Possibly stupid question: if they found out that people were doing illegal stuff on it, doesn’t that mean that they were monitoring people’s conferences? I thought that the FOSS community was big on privacy.

Dehydrated water: just add water.

Good, maybe in two or three more years Windows 11 will be useable. Right on time for Windows 12 to roll out and drag Microsoft users back to the Stone Age again.

Danke schön. I find this a very reasonable way to go about it.

That’s pretty much it. Systemd goes against the philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well” by doing a whole lot of things and being integrated to an extent that makes it pretty much impossible to use only an arbitrary subset of its components while replacing the rest with alternatives. I understand where the critics are coming from, but I honestly don’t care either way.

I like this. Where is “here”?

Stats.FM is another good one. It shows you all sorts of statistics on what you listen to, which you can filter by time period and use to find new music.

Jeff-BAY-zoes

Just grip them real tight in your hand until they stop vibrating.

Terrorists and authoritarian governments are each others’ greatest allies even though both pretend otherwise. Each one uses the other to endear itself to the people and justify atrocities that they would otherwise never get away with, all in the name of protecting you from the other one.

Lemmy has undercover ads now?

I’d make a shortlist of phones based on price and hardware, then check the XDA forums to see which of the models on that list have good AOSP-based custom ROMs available. Generally, you’ll have better luck with flagship models, but there are custom ROMs available for many, many smartphones - some even get updates for longer than the official firmware.

Another option is to use adb to uninstall bloat and crapware from the official images, which can be done with varying success depending on the phone’s make and model. For example, I have a Samsung Galaxy A53 and was able to uninstall or disable most of the several useless or redundant apps it came with, but several I could not get rid of without breaking needed functionality (that shouldn’t depend on them, but does for some obscure and probably illegal reason).

I know that my personal case is only one data point, but I currently manage one EndeavourOS system and one Arch Linux system and except for hardware-specific issues and things I only tried to do in one machine and not the other, I have only ever had identical problems in both. And few of those, too. EndeavourOS… endeavours… (sorry) to be as faithful to the original Arch installation process as possible, except automated and optionally also installing a graphical environment.

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I dual-booted for over a decade and even went back to just using Windows for a while before finally making the full switch. I think I spent two or three years without using my Windows partition before deciding to give Windows one last chance, which lasted a month, then wiping it and sticking to EndeavourOS for my daily driver/gaming desktop and vanilla Arch Linux on my laptop.

For a desktop environment, I suggest xfce or lxde. They’re very lightweight. As for the distro, all the ones you mentioned are Ubuntu-based. Even though there are some lightweight Ubuntu-based distros, like Zorin and Bodhi, you can do better. I’d suggest going for something lighter, such as the Arch-based EndeavourOS (xcfe is the default DE so it’s very well-supported).

Now, if you want something even more lightweight that’s still Debian-based like Ubuntu, Mint et al., take a look at BunsenLabs Linux. It’s blazing fast, extremely light and very user-friendly. It doesn’t use a traditional desktop environment. Instead, it uses the Openbox window manager, which requires much less resources - especially RAM, which seems like it’ll be the bottleneck on your laptop.

I agree. The average user can’t be expected to read all of the documentation, but when you run into a problem, odds are you aren’t the first. So instead of immediately going to ask for help, maybe Google the issue for a while, at least skim the man page or try fixing it yourself before asking.

And ask well. There’s a huge difference between “I have problem X with package Y. I tried solution Z and it didn’t work. Here is some information I think could be relevant. Thanks.” and “HELP program Y isn’t worknig I dunno what to do???”.

Hell doesn’t have as much music.

Unless the components of your antenna stick out from inside the case and rust, I’m pretty sure that’s not true.

I’ve had a total of four smartphones starting in 2012. The reasons for my three upgrades were, in chronological order: battery degradation, theft and battery degradation. I’m hoping that the next one is battery degradation too.

Regarding your 1-year justification, I do spend all day on my phone. It just happens that it’s already more than good enough for my needs. The OLED screen is sharp and doesn’t tire the eyes, the size is great for my hands, the storage space is sufficient and the camera is as good as you can expect a camera with a tiny photoreceptor to be.

<rant> I use my phone’s camera a lot, but the marketing gimmick of just upping the megapixel count and barely anything else means that smartphone cameras have effectively been the same for years. Which is why this ugly trend of multi-camera phones came around as well. My 24 megapixel Nikon camera delivers much better images than my 64 megapixel phone. The best way to improve picture quality in phone cameras would be to increase the size of the light-sensitive surface, not just to subdivide it into more and smaller pixels. But that would require a larger distance between the photoreceptor and the lens, which means a thicker phone.

And since by some divine decree phones must continue to become thinner and thinner until they can double as razor blades, that’s never happening. Thicker phones could also mean larger batteries, a more comfortable grip, better impact resistance, the return of the headphone jack, more easily replaceable components (battery especially), better heat dissipation and more, but who cares about making a product that’s actually better when instead you can aim for a paper-thin sheet of overheated components with a transparent battery that lasts twelve minutes and a 128-gigapixel sensor where each pixel is as wide as an anorexic electron and half the processing power is used to reduce noise in the ISO 9000000 setting required for that sensor to actually register a visible amount of light? And then you take your wire-thin phone and put a huge kevlar case on it so that you can actually hold it without cutting your fingers and it doesn’t shatter into dust when you drop it. </rant>

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