That’s a weird thing to present as an absolute truth. As someone who has exstensively used both Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11) and macOS (from 2011-2022), and now using KDE Plasma on my daily driver laptop, GNOME at work and Cinnamon for my living room machine: all three Linux DE are superior experiences.

Surely there are people who would prefer Windows and macOS over them, but it is highly subjective.

They got camera working on FP3 and FP4. Fairphone employs a guy who basically does work to get their hardware to run Linux.

I would use Audiobookshelf as a source for Music Assistant, and then play them via Music Assistant. That way I can use my Sonos speakers (and eventually Snapcast speakers), synchronize across rooms etc. If I had to use Audiobookshelf directly, I would either play it from my TV with the TV on (only other way I can use my Sonos Beam) or on my phone with a Bluetooth speaker or headphones.

Can’t wait to listen to a constant buzz of thousands of these in the air at all times.

How voluntary is it when these platforms have a monopolistic grasp on how consumers access music these days? And the more people believe that the artists are actually fairly compensated from this model, the firmer this grasp becomes. What choice do they have of being there if they want to have any kind of reach?

A Spotify Premium subscriptions will cost someone 156€ a year. If that person instead spent that entire music budget on purchasing albums from select musicians according to the enjoyment they derive from their works, or buy concert tickets or merch, and decides to pirate the rest of their music listening, what changes? For the consumer, they are now left with actual, irrevocable access (legal and illegal) to the same music you had rented access to before, and have spent the same amount of money. For the musicians, the ones who received the purchases are left with much more of your dedicated music spend, and the rest will have marginally less (their share based on total streams of your monthly subscription x12). For Spotify and Taylor Swift, they receive marginally less money (but more than the artists you actually listen to) of which they should probably not have received to begin with.

I’m not sure how you think Spotify compensation works, but it is not a “one stream and you get paid”-deal, but rather a revenue share model where artists are compensated from a large pool by total streams. The main share of your Spotify monthly subscription that goes to compensating artists goes to Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny etc. Being a top listener to your favorite, but underground band contributes negligibly to what they actually get paid.

If you care about their compensation, buy the album as directly from them as possible, or buy merch/go to concerts, and recommend their msuic to other people so they might end up paying customers. Subscribing to Spotify and thinking they get a fair deal out of that is not the way, and increasingly not the way (with their GenAI-shenanigans).

My Linux laptop at work is enrolled in Intune

Will be interesting to see how the Jolla phone turns out :)

I would like to use my current phone (Fairphone 4), so I will donate to postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, and some of the DE (ME?) like KDE Plasma Mobile and Phosh.

Oh, I wish. I will be focusing my year-end donation round on efforts to make that happen.

Their Linux marketing department seems to have been quite effective over the last year.

I need to do this, good memories!

I set up VNC to only allow connections from localhost on my mother’s computer, and then forward the required port via SSH when I need to connect. SSH is set up to only allow public key authentication. Works quite well

Oh, I had the impression that it didn’t work on Waydroid at all. What would be the benefit of using Signal UT over tje Waydroid version?

Surely that is just the Kerbal Space Program-DLC?

I recently got my Linux-laptop in a heavy MS-based company. It is enrolled via Intune and I can access all company resourcws an MS365 apps through Edge.

Apart from having to use Edge for all of that, it is a great experience compared to what I am used to.

But it took a while and a lot of complaining about being allowed to use more appropriate tools for our job. But the bottom line is: ask for it. Tell them why you need it. When they say no, try again later, document why your current setup fails and why getting a Linux-machinee would work. Maybe you will succeed. IT here has gone from “we don’t use open source” (actual quote) to giving us Linux-laptops and setting up Linux-servers on OT. They grow from this also.

Being one of the best paid traders in the world does not necessarily qualify you to advise the government… There are plenty of morons who (for some time) are able to make a killing as a trader due to taking excessive risks and being sufficiently lucky for some stretch of time.

I think I will take the jump with my FP4 sometime in the first half of 2026. So far the big blocker is Signal, as it still requires a mobile app to be the main application. Maybe I will keep a secondary, cheap Android phone running Lineage in a drawer somewhere.

I would rather go for postmarketOS than Ubuntu Touch, and there have been some recent advancements on that front for Fairphone 4 (camera and battery gauge), but I think Ubuntu Touch could be a good stepping stone.

?

Because line go up