brzrd

Use a retired phone with no apps other than your music and the players (New Pipe, Archive Tune, etc) you want. Give your old phones a 2nd life without having to purchase another thing. Connect via WiFi and have a ball.

“The fundamental architecture of Linux prohibits age verification completely”…until the next law erodes that privilege altogether.

I hope you are right. And for all our sakes, I really hope I am wrong.

Thanks for the explanation. What you have described is not different to the manner in which I understand the situation as well.

My concern is that (despite your good intentions) your previous comment may have the unintended effect of making light of the situation we are all in.

The ‘field’ we have the privilege to ignore now id a mandatory requirement for a passport and iris scan tomorrow.

My first thought is to not sit still and accept the new law - rather, to empower everybody here to write to their legislators to block or reverse these gross violations of privacy. May Linux developers have already expressed willful non-compliance to the law. Show we not get behind these developers and organisations (like the EFF) and demand a repeal?

I however apologise if I have misunderstood your intent. But one thing is for sure, if we do not put up a fight at present, then the future is already lost.

…until it becomes a requirement to be filled.

If that is the case, explain why is it being implemented in the heat of mass age verification? What is the motive?

Thanks. This is what I concluded from my reading too. Just needed to jump an extra hoop or two to allocate for btrfs which I didnt know about but going back and redoing the zrsm swap was not difficult.

Ha. Learnt something today. Thank you for the share. You are kind.

note: the term “virtual memory” I used in my response above refers to swap memory. I was having trouble recalling.

In the beginning it was that I wanted to try Gnome and Fedora. I was new to Linux then and experimenting was exciting.

But I guess the important point here (for me at least) is why I stayed on. Fedora

I realised the system packages for LibreOffice and some other apps were newer on Fedora.

Being able to run this laptop mostly on fairly current system packages meant more compatibility (eg. formatting cnsistency on LibreOffice) and not incurring resource overheads from running the same software on Flatpaks. I’ve not scientifically tested this but it does “feel” a lot snappier running system packaged apps.

I made the decision to move to Sway when Fedora 43 came out and that freed even more resources from not having to run Gnome.

Gnome was a good introduction to a keyboard driven workflow and moving to Sway was a lot easier because if my experience navigating via the keyboard on Gnome.

None of this was premeditated. Its just how things turned out for me. And with Linux, I’d probably optimise more as I go along.

My system just grew to adapt to my needs, preferences and limitations every step of the way. And I think that journey will continue to adapt as I go.

Will I recommend LinixMint to anyone? 100%!!! I cannot find any fault with it. Its super reliable, beautiful UI, decent customisations, etc. I’ve set up LMDE (the Debian variant of LinuxMint) for a few Windows-refugee friends of mine and they’ve been having a great time.

Will I go back to Mint? If I could run Sway on it, then perhaps. But I dont have a need to at this moment.

My daily driver is a 2014 i5 machine with 4GB RAM, running Fedora 43 Sway (riced but no animations).

It can simultaneously run Emacs, Librewolf 6-8 tabs (research), Helium 2-3 tabs (for email, calendar & cloud drive) and 1-2 desktop chat apps. If I flick on Freetube at this point, it’ll freeze up.

I’ve got a pretty minimalist approach to work so I don’t have too many things running most of the time. I use mostly system packages and Flatpaks sparingly. I can keep running this thing as my daily driver for a few more years.

Also stick a 27" display and a pair of 5" powered studio speakers into it in the evenings to enjoy some movie streaming.

ps: I’ve recently configured another 12GB of virtual memory (?) on the SSD to support the 4GB RAM on the machine and that has significantly helped with multitasking.

ps2: Sharing the above to encourage to try Linux out. I came to this with zero knowledge amd experience. Really amazing what’s possible.

ps3: May be also good to mention that if first ran Linux Mint (with no optimisations or modifications) on this machine and only moved to Fedora a year later. Both distros worked flawlessly. If anybody is keen to know why I moved from Linux Mint to Fedora, please ask and I will share my experience.

Truth is, most of us feel the same way you do. You are not alone. What is being shared by the community is the “best options of what we have” at the moment.

This tyranny is by design. But this also means we can design ourselves out of it. Its just slow process.

We are starting to see new models of communication be develop, and in some cases we are seeing convergence of these efforts into very exciting solutions.

We’ll get there. Its a lot of work and we have to keep doing whatever we can in our capacity to help that process along.

Just know we all feel the same way you do, and this is the best we got for the time being. We have to stick together and keep talking all this.

Power to us!!

Perhaps you have some useful suggestions to share. Always happy to listen and learn.

I jumped through hoops with the Samsung. ADB-ed the hexk out of it and broke functionality in so many ways.

If I can save you the effort - DON’T even bother trying. There is just too much interconnectedness to undo without breakage.

I moved to a hunch of Pixels running Graphene and have lived happily ever after.

With the added Israeli spyware coming to Samsung, I cannot think of any reason to put any effort into it.

Additional info: Skip the Pixel 6 and 7. Its better to spend a little more in the Pixel 8. I got mine used and its brilliant. I also liked how the Pixels 4 and 5 were as well. Very good devices.

I would not give up the smartphone for a dumb phone, primarily for the superior security and privacy smartphones provide that dumb phones just do not have technology for.

This conversation has a tone of settling for inferior technology to do the work a well-designed smartphone experience should.

The smartphone can be made pretty “dumb” - the user experience has more to do with the software (apps) added to it than the hardware (the smartphone) itself.

Aside from the apps the platform bundles, I only have Signal (for text and voice), email, a browser, calendar, a note taking app and a FOSS music player. I have disabled all sound and visual notifications and removed all apps off the main screen.

Of late, I’ve moved the SIM-card onto a secondary phone that resides in my bag, which is only switched-on for navigation or if I need WiFi in a snap.

It has not always been this way for me and I am sure my setup will continue to evolve as my needs change.

This!

That’s always the hope. I’ve not yet had a phone that has lasted me 10 years yet but hopefully with reparability and designs that favour stability instead of bleeding edge tech, we’ll be able to see a time when that happens. Good luck in your pursuit.

I’ve had about five different Pixels. One of the Pixel 5 just blew a motherboard. I tried replacing it, but It just made more financial sense to buy another one given that the phone came out in 2019(?) and I got it used. The Pixel 5 also stopped receiving security and GOS updates last year so it wasn’t worth saving. Other than this one account, the phones I own have been without serious issue. This is not a direct answer to your question, but I hope you find some meaning to help you decide.

Get your Pixel secondhand. That way you are not contributing to their profit margins and have more flexibility on the Pixel version you want without having to break the bank.

And I also agree with the comment that Pixels are not the most robust phones. They are good, but not the most robust thing you could own. Power but to issue across Pixel devices is a real thing. I had two of the power buttons on separate phones fall out. Good thing is that you can get them online cheaply and manually replace them yourself.

BUT Pixels are gorgeous phones and a real delight to use as well. Lovely screens, decent battery, good camera and is buttery smooth with Graphene.

I am on these Pixels because if Graphene.

The hardware shortcomings I can live with and work around. I mostly have great experiences with Pixels with the occasional hardware issue to slove.

I use the on-screen Accessibility Menu shortcut to adjust audio volume, screen brightness and un/locking the phone.

This here. Not fully featured but a decent reader and editor which we hope will improve with time. Good effort on the devs!

LibreOffice & Open Office Document Reader | ODF https://f-droid.org/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/

With the lack of any other viable option, I struggle to see the point of the arguement.

Agreed. The Google implementations are there for folks who absolutely cannot go without certain apps only available from the Play Store. Upon installation, all that’s there is the OS with the necessary apps (camera, phone, browser, etc) with the security on these individual apps additionally patched.

With the sandboxing of Google Play and Services AND the option to further house these apps from the Play Store in a separate profile, you have a perfectly working device that the individual user can customise to their needs.

Its a great project and a real asset to the FOSS, privacy and security community against big tech/govt surveillance.

The phone is only as good as how you choose to set it up and use it.