I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Elison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.
Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.
It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.
For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂
That is not the reason: Signai is very good but it’s not the best. The reason why it’s more popular is because it’s good, ubiquitous and easy to install.
In other words, it’s a well-known app you can confidently tell your computer idiot friends and family to install on their phone and start communicating with them 5 minutes later. What’s what makes it popular.
Robots.txt is honor-based and Big Data has no honor.
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If you can live without all the apps that only exist on Android or iOS, then a non-Android-non-iOS phone is a great choice. But it only takes one of those apps to be essential to you and your non-Android-non-iOS phone suddenly becomes a miserable experience on a daily basis.
You say you don’t need a banking app. That’s great.
Me, I currently live in a country where banks are entrusted by the government to handle secure authentication online. If you can’t use the mobile banking app, you can’t interact with social services, the local equivalent of the DMV, healthcare system, police… And you can’t book a train ticket, change the trash collection schedule, check if your parcel has arrived at the post office… Everything is online here, and without the banking app, your life becomes very very difficult. Not impossible, but not a pleasant experience.
And my company requires me to use the Teams app. In fairness, if I can’t use it on my phone or I refuse to install it on my phone on principles, they will readily provide me with a work phone - and a pretty nice one too. But that means I’ll have to carry two phones and, well… I just don’t want to do that.
So if a Linux phone works for you, more power to you. It’s just that you’re a minority of extremely lucky people for whom this arrangement is at all workable.
Yes, an inept user can install it. I know because I am a fairly inept user 🙂
The key to a successful deGoogled OS installation is picking the most compatible phone possible for the AOSP flavor you want to run. If the phone is well supported and everything is reported to work, you’re unlikely to run into issues.
I chose a Fairphone 4 to run CalyxOS. Or rather, it went the other way in my case: CalyxOS was kind of imposed on me because my requirements for the phone was first and foremost not be Google Pixel phone (i.e. GrapheneOS was not an option) and good repairability second. CalyxOS is the only deGoogled AOSP distribution that runs on the Fairphone.
If you look at the instructions to install CalyxOS on the Fairphone 4, it’s nicely detailed and really simple. It went without a hitch for me. You can also install it on the Fairphone 5 and it looks simple enough too, but I haven’t tried it myself.
As to why I like it:
It emphasizes privacy over security (like GrapheneOS). Yeah it might not be quite as secure as GrapheneOS, but it’s more practical.
Enable MicroG and you basically have a normally-working phone. Yes, you still hit the Google server and that’s not great. But sadly that’s part of the compromises you have to make with your principles if you want to have a somewhat normal digital life in this day and age.
System-level integration with F-Droid and Aurora. The GrapheneOS people think it’s a liability. I think it’s a plus.
Comes with a work profile manager that works fine out of the box. You don’t need to install a third party manager like Shelter.
I know I’m gonna be shouted at for saying this, but… The Calyx Institute is always a little behind with Android updates unless they’re critical, and I find that to be a plus regardless of the OS you use - desktop or mobile: when your OS pulls updates as soon as they come out, it pulls screw-ups as soon as they come out too. CalyxOS’ delay in pushing updates means you let others play guinea pigs for you, and you only get updates after they’ve been thoroughly tested by a large number of users.
CalyxOS comes preinstalled with a nice set of apps. I especially like the Datura firewall: it lets you use sketchy app and deny them access to the internet. For instance, I use it to configure my TP-Link smartplugs with the TP-Link Tapo app without letting this hateful turd of a spyware app call the mothership. I don’t quite like how the SeedVault backup software follows the Android security model, because it prevents you from doing a true, full backup. But it does backups nicely and securely and that’s better than nothing. And the Calyx institute offers a free VPN: I only tried it once and it was kind of slow, but hey… it’s free.
Like I said, it runs on a non-Google phone. I hate Google with a passion and there was no way I was going to give them money to get a Pixel phone for the privilege of not being subjected to the Google surveillance. So most other deGoogled OSes weren’t even an option for me.
I made two honest attempts to move completely away from the three Big Tech mobile monopolies (only two now, the dystopia keeps consolidating…): once with Symbian a long time ago, once with Ubuntu Touch.
Yeah, the phones do phone things. And if you squint hard enough at the Linux phone, the look and feel is almost as polished an experience as Android’s.
But here’s the thing: as soon as you need to make a payment with your bank’s app or you need to connect to your company’s Teams, you’re shit out of luck and you need a backup monopoly phone. That happens very fast and it gets tiring very quickly.
So I’m still on Android. DeGoogled Android (CalyxOS) but still code from the Google dystopia ultimately, because however much I hate Google, I’m also a practical man who would like to live his life somewhat normally.
That’s how entrenched the monopolies are: even when you’re as dedicated as I am to avoiding them, you can’t.
You know, in fairness I’m onboard with your line of thinking ultimately.
But ask yourself: what’s running on your computer? Do you know all the people who supplied each and every bit of code on your computer?
I run Linux myself: EVERYTHING I run is made by randos who decided to code something and give it away for free. And 99.99% of them ultimately have no motive other than selflessly give back to the community. This has been solidly proven for many decades and it continues to be proven.
If you run Windows however, you KNOW you run an OS made by a for-profit with no principles and no regards for your rights and your privacy for the sole purpose of extracting as much money out of you as they can, directly or indirectly.
Which one would you trust ultimately? Randos you don’t know but have an unbroken record of doing the right thing, or companies you know have a proven track record of trying to shaft you at every opportunity if they can get away with it?
Ultimately, it’s a question of trust. You seem to trust no-one. I submit that you should look at the actions of whoever supplies the software you use and decide whom to trust based on what they do, not what they say or what your guts tell you.
In the specific case of GrapheneOS, Micay is an abrasive and toxic SOB (I know, not his fault, he’s on the spectrum, but that’s just an objective fact) and the community he created around him continues to be toxic to this day after he’s stepped down. And I disagree with some of the technical choices he made for GrapheneOS with respect to security vs privacy. But I would trust the software he writes any day of the week because he’s never done anything to prove me I shouldn’t trust his code. If he ever sneaks in analytics, ads, or some automatic updater that doesn’t ask permission in his code however, I’ll blacklist his ass forever in a New York minute. But he hasn’t, and neither have any of the GrapheneOS contributors.
So if you think GrapheneOS works for you, you should use it because I believe it is trustworthy.
Calyx, for instance, isn’t as good as GrapheneOS, they do a lot of snitching on you (including to Google and Mozilla) and they overlook critical details such as this one
Okay, let’s unpack the pack of BS shall we…
Resolved in CalyxOS 4.9.4, June 2023 Feature Update.Please go spread your FUD someplace else.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this project was involved in some way.
You still don’t elaborate why you wouldn’t be surprised. Have you seen something suspicious from the GrapheneOS people? Evidence of shenanigans?
If GrapheneOS is sketchy, I’d really love to know. Honest. Even if whoever makes the allegations is clutching as straws: as least there are straws.
Or can we safely assume it’s just a vague feeling you have for no particular reason?
Care to elaborate?
complement
compliment.
But hey, on the plus side, now I’m 100% sure you’re not an AI 🙂
As a CalyxOS user myself, I was about to reply with some comparison points, and then I thought… Why bother. I’ll just get downmodded and dragged into another pointless argument with people who think it’s vitally important that they should be right and I’m wrong.
So my take is this: whatever works for you.
You like GrapheneOS? More power to you.
You like CalyxOS? You’re a rockstar.
You like IodéOS, LineageOS or /e/? Cool!
What matters is not to run Google’s surveillance stack. That’s what’s important! Even if your deGoogled OS of choice isn’t quite entreprise-grade, it’s still 95% safer and 200% more honest than anything with straight Google on it.
I am doubly pissed off:
But… I would be pissed off if I used straight Firefox, and I don’t: I use LibreWolf, and I have no doubt they’ll strip this latest round of Mozilla nonsense from the LibreWolf browser.
I don’t know… I have a love/hate relationship with Mozilla: on the one hand, they’re pretty much the only thing that stands between the final overrun of the web by the Google monoculture and still having some kind of a choice what you use to hit the internet, and they make one of the only email clients worth its salt in Linux. On the other hand, every time they decide to do something, it’s always a screw-up, and it’s been like that for decades. Surely in their position, they should know what not to do to piss off everybody all the time, and yet… What a weird bunch.
The problem with pulling Betteridge is that this isn’t a headline: this is one person asking a genuine question in a Lemmy community.
hair-brained
Harebrained.
I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.