And just to be clear, RT is also state propaganda in the same way Fox News or CNN is.

Honestly can’t disagree, it’s unbelievably polished and high quality for being free.

It suffers from that less now since Canonical abandoned the project. UBPorts is AFAIK just a community project to keep it alive. I would’ve assumed they would drop the CLA stuff, but I guess they didn’t want to or couldn’t for whatever reason?

PostmarketOS has a similar ability thanks to Waydroid, though I’ve never used it myself.

Long-term, yes. It isn’t ready as a daily driver for the average person (hence why I used the term ‘build up’), but there is realistically no other option that can truly be called community owned like PostmarketOS can. It’s our best shot at a permanent non-enshittified platform, it just needs our support so it can become polished and support more phones :)

The issue with Ubuntu Touch is that unfortunately it uses an outdated Android kernel (which is also usually not receiving security updates) and a Halium abstraction layer to access the closed source binary blob Android drivers for the phone’s hardware. It also requires that it be installed on top of an existing Android install, so in all it’s more of Linuxified layer on top of Android, which means it’s not truly escaping the control of the Android/Google ecosystem.

UBPorts also appears to inherit the use of CLA’s from Canonical:

I’m very much not a fan of CLA’s., which SailfishOS also employs.

The advantage of PostmarketOS (even though it is not ready as a daily driver for the average person), is that it uses the upstream Linux kernel with open-source GPU/hardware drivers, not an Android kernel to access the outdated proprietary GPU/Hardware blobs.

Graphene is currently the best daily driver for the average person, but as they are a hardened Android fork, they are still somewhat reliant on Google playing ball.

PostmarketOS is not ready for the average person, but it is our best long-term option since it is not based on Android at all.

Legend! :D

!videos@sopuli.xyz would be a good spot for stuff like that :)

Please consider donating to PostmarketOS to build up a pure mobile Linux alternative that is completely free of Google’s influence. It’s the best option we have.

Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.

For the parts they have open-sourced, they implementrd a CLA that contributers must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to relicense your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.

Personally I’d be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.

Found a rare interview with Horse that occurred between levels 5 and 6.

These are the best I’ve found that also have no trackers in them (most are in f-droid, a couple from aurora/playstore):

• shattered pixel dungeon (roguelike)
• breakout 71
• endless sky (space trader)
• pewpew live (stick shooter)
• vroomies (odd swipe racer)
• Datawing (super fun racer/timetrial drifting game, best out of all of them IMO. Not on f-droid)
• the frostrune (point and click adventure)
• ScummVM (emulator for classic point and click games, many of which are free)
• Arx Libertatis (an engine to run Arx Fatalis, though you need the OG game files, which isn’t free, but… Yarr)

I think Star Wars Kotor and Kotor 2 have android ports. Those are great RPG’s, but not free.

I personally think there’s a law of diminishing returns with things like graphics and resolution, and as technology advances, what used to be good or even amazing becomes our baseline as expectations shift.

Somewhat related to that, I’d also say there’s merit in sometimes analyzing if our chase for ‘better’ is truly bringing us enough value to warrant the downsides it brings. As an example, the market’s desire for the new and novel, for better graphics, for higher resolutions, feeds into a consumer culture that brings with it a tremendous amount of greenhouse emissions to produce and ship all those new consoles and higher resolution monitors/TVs, environmental destruction to mine the raw materials for them, exploitation of third world workers to gather those materials and assemble them into those products, products which as the OP points out, are increasingly user hostile and enshittified alongside those better graphics.

When looked at objectively, a Wii is a comparatively low resolution, but it is also widely available used (so while it did initially contribute to the downsides I mentioned above when new, as a used object on a second-hand market, it does not), and despite that lack of resolution, still brings with it the capability of giving us great fun, which is ultimately the reason we want to experience them, is it not? And due to its age, it has no enshittification whatsoever, the user completely owns the experience.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.

Even if we had pristine environments and only healthy food, cancer will still occur quite frequently. I of course support researching more effective cancer treatments than we currently have (and what we do have should be free to anyone who needs it), but until better options are available, chemotherapy, as awful as it can be, can be very effective depending on the specific cancer, and has spared many a horrible death despite it being a poison itself.

We would condemn tens of thousands to a slow death if we were to cast aside toxic chemotherapy without an adequate replacement that has proven itself.

!energy@slrpnk.net might be a better fit for this article.

Me, still playing 480p Wii games on my modded Wii with an old ass 1080p TV, having a blast

I had to buy a printer recently to replace a used one from the 90’s that I’d been happily using for the past decade, and decided to go with a fairly new laser brother printer. I plugged it in and, magically, it really did just work, even on Linux.

Mint and Mint LMDE are using Pipewire by default, how are you using pulseaudio?

Gnome 3, despite being simple by design and relatively easy for us techy folk to adapt to, is likely still quite a radical departure for someone who understands absolutely nothing about computers besides what they had to learn to do their jobs.

Explaining Computers did a good video on Zorin, where he shows it can be more Windows-like. Linux Mint is another good option, but it wouldn’t be too different from the Windows themed KDE you tried, IMO.

I think with people such as you described, where change is feared so much, it probably is best to stick with the most familiar possible layout, and to not share more information about the differences than absolutely needed. Perhaps the initial Gnome 3 shock made them shut down even when KDE was introduced instead? Hard to say. Good on ya for trying, though.