luckily, I can probably live with using mine a few more years. Mine's an early AM4 system with a Ryzen 5 2600 in it. My CPU performance isn't a huge bottleneck (although I'd like a couple more cores for faster compilation).
Really, it's my graphics card. The 580's fine for some basic gaming, but it sort of got left in the dust with ROCm support - it's kind-of-sort-of supported, but not well enough for Blender to work with it.
I think the situation's improved with ROCm on consumer GPUs enough now that so long as I buy a newer card, I should be fine. Debian support's improved a lot as well - for many GPUs, it should just be a matter of sudo apt install hipcc now. However, Debian is still a few versions behind in experimental and doesn't support the latest AMD cards, but I suspect that getting it packaged was the hard part, and that once Trixie releases, Forky/Testing will catch up in a few months.
The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 'Polaris' graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old
20+ years ago, Lindows had a great app store that let you create an "aisle" of your favorite apps so if/when you'd reinstall your OS, instead of searching and installing all your apps one-by-one, you'd just go to your aisle, click "install all" and boom.
For me that's the main benefit of using home-manager on nixos and other distros. You basically just make a list of packages, and install/update them through home-manager.
I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we're just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script
if we're talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used
Aren't most app configurations and settings saved in the user's .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?
For me the config management aspect of home-manager is mostly useless. It takes a lot more work to set it up, looks far uglier, and you need to maintain it because parameters change over time. Saving dotfiles in a repo, and symlinking them on install is simply easier.
The only two scenarios where it's actually useful is when you have slightly different configs for different devices, and when the program doesn't support dotfiles. A pretty cool example I've seen for the second one is managing Firefox customisations (settings, plugins, additional CSS), but I'm only disabling horizontal tabs so it's not worth it for me.
Sure, but then you need to maintain it. I don't know about you, but I never had the discipline to update it with every package install and uninstall. It's especially annoying when you have multiple devices.
Declarative package management doesn't have that issue since you're managing the packages by editing the list.
Besides that, the home-manager approach works on any distro (and os?), you get bleeding edge packages, you get a built in rollback system, and you can handle configs as well (but I mainly just symlink them anyways).
/facepalm moment for not thinking of that at the time
But it's lacking organisation and modularity. For example let's say you need programming packages on one device, gaming ones on another, and general ones on both. It's pretty easy to set it up with hm, and you can disable specific modules when you don't need them (for example you rarely need to use a certain language and supporting packages).
It's pretty fast, especially if you don't get into flakes right away. You basically just install nix with a one liner -> install home-manager through nix -> start adding packages to list.
Here's a comment I made when I was starting out with basic instructions. Do note I'm now using this command for updates instead (updates hm, package definitions, and the packages themselves)
For Arch you run pacman -Qe which lists all installed packages that were not installed as a dependency. I output that to a location via golang script which is monitored by the pCloud client for automatic backup along with a lot of other configs from $HOME/.config. I then have a systemd service that fires the script and a timer to kick off that service periodically.
On a related note, would you recommend restoring an entire home directory (including the dot files and all the dot directories) once I reinstall all the packages after a fresh install? Would it basically replicate my restored setup or would there be random issues that emerge? I'm thinking particular system settings related to kde/gnome settings, but others I might not be aware of.
For me, I tend to focus on specific directories I know I'd need data from (or that will just be a hassle to rewrite config for). I have a scripts folder that gets backed up, Books, .mozilla, etc. A lot of things I just know I won't need like .cache. That folder is 7GB and mostly just the cache from yay needing to be cleared out.
I don't backup my entire home directory because I'm worried ACLs may change or other little issues that will take more time than its worth to correct. That said, you could. You worried about something like that, you could pull the existing ACLs: find ~/ -type f -exec getfacl --absolute-names {} + > home_acls_backup.txt and then restore them: setfacl --restore=home_acls_backup.txt
I haven't really used KDE much, but I know it has a theme data in .local/share that you'd want (and probably the .cache folder as well). GNOME keeps theme data in .themes, .icons, .fonts. They might just be defaults, but if you have anything custom, you'd want those folders too.
Thank you for your reply, this is helpful to know.
That's what I currently do as well, I just backup particular .config subfolders and other directories. I'll probably continue to avoid just raw transferring an entire home directory on a new install.
One other thing I didn't mention is it depends on the backup tool you use. Not all of them are filesystem aware. What that means is if you have hardlinks present those will not be preserved.
That can be important to remember as it will bork things down the road with the restoring. If you aren't familiar with linking: Hard links point to actual data (think of it like a pointer in C). Soft links (symbolic) point to file path.
This is how I do it. I'll see something and think 'hmm, interesting' and completely forget any of the details but I'll remember vaguely that something exists then I can search for it.
Language models are pretty good at solving the 'I think I remember something that does this specific thing but don't know where to look' kinds of problems (don't just blindly run LLM generated commands, kids). Then once you have a lead, traditional searching is much easier.
If you can't remember what to reinstall, was it really that important? Packages are so quick and easy to install that I just install them the first time I try to use them and find them missing.
I think you are right when it comes to re-installation of the packages themselves. What's more annoying for me is re-applying all of the little tweaks and configurations for all of the ones that I actually do want or need.
I'm not advocating for anything, but if I remember correctly, flatpaks are typically installed in user home directory. If that's the case, then it's just a matter of copying a directory and installing flatpak. I might be wrong though.
NixOS has a config file, you backup that file, you can duplicate your system with it.
OpenSUSE has an AutoYast system where you can build a config for the next install.
OpenSUSE microOS has ignition and combustion files to replicate a system from scratch. For those that don't like hand typing a config file there is this web based tool to write out a file based on selections opensuse.github.io/fuel-igniti…
You're correct. All packages installed via dpkg/apt are on that list. What isn't included are appimages, flatpacks, snaps and other non-dpkg software if you happen to have any.
instead of searching and installing all your apps one-by-one
And... that takes what, a good all 5 minutes?
Honestly unless you either re-install an OS frequently (which is a weird thing to do on a day-to-day system) or plan to go offline for a long period of time I bet you'd spend more time finding a "solution" then not doing so manually.
I'm not you but when I install a fresh OS (maybe once every couple of years, at most!) on my desktop (not counting other devices, handheld, servers, etc) I install
Firefox (if it's not already by default, if it's ESR then I might get a different update mechanism)
...well honestly that's it!
Then yes as I start to work I add KDEnlive, OBS, Blender, Cura, OpenSCAD, etc.
My point being that I can't imagine a moment when, as you start the OS you actually need all the other software at the same time. You usually need one, then another, e.g. Inkscape to edit a PDF document you just received, then you pass the extract image to e.g. LibreOffice Writer.
So... not having everything from the start is IMHO a good moment to consider what you actually need, keep things lean.
TL;DR: there are technical solutions but on a desktop connected to the Internet it's not worth it.
PS: I do personally keep my bash history or my ~/bin/ and ~/Apps/~ directories across installations (because I do keep~` on a dedicated partition) with some AppImages in but honestly I don't rely on these.
Surprised nobody said this yet, but I use ansible. I also use it to have the same install on multiple machines independently (something that doesn't work by just having a dedicated home partition).
But it's a bit of maintenance to keep modifying my dotfiles, certainly not as easy as your old apps aisle.
In APK based systems (Alpine, Chimera, Adelie) there is /etc/apk/world
It is a list of all the packages you have explicitly installed. When you add and remove from this list (all apk does), the system solves for dependencies and makes sure you have the right packages installed.
You could bring up a new system by updating this file.
Hello everyone! I have been de-googling my life for a few years. I don't have official YouTube clients anymore. At this point I use PipePipe, a fork from New Pipe to watch videos.
But as a Spotify and YouTube Music replacement, I am currently using Outer Tune.
My problem is that with or without Proton VPN usage I get errors again and again. despite closing the app, switching off the VPN etc. At this point it's impossible for me use Outer Tune any longer.
What are you using?
claryfication:
on the long run im looking to build a offline media vault. but for the moment. i want to use a Spotifiy alternative, where there are suggastions... for new music that i like.
i tried Rimusic a while ago can't say why i find't like it anymore.
i love making playlist offline with it and PipePipe is a dream but its not right for me for music
I buy music from Amazon music, hd tracks or band camp it's all drm free and put it on my server behind a subsonic based server . That'll give you the closest to a streaming service. Otherwise just sync music on your phone old school.
Let me add that my favourite albums / artists will usually be bought on vinyl records as well for some neat displays and to throw some support their way.
1 physical purchase is worth a million streams (I imagine compared to spotify anyway)
I have had some issues with OuterTune (expected for this type of app) but not to the extent you're describing. The current version works for me. Have you tried other open source YoiTube Music clients too? There are loads out there.
I’ve done this for decades. While everyone else switched to streaming music, I keep my entire collection on my phone. It’s only 40GB, but it makes up the majority of my music listening, with streaming radio supplementing it to find new stuff… which I then purchase and download if I like it.
If you have a NextCloud instance with NextCloud Music app installed you can use its Ampache or Subsonic API implementation with a client in your devices (I recommend Ampache as the implementation is a literal server clone).
If not, as other people suggested Funkwhale.
If you still depend on YT Music, there is RiMusic as a client but prolly will give you errors too after some time if your network is denylisted.
Could you please elaborate on your last sentence? What do you mean with "errors [...] after some time if your network is denylisted"? I am using RiMusic and I indeed run into weird errors where the music stops in the middle.
Not sure why nobody mentioned it yet, but I switched to Metrolist a while back when RiMusic/ViMusic stopped working. Never had to look back and never had issues so far.
For real? ViMusic is archived since October '24... same goes for RiMusic which was archived.... yesterday? Ok, I wasn't even aware of that - last I knew was that it became a local-only client when the dev gave up fighting against the constant api changes on youtube side.
Anyhow, glad it somehow still works for you - it's been a great app.
I use Musify from F-droid for what your describing.
To be honest though I only really listen to my offline collection and radio/internet radio for discovering new music.
Check out The Indie Beat. It's an internet radio station playing music from artists on the Fediverse, like Radio Free Fedi used to. All my favourite discoveries from the last couple of years have been by or via Fedi artists.
If that YSK post about Deezer's main shareholder CEO wouldn't have come out, then I would have suggested that, since that's what me and my friends are using in the family plan after being disappointed with Tidal as a Spotify alternative.
Buy music and then upload it to your phone. Thats what I do. You can get 10-15 albums for the cost of 1 year of YouTube Music. You could have 30 albums in just 2 years. Music that won't go away increase in price, and the Apps you can use to play them won't show you ads even after you pay for your music
Blackstone CEO and billionaire Stephen Schwarzman has been a key player in the worsening global housing affordability crisis. Activists want to rein him in.
What are you talking about? I can see my headline might be confusing, meant to be a play on words, as he has a shady past, but the Blackrock employees were hit and injured, so it did have to do with Blackstone.
The WSJ reports that a Blackstone employee was shot in the lobby.
The WSJ says several Blackstone employees needed hospital treatment.
Fair enough. I wasn't criticizing your title at all, I was more confused that the article made it seem like Blackstone was the target, but halfway through they mentioned that the NFL was the target
While I don't support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they're going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they're smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you're going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.
Thanks for the extended info. I agree about the shootings. I never understood why lone gun"men" always chose schools and Walmart parking lots. If you are crazy and want to go down guns-blazing, why not aim for the real evils of this world, the ones causing so much pain for no other reason but greed, the oligarchs and their ilk?
This is a species associated with myths and legends. In many European languages, the Nightjar is known as the ‘goatsucker,’ with the genus name Caprimulgus deriving from the Latin for ‘milker of goats’.
Humans and great potoos have had limited direct interaction due to the bird’s secretive and nocturnal nature. In some cultures, its eerie vocalizations have led to its association with death or bad luck. However, more recently, birdwatchers and ecotourists have become fascinated by the great potoo, appreciating its unique characteristics and mysterious behavior.
Discover the great potoo, a cryptic bird known for its camouflage, unique behavior, and fascinating diet in the tropical forests of Central and South America.
Sometimes the stupid blindsides you. Even though you've come to expect every day to be a parade of new and worse shit. Sometimes it catches you unaware. That's what this post did to me today.
Im not sure if this goes here like a major amount of my posts. Im looking for a alternative to youtube for beginners who just want to be apart of the community in a old school youtube perspective but not too old that it feels outdated. I sadly created a movie recap just to see how hard it was, it took me almost 2 hours just to slice and remove parts of the movie only to get a copyright warning by youtube. I mostly just blame my newbie editing skills, but is there a alternative to youtube that allows me to post videos youtube dosent want me to?
If you want to see my horrible cliche recap here it is. Be warned its not great and it has one of those text to speech voiceovers and such. I feel like i worked hard but at the same time i may have made slop. (please dont steal)
Not so bad but not compatible with all instances. What I noticed in the past, is campaigns against peertube to avoid people from using it, something quite strange (actually disgusting) but a sign that it's probably considered a "dangerous" platform for the established ones
It was created by youtubers to try and gain independence from youtube, it's ~~cooperatively~~ owned by the creators. It is mostly the same as those creators youtube content but with no ads and less ad friendly parts added in, occasionally a creator will put out some passion project that wouldn't work on an ad supported platform. It skews edutainment and video essay type stuff, contrapoints, strange parts, tom scott, philosophy tube and Not Just Bikes are a few that are involved. Quite a lot of content overall but most of it available on youtube.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
So far i haven't come across something better than odysee. It has a community, but like most alternatives for larger platforms, the userbase is smaller, and often times i'll also find some unhinged conspiratorial comments on there that are kinda off putting to me lol.
If having a community is a requirement for OP, then I'd say Odysee kinda sucks because it's full of National Socialists. Though I primary go there for watching videos, so a few nose emoji spammers don't bother me.
I also dislike that it shows recommendations/related videos. That's an anti-feature of YouTube for me, so I don't want it on Odysee either. That can be fixed by using a desktop app without recommendations like github.com/trizen/lbry-viewer (not sure if that's the correct one, I haven't installed it yet on my current system.)
Got my Minimal Phone about a week ago. It's definitely a niche device, a cross between a e-reader and a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard. I'll preface this whole "review" by stating that it's not for everyone. For me, though, it's almost perfect as I don't (nor want) to spend all day staring at my phone, doom scrolling, watching video after video, etc. I just need the basics, love e-ink displays and physical keyboards, and this has me covered.
I put each section into spoilers as I didn't want to throw out a full-on wall of text. If I left anything out or if you have any questions about it, just ask.
Overall / TL;DR
It's a solid, well-built device for people who want to minimize distractions and get down to business. The e-ink display is naturally gorgeous, and the keyboard a joy to use. Other than the lackluster camera, most of my gripes can be solved in future software updates.
I won't spend time going over the specs since they're readily available. Rather, I'll just give my experience with the major features.
:::spoiler Build Quality
Build Quality
Build feels solid but there definitely is a "fragile" feeling to it. It's a pretty thin device, made of plastic, and has corners that seem like they won't take a lot of abuse. That's not to say it feels "cheap" - it doesn't. But it does feel like you'll want to put it in a case (more on that below) and definitely avoid dropping it. :::
:::spoiler Display
Display
Like any e-ink display, the screen is crisp and easy on the eyes. The refresh rate is also about what you'd expect from and see in other e-ink devices such as a Kindle or a Kobo. The technology is what it is.
Minimal includes a "quick settings" app of their own design that will attempt to increase the refresh rate at the expense of image fidelity, but I've found it to be a bit buggy and leave it turned off.
What I believe it does, when set to either of the "fast" or "extra fast" settings, is only update every 2nd or 3rd line of pixels (not sure if "pixel" is the right word for e-ink, but it will have to suffice). This produces a very grainy image, but does, indeed, increase the apparent refresh rate. What I feel like it is supposed to do, and does at least part of the time, is do a full refresh after the contents on the screen stabilize in order to clear up the display. In practice, though, it doesn't seem to do that; even hitting the manual e-ink refresh button keeps the grainy image. The "fast" setting seems like it clears the image up more often, but not 100% of the time. The "extra fast" setting seems to always keep the grainy image.
So I do see what they're attempting to do here, but it just doesn't work quite right. Yet. This is something I feel they can and will eventually work the kinks out of.
That said, I just leave it on the "normal" refresh rate which keeps the display looking nice.
Other reviews have said they have to hit "refresh" repeatedly, but I've not had that issue. I've also tried to optimize things to reduce the number of things that change on the screen, so maybe that's a difference? It's not that I never have to hit the screen refresh button, but only occasionally.
Of note is that Minimal did so some tweaks to the base Android configuration to maximize performance of the e-ink display: - Animations are disabled (confirmed in developer options) - The color correction is set to grayscale - Navigation mode is set to "3 Button" mode but the on-screen "soft" buttons are hidden (since it has capacative navigation buttons) - Probably some other subtle config tweaks I may have missed.
Additionally, you will need to say goodbye to dark mode. On an e-ink display, "light" mode isn't the eye-searing problem it is with other displays, so an unusable dark mode isn't much of a loss. While dark mode is perfectly legible, due to the nature of e-ink, it will have to refresh more pixels every time something moves/scrolls. This causes the screen to both update slower and leave more "ghosts" requiring a manual press of the refresh button.
Sadly one place this is unavoidable is in the notification area quick actions. Organizing those was an exercise in frustration since the colors and fill of those buttons are fixed, and dragging things up and down was hindered by the darkness and slow refresh. Granted, organizing the quick actions is always frustrating in Android, but it's even worse here. :::
:::spoiler Keyboard
Keyboard
I love this keyboard. It took me a minute to get used to it, but that's true for most keyboards on any new gadget. The keys are responsive, have surprisingly decent travel, and a satisfying but quiet 'click' feeling.
I've noticed other reviews calling out the space bar for being "mushy". I can see their point while also not being as harsh in my critique of it. While the spacebar is presented as a 4 key-width single button, it is actually two buttons with a wide keycap. You'll want to hit it on either side rather than in the middle. When you press it in the middle, you're straddling the two keys underneath and hitting neither one fully. Once you get used to that, I've had no issues with it.
Minimal includes a settings app to customize the keyboard. I haven't messed with it too much yet, but one thing I did do was enable the option to switch the alt mode of the voice input button. Normally, to type a period you would need to press Alt+Voice, but enabling that option makes period the default. I appreciated that greatly.
Some common characters, especially the forward slash, are not mapped to physical keys and require hitting the "symbol" button to bring up the on-screen character map. Not a deal-breaker at all, but takes some getting used to. The character map shows where the on-screen keyboard would be with other phones, so it doesn't feel awkward or intrusive, and you can close it with another press of the "Symbol" button.
My only actual gripe with the keyboard is the placment of the Alt and Shift keys. The Alt key is where you would expect Shift to be, and vice-versa. There seems to be a way to re-map those in the keyboard settings app, but I haven't messed with it too much. My first attempt didn't work quite right, and I reset them back to default while I was still playing around and getting it setup to my liking. I'll probably double-back on that later. :::
:::spoiler Camera
Camera
While I've only taken a few test pictures, the camera on this seems like an afterthought. That, or it's just there to allow scanning QR codes. There are other reviews for the Minimal's camera (none of them particularly flattering), so I'll let those speak for me as well. The main problem is it's incredibly hard to tell if you got a good picture or not because of the e-ink display.
So if you require an excellent camera, this probably isn't for you. :::
:::spoiler Software
Software
Aside from using the Minimal Launcher as default (more on that later) and a few settings apps specific to the device, the phone runs vanilla Android 14 and has absolutely no bloatware other than what Google mandates (Keep, Meet, YouTube, YouTube Music, et al).
By far, the software is where this phone needs the most work. That's not to say any of it is bad, just a little rough around the edges with room for improvement.
Minimal Launcher
I like the idea of the Minimal Launcher. It's a text-only list of apps with an optional clock and date display. Up to 8 (or maybe 7?) apps can be "pinned" with the rest available by swiping up. It's distraction-free and works very well with the e-ink display. But...that's about it.
It will let you rename apps, but sometimes they'd revert to the original app name. Sometimes my pinned apps would disappear. Sometimes newly installed apps woudln't show up until after a reboot. The launcher's settings panel is supposed to be accessible by swiping left or right on the home screen, but it only registers 4 out of 10 times.
You can install other launchers if you want. At first, I used my old favorite FastDraw but eventually settled on NeatLauncher.
NeatLauncher is what the Minimal Launcher should be, and I kind of wish Minimal would just fund that developer and adopt that as the official one. It does everything Minimal's launcher does, plus more, and is more stable and intuitive. If you're like me and like the idea of the Minimal Launcher, then give NeatLauncher a try.
"Lock" Screen
This quirk caught me by surprise. You would think that when you lock the phone, the lock screen would remain visible on the e-ink display. Maybe it updates the clock every minute, maybe it doesn't, but you'd still think the lock screen would be what's displayed when the phone is in standby.
Nope. It switches to whatever the screensaver is set to. By default, it's the Minimal logo with a white background. It also includes the same but with a dark background and another one with a Panda as alternatives. You can also use Google Photos's screensaver and show images you want.
Okay, so if I turn the screensaver off, it'll show the lock screen in standby, right?
Again, no. If you disable the screensaver, whatever was on your screen last will be what's displayed in standby.
I made a "Screensaver" galery in Photos and assigned that as the screensaver for a while, but when it's on charge, sometimes that causes the backlight to stay on. I also used a clock screensaver, but it doesn't update and shows the time as of when you put the phone to sleep. Not great if you want to just glance and check the time; it won't be right.
It does show the lock screen and notifications as they arrive, so that does fit expectations. If you have the screensaver enabled, it'll return to that after a timeout period (similar to other phones turning the display back off), but if the screensaver is disabled, then the lock screen remains visible.
In the end, I just set it back to the Minimal logo with the white background.
Again, this is a quirk/annoyance that can and hopefully will be addressed in a later software update. :::
:::spoiler USB-C Port
USB-C Port
The USB-C port is listed as full featured (including video), but I have not been able to get any kind of video output from it. I hooked it to my USB-C dock, and it happily recognized the flash drive, keyboard, mouse, SD card reader, and ethernet port. The phone powered the dock and connected devices just fine, and it properly started charging when I plugged a USB-C charger into the dock. But the HDMI output on the dock never displayed video. I tried also to hook the phone into my USB-C travel monitor. It powered the monitor just fine and detected the USB devices connected to the monitor's hub, but no video.
I'm not sure if this is a software/firmware limitation or the specs on Minimal's website were incorrect about video output. I'm probably going to email support and ask for clarification.
This isn't a deal-breaker for me, but I was hoping to be able to dock it to my travel monitor for more intensive tasks and have it in something of a "Maximal Phone" mode lol. :::
:::spoiler Call Quality, Data Speeds, and Cellular Performance
Call Quality
I've only done a few test calls with it, but they all came through loud and clear on both sides of the call.
Data Speeds
The radio is only 4G, so that's probably a bit limiting for some people. I knew that going in, but for the use-cases involved with this device, 4G is acceptable for me.
Using speedtest.net in a web browser (which only tests download speeds), I got about 35 Mbps down with what I'm guessing is 3 bars of signal (not that Android's signal indicator is useful in any way).
Cellular Performance and Compatibility
When I installed my SIM card, I got an SMS from T-Mobile that the device wasn't supported and may experience reduced speeds, gaps in coverage, etc. I'm not sure if it's because the radio lacks some bands T-Mobile uses or if it's just because the device isn't in their database and the message was just a "CYA". Regardless, there were no impediments to using it, just that warning text message. It does seem to support all the bands in my area, though. One of my older phones would lose signal when I was downstairs in the basement, but this one switches to the lower 4G band seamlessly. :::
:::spoiler Cases and Accessories
Cases & Accessories
Cases
Unless AliExpress has some options (I didn't look there), then cases are slim pickings. The official, first-party case is $30 and has the same "ships in batches" delivery as the devices themselves. I sadly opted out of ordering the case assuming I'd find one elsewhere.
This was the first time I'd printed in TPU, so it took a few iterations to get something usable. The end result is far from perfect, but it's "good enough" until I get better at printing in TPU, some 3rd party cases pop up on Amazon, or I break down and order an official case.
The post photo shows my "best" 3D-printed case. If you think that one looks bad, you should see the reject pile 😂
Sceen Protectors
Amazon does have screen protectors for it, though they're not the tempered glass ones. Will probably pick up a pack of those soon to protect the screen from everyday wear-and-tear. :::
:::spoiler Tips and Tricks
Tips & Tricks
Launcher
Replace the default Minimal Launcher with NeatLauncher. It's almost functionally identical but better in every way. - Set Neat's color scheme to Achromic (black and white which looks great on the e-ink display) - Set the background to transparent (any kind of background image is just "noise" when the screen has to refresh)
Screen Brightness
Note: E-ink displays are illuminated from the front, but saying "front light" sounds weird, so I will call it "backlight". Just in case anyone is feeling pedantic; I hear you, lol, but "backlight" sounds better.
The screen brightness controls could use some help out of the box. While Android and the device do support adaptive brightness, it doesn't take into account that e-ink needs less backlight the brighter the ambient light is. So you'll probably want to leave that off. Hopefully a later software update addresses that.
Minimal's "Quick Settings" app is always accessible by long-pressing the "refresh" button for the display. It's got 3 presets with individual options for screen brightness, color temperature, and keyboard backlight brightness. You can also set custom values and save it to the "custom" slot.
Because I only want the backlight on when the ambient light is insufficient, I found that I was going into the quick settings too often which annoyed me. So I set the brightness to 0 and saved it to the "custom" profile and used KeyMapper to bind the brightness controls to the long-presses of the volume keys. Any brightness above 0 in Quick Settings would act as the minimum brightness when adjusting it with Keymapper. The volume keys also do not "repeat" (holding them down only increases/decreases the volume by one increment), so no functionality was lost by re-mapping them to brightness.
Bind a long press of "Volume Up" to increase the display brightness
Bind a long press of "Volume Down" to decrease the display brightness (will go down to 0)
In the end: Single-presses of the volume key adjust the volume. Long pressing the volume up will increase the brightness 20% (can't find a way to control the increments) while long-pressing volume down will decrease the brightness by 20% or turn the backlight off completely.
Termux
What good is a phone with a QWERTY keyboard without installing Termux, am I right? Out of the box, Termux isn't a great match for the e-ink display because it defaults to white on black. Download the Termux Styling add-on and set it to "black on white" theme and your experiece will be MUCH better.
:::
Frequently Asked Questions
Why spend money on this rather than just uninstalling stuff from a regular smartphone?
I've tried that and failed. What ultimately worked for me was when I bought a semi-dumb phone (Cat S22 Flip) that could only really do my bare essentials effectively. Now that I've cut all but the necessary apps out of my life, I really don't want to go back to a regular smartphone. The S22 Flip is also getting a bit long in the tooth with its Android 11 and no manufacturer support. I've flashed newer GSI-based images onto a secondary S22 I bought, but those have their own quirks and issues that aren't present on a stock device and have proven unreliable as a daily driver. I need a successor to my beloved S22 Flip, and this was the primary contender.
More than that, though, I am beyond tired of the "tall, skinny rectangle" form factor. Phones keep getting taller, skinnier (screen width), and thinner (thickness), and I've reached my limit. I miss my old OnePlus 3 with it's 16:9 screen that didn't feel cramped like the CVS-receipt screens on current gen phones.
This one has a portrait-oriented 4:3 display as well as a physical keyboard (something I miss greatly on phones).
Can it run Doom / play YouTube / etc ?
Yes. But you're not going to want to. The refresh rate is way too slow, and the images get all strobe-y.
What's the battery life like?
Honestly, I don't know yet. It's packing a 3,000 mAh battery which is tiny for a smartphone, but with the e-ink display sipping power, it evens out.
This early on, where I'm still setting it up and just seeing what it can do, I'm probably using more battery than I would under normal usage.
That said, I've been trying to use it "correctly" and have seen pretty decent battery life. Using it as an e-reader, for example, it only draws power when I turn a page (minus any Android background tasks). With the backlight off, I've read 5 or 6 long chapters with the battery only going down a percent or two (which is comparable to my Kobo).
Bottom line is: The less the screen changes, the longer the battery will last. I don't know if it'l get days of battery life with actual usage, but I've never obsessed over that; as long as it gets me through the day with normal usage, and so far, that's what I'm seeing (plus some).
Is it your daily driver?
Not yet. I'm still putting it through its paces, getting to know it, customizing it, etc. Unless my primary device meets a catastrophic end, it usually takes me 1-2 weeks to "provision" a successor. For now, I have my second line SIM card in it, so it's something of a secondary device at present. I also really like the S22 Flip I have now, so parting with it is going to be difficult.
Is there anything you hate about it?
I've got a few gripes and have noticed some quirks with the Minimal-specific software, but nothing I truly hate. If I had to choose one thing, and this might just be an Android thing nowadays and not specific to this device, it's that you can no longer configure a long-press of the power button to turn on the flashlight. All my other phones had that, or something similar, but this one does not. The closest I've come is mapping a long-press of the "symbol" button to toggle the flashlight, but due to not being rooted, that only works if the screen is on.
Can the bootloader be unlocked / Can it be rooted?
No idea yet. The developer option to enable OEM unlocking is available, but that may not mean much. I have not (yet) tried to actully issue the fastboot oem unlock command to see if the bootloader is capable of being unlocked or if it requires a code from the manufacturer. AFAIK, all non-shady rooting methods these days rely on unlocking the bootloader first.
Minimal has stated that they do not yet support 3rd party ROMs, but they do seem like they are open to it down the line (take that with a grain of salt, naturally).
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to modding my phones and never attempt anything without recovery tools and images on-hand. Right now, I do not have access to a stock image to restore if something should go wrong.
Explore the harmony of technology and simplicity with Minimal. Our innovative approach strips away the unnecessary, focusing on what truly matters in your digital experience.
thank you for an elaborate and in-depth review, enjoyed imagining owning it. although it has a lot of nice-to-haves (e-ink, keyboard, etc) at 10x (that's TEN times) the price of my usual phones Imma forget about it as soon as I click "post".
books (printed through the printing press) spread knowledge just like the internet does, allowing a facilitated and drastically accelerated exchange of ideas
new transport methods allow new lands to be reached and new worlds to be explored. i wonder whether it is an accident that "spaceships" are called after ships
They absolutely did exist in the 20th century, but they were much heavier and bulky, used resistive touch screens, had awful battery life, and were understandably very primitive compared to modern tablets.
Ships, including ocean-going ships, were a thing long before 15th century. Europeans have travelled to North America in the 10th century. What happened around the 15th century was the creation of empires willing and able to colonize (plunder, steal, enslave) on a continental scale. The idea that the amerikas were somehow "the new world" rather than land stolen by massacring natives is imperialist propaganda. I think this is the reason why a lot of people fell for "colonize mars" bullshit - they subconsciously think that the land now occupied by the US was a barren wasteland which couldn't support human life until brave europeans came and covered it in McMansions and fast food chains. From that mindset it makes sense that we can do the same again, but with mars.
Hello, I am looking for simple introductory information. In the direction of data protection, digital sovereignty, open source, data sovereignty, freedom of information, etc...
I would be very grateful for tips and recommendations! 😀
That is very kind! My main question is probably how do I introduce the topic in an interesting way to non-techy folks. What's the best topic to start? What are some must known examples of how things go wrong?
For non-techy people I think the best way of getting into it is surely the mass surveillance, "you use social medias, but did you know that all of it is recorded and reported on these?" I would try to use some scary things that would make people first really interested to it from the start, instead of proposing alternatives the second you talk to them. Examples are countless try to inform yourself on the Edward Snowden leak to explain it to them, talk about the numerous spying techniques used by big tech. Hope was at least a bit useful 😀
A few months ago I thought about doing some workshops or presentations in my local area and asked a similar question about whether anyone had already put together something cohesive and as simple as possible but I couldn't find anything that quite fit the bill.
Maybe there is something already out there but if anyone wants to collaborate on making something let me know.
Not exactly for me - I want to do a workshop about the topic as well! (and only have few days to prepare) If I manage to get some slides together I'll gladly share them here!
The current release provides only basic functionality, with several key features to be introduced in future versions, including:
App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
Additional issuance methods beyond the currently implemented eID based method.
These planned features align with the requirements and methods described in the Age Verification Profile.
There is an issue opened to remove this as it's basically telling us that to verify our age in the EU an American corporation has the last word, making it not only a privacy nightmare but a de-facto monopoly on the phone market that will leave out of the verification checks even the fairphone (european) with /e/os.
The new age verifying app for the EU will only accept Google Play integrity for Android, de-facto banning any aftermarket OS like GrapheneOS
Taken from the readme of the app on github:
The current release provides only basic functionality, with several key features to be introduced in future versions, including:
App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
Additional issuance methods beyond the currently implemented eID based method.
These planned features align with the requirements and methods described in the Age Verification Profile.
There is an issue opened to remove this as it's basically telling us that to verify our age in the EU an American corporation has the last word, making it not only a privacy nightmare but a de-facto monopoly on the phone market that will leave out of the verification checks even the fairphone (european) with /e/os.
I agree with most concerns here but as a professional prototypist... people do not seem to understand here and on related issues what "reference implementation" means.
This is NOT supposed to be used! By anybody! This is basically a technical demonstration that shows how it can be done at all.
Think of this as a test suite rather than software proper.
Again, this does not mean it's OK to even suggest that Google and Apple are in any way acceptable bottleneck. I do believe those are terrible choices. I do also believe relying on them just to do a proof of concept or technical demonstration is quite "lazy" but I also bet that this was necessary due to the scope of the project, e.g. "deliver us an app that works in 6 months on an average mobile phone". I really don't think they had discussion on accessibility, inclusion, etc.
So... yes, do keep track and be concerned but also don't conflate a proof of concept with a maintained app that will be required to be used on all EU citizen mobile phones next year.
There's a big difference between a reference implementation and a proof of concept. A proof of concept just shows it's possible at all, but a reference implementation is meant as a reference for "you should do it this way". Expect most companies to just directly copy the reference because they'll feel it's a waste of time developing their own system that's in compliance.
Sure it's beyond a proof of concept and others will definitely heavily rely on it yet my point still stand, i.e no one is supposed to install this built app directly. As I also said yes it's wrong to rely on Google and Apple in general but even more so with talks of EU sovereignty so I'm not giving them any slack for that. What I'm still insisting on is that this repository is not the app people will have to use.
Is there anyone more familiar with this age verification process that can explain if and what data does this share with some UE body or government? Is the the system 100% client-side or is there any API or tie to other govt service that may be able to track when and where (website) you're trying to verify your age? Thanks.
Apparently they want everybody to get some sort of "EU wallet", that is, some digital signed identity which sounds super dystopian. But that's just what I read. It sounds like a complete disaster.
I feel like a productive way to address this would be to make a child mode mandatory for all operating systems, as some EU countries already did, and then to give parents a better incentive to actually enable it. For example, all end-user devices could be pressured into prominently showing an option to enable it when first booted up (without forcing your hand either way) so that it's hard to miss. There are so many other ways to improve this situation.
I found out recently that every android device asks if you will be using the device, or if a child will, as soon as you log in to the device for the first time. The funny part is that it asks AFTER you sign in, effectively linking to to that device, even if you're giving it to a 15 years old teen.
And that's why my kids only have Linux PCs, and phones that they use that belong to me, so I can take them away in case it's necessary (spoiler, they try to stay away from those phones as much as possible, lol).
Since many parents don't seem to be aware this mode exists, I think it's a good idea to ask that prominently by default. Technically versed parents like you can still use other approaches.
Absolutely, it is a useful feature for technologically challenged parents, no doubt. However, this way of doing it (using any GAFAM related company or similar) exposes kids to data mining since way before they can make this decision (which most will likely choose to do it anyway, but that's besides the point). Now, what if these kids grow up to be privacy-minded adults? Their data is already in the hands of others without their consent, and we all know that once data is out there, there's nothing you can do to reel it back into privacy.
This issue is right up there with parents, or any acquaintances for that matter, uploading photos, videos and PII of our kids with titles like "my awesome nieces and nephews". My wife's sister was kicked out of my house because of this, and was banned from interacting with my kids for almost 2 years. The reason? I told her I do not allow my kids' pictures in social media, and she still did it (maybe thinking I would just bend over and take it).
It's up to each parent to protect the privacy of their children until they're old enough to choose for themselves. We are raising privacy-minded kids, but that's no guarantee that they will be privacy-minded when they are adults. The opposite also holds true. We should not expose our kids to any type of surveillance outside the parents, and even the parents' surveillance of their kids needs to have limits.
This is why I believe all of us with a little more sense and knowledge, should strive to advocate against this system. All it takes for bad people to win is for good people to do nothing.
Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn't send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they're not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.
It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/… Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up...
This article is interesting as well: eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just… My favorite quote is this one, "All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. [...] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation."
Thanks so much. It's refreshing to see how some people still have common sense.
In all honesty, I'm very tired of these invasions. But the reality is that this was created by us, parents, families, and tech corps and governments just saw the opening and walked right in.
Tech made us lazy, we fell into the bliss of convenience while entirely dropping our rights on their laps to do with as they wish. I'm guilty of that myself. I allowed Google home and Alexa devices into my home and used them all the time. Then it all clicked when I started seeing information on subjects that interested me, my wife and my kids all over the place, without even looking for them. I panicked bad when I realized something was very wrong, but the damage was already done.
This is what got me into the Privacy and security wagon, and it took me almost 8 years to revert that as much as possible and finally have some sense of safety (because some of that stuff is out there for good, and there's nothing any of us can do about it).
Now I keep a sort of digital fortress around my family and myself, and I not willing to let it go anymore. This has made our family much more interactive in real life while at the same time harder targets for tech corps and governments.
Evidently, there are some of these that are unavoidable for us common folk, but we can compartmentalize our lives in ways that it's harder, if not impossible to tie everything about us together into a single fully integrated profile. Yes, it requires work, time, money and missing out on some convenience, but the alternative is infinitely worse, full of unknown dangers that can affect us now or later.
Until most people are fully pushing back on all these dangers, it will only get way worse over time.
I believe that removing the possibility of profit for tech companies is the only way to effectively reverse this trend, however, most people are too distracted by all the screens around them and the carefully crafted content made precisely for this purpose to figure out what is really going on, and by the time we all end up figuring it out, it may very well be too late.
So, I would like to see less excuses by most people on how "it's too hard for most people", "some parents are not as tech savvy" and similar BS. That only helps keep the myth of "there's nothing I can do about it" I alive, which is what all these institutions are banking on.
is /run shared to the real filesystem after the initrd stage? like what directories are shared to the real filesystem after initrd, or what files. Or is everything just inaccessible in the real filesystem from the initrd phase.
switch_root moves already mounted /proc, /dev, /sys and /run to newroot and makes newroot the new root filesystem and starts init process.
WARNING: switch_root removes recursively all files and directories on the current root filesystem.
If you look at the source code, it uses mount(2) with the MS_MOVE flag to move the /proc, /dev, /sys, /run to the new root, then deletes all the files on the old root fs recursively, then MS_MOVE-mounts the new root over the old one. As the comment in the source code points out:
/* Don't try to unmount the old "/", there's no way to do it. */
This is presumably why it deletes the files on the initrd, because it is a ram disk and the files would be eating up memory if left there.
The rule you quoted only applies to people self promoting their own products to sell there, they do not apply for recommending something or asking for suggestions for something. Feel free to make a post there about earbuds!
On that note, I've found the built-in lemmy search function to be amazingly thorough, fast, and useful. You can search content from all communities, not just the ones on your instance, search comments, sort by date, what-have-you.
Sometimes it doesn't pick up some things, I believe it might also be related to the fact that the instance I'm on is recent, but it has previously allowed me to find some nice things so yeah, that's that
I mean, you don't have to be a local user to use the search functions on any of the more established instances. I can easilly see search being one of the more taxing functions for smaller servers.
Hi, I have lemmy.world blocked for browsing purposes because you know, it's mostly trash.
However, I want to post a question in !summit@lemmy.world because I'm having an issue with the app where I can't seem to access the toggle to hide posts from bot accounts.
Is there a way to whitelist a niche community without unblocking the instance it's on?
YappyMonotheist
in reply to Peter Link • • •Israel (supported by Western powers and vassals) will never stop because the motivation behind it is lebensraum plus VC investment, and they're all amoral sociopaths. Would chattel slavery have ended in the US by just asking nicely? Or because the WASP man developed a conscience, randomly?
All this "Palestinian recognition" is just wind, lies and spin for internal optics, so people quiet down about the genocide for a second while they 'get the job done'.
mrdown
in reply to Peter Link • • •