you realise you’re here too, right pal?

Not sure what you mean, you can get a used Pixel 6a for 120 EUR, which will continue to get updates for another 2.5 years. Show me another phone with such a great value proposition. That’s exactly my point, outside of the EU and north america, you’re just very unlikely to find that scenario. I don’t want to doxx myself here, but the going rate for the phone you mentioned is at minimum 300 euro equivalent - comparable flagships significantly cheaper. I have nothing against Pixels specifically - before the re-brand, I had nearly every Google Nexus phone ever made, and they were all amazing. They’re just not acceptably priced in all markets for what they are, even used.

I’d argue however that there’s much more to android than either Pixels OR chinese spyware crap - Samsung, Sony, and LG aren’t always perfect, but often make very good products that if running a custom ROM, are every bit as secure as any pixel, while the hardware of pixels is generally a bit worse, but compensated for with better software optimisation. Buying into a false dichotomy that there is only one good android manufacturer puts us no further ahead than apple fanboys beholden to a largely good, but sometimes flawed ecosystem.

My ideal is that development can expand to other mainstream brands and OEMs, and that the interest in the graphene/ROM community picks up steam more broadly, rather than being siloed into pixels alone, and bound to the fate of google-specific hardware going forward.

graphene is ONLY for select Google pixel phones though. I wish this was made much clearer by the team and advocates.

its a real shame because pixels, although big in the USA are typically a minority of most android ecosystems elsewhere, and bootloader hijinks keep some perfectly capable phones from being easy to switch over to, even if they were supported.

Even on samsungs, which are much better for flashing than they used to be - my options on a year old flagship for a decent ROM are pathetic compared to the old days.

so I would really love to use graphene, and go back to an open source ROM without crap on it, but pixels are such a bottom tier phone for their price in a lot of places, as much as I really really want the project go gain traction for their transparency and objectives.

“it prevents some users’ preferred operation of using the mouse while its charging”

…

“It’s not a stupid decision”

absolutely. I had tried Linux on various machines long ago but was one of the people that was put off by older distro’s learning curves - I’m now daily driving Linux on both my laptop and desktop and the main push for the switch is microsoft fucking around with settings, installing candy crush after updates (on a paid OS), adding more and more dumb, unsolicited, privacy invading AI bullshit with every feature update, and running like shit on a perfectly adequate machine.

Modern Linux, with flatpak support? I haven’t looked back once - had to help a friend fix something on a win11 desktop recently and was reminded of every reason I made the switch. Even if I had to jump in the terminal every day like long ago, it would still be worth it to not have bing, copilot, and edge rammed down my throat, whether I want them or not.

Windows is getting so shitty that completely non-technical users are tired of it… as soon as somewhat open minded users start to experiment and realise that Linux feature and UX parity has been achieved - I hope microsoft fucking collapses and we can all finally walk into the sunlight that open source OSes and software represent.

I mean, technically - the most secure option is irrevocably destroying the laptop everytime you have a break.

absolutely fucking insane - imagine suggesting a pet could “leave if they don’t like it” for any other form of animal abuse.

I’m not saying that all the women need to wear ‘skimpy bikinis’, I’m just making the point that the teams that are wearing the ‘sport hijab’ aren’t doing it because they have any kind of freedom, but because there is enormous societal pressure and political/legal/religious oppression, that extends beyond the games into their daily lives. Calling that ‘freedom’ is unreasonable, because the choice is either ‘wear these specific clothes (men-excluded) or face social outcast/death’

I completely agree that the frequent sexualisation of women’s sporting outfits is something which is still shitty and I’m not defending the objectification of talented athletes who want to be seen as skilled, rather than oggled for their body - but claiming that because the voluntary admission sports-team outfit is more revealing than necessary, doesn’t mean the athletes were forced into wearing it, and in the broader society, people in those same countries actually have the freedom to wear whatever they please, whether it’s ‘skimpy’ or not.

Sure, the women on the western team are perhaps pressured into the bikinis from decades of objectification and commercial sex-appeal underwriting womens sports, but in their daily lives outside, they aren’t beholden to a religious dress code, and consequently have much more ‘freedom’. The argument can also be made that even though the ‘skimpy’ outfits are objectifying, the athletes would have known what the prevailing dress code at the sport was before they signed up, and were ‘okay’ with it - at least to the extent that they still participated.

well nobody is forcing anybody to wear anything in the western countries - the huge difference is that outside of the sporting environment, women can choose to wear or not wear ‘skimpy bikinis’ - but in a sharia observant country, there is no such allowance made, so the sports team outfit actually is indicative of the dress standards forced upon women and expected by society.

Some cultures allow women to cover their bodies. While others allowed them to show as much as they’d like. Oh they’re allowed to cover themselves? They’re forced to wear it.

A truly insane way of phrasing repression - I guess Jews in nazi Germany were allowed to wear a star of david? No, I don’t care how liberating some women say the enforced coverings are, when there isn’t a choice - it’s repression. Plain and simple. Try being a woman in saudi wearing normal clothing in public and see how permissive the regime is.

Yeah but people are correct when they ask if that’s really the standard you should be aiming for. If democrats want to beat trump as much as they say - perhaps to stop shooting themselves in the foot, picking incrementalist candidates who forget where they are, and trying to re-engage people that (correctly) feel completely unrepresented by offering up these ancient clowns would be a good start.

Blind allegiance to the most uninspiring dem runner in history, and his campaign being more about who he isn’t…it’s just the emperor’s new clothes but as an extremely consequential election.

If democrats lose again, it’s time for some serious self reflection - as bad as trump is, and as insane and dangerous some of his supporters are - that’s not an acceptable excuse for losing an election - if anything, it makes it more embarrassing that there’s anything resembling an actual contest.

dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.

Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.

The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.

as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.

Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.

The issue is WhatsApp from a few years ago versus WhatsApp today - meta/favebook is probably the worst possible company to have bought it, their record on security, privacy, and features is horrible.

The app today is full of enshitification (meta ai being shoved down my throat by the communication monopoly) and nobody can ever fully trust their security or privacy because its not open source.

Signal sadly doesn’t yet have the ubiquity of whatsapp - but for everyone that has it (now I’m finding even non tech-savvy family are switching over) use signal, and where you have to, use WhatsApp.

imessage is no better in that case - and outside America barely anybody still uses either SMS or RCS, apple is a smaller share of the market meaning the ubiquity of imessage isn’t there.

If you want anything beyond SMS which is a universal standard, you both have to be using the same service - I’m just saying that signal is available for anyone who wants to use it.

I was also upset at the removal of texting from signal, but in hindsight its for the best - if its a secure message service that youre not charged per message to use, the support of a dying platform which is difficult to distinguish when in use is an issue - now its extremely clear whether youre reaching someone through signal or text, cause signal only sends signal messages.

Signal is better than any other common alternative, and its on both android and ios

The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you’re not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I’m very progressive myself, before it’s claimed otherwise)

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.

I don’t want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I’m still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don’t want to feed into their narratives of persecution.

I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people’s concerns about this behaviour.

I think PC gamers tend to overestimate their importance in OS distribution these days - gaming on Linux is just as passable these days as on Mac, and there’s much more to PC use than only gaming for 90% of users.

I feel that PC use is more complicated than gamers/productivity - but having switched over full time this year, Linux clearly has some work to do so the average user doesn’t need to touch the terminal - but even compared to 10 years ago its infinitely more capable and user friendly.

Customers of paid software need to start either voting with their feet meaningfully, or lobbying to get software support on Linux if they want it - complaining that titles aren’t available for Linux and then continuing to suffer through windows instead of making that known to the devs is seen exactly the same way - a sale.

I certainly miss some windows only software - but I’m not going to be held captive anymore for programmes I paid for, that refuse to consider my needs, when they are a part of my wider usage and expectations.

Not everybody who approaches the machine or walks past it is really consenting to their appearance being logged and analysed though - not to mention that “we don’t store data” is only true if the security is effective and no exploits manage to weaponise the camera now staring back at you as you try to make a purchase.

Ultimately vending machines are completely passive sales anyway, the collection of demographic data about who is buying from the machine are a little useless because it’s not like the machine can work on its closing techniques for coin based candy sales.