Keep trying, check protondb for the games you want to play, popos is probably the best, or garuda has support for nvidia out of the box
If nothing else just try back once or twice a year whenever you see a new release from the distro you want to use. The 1660 is a pretty common card so in general it should be well supported.
This is a tough situation because the more changes to settings you make the more unique you will appear. Less is more in this case, libre wolf or Mullvad are both good Firefox based browsers with good defaults. My biggest recommendation to add is a cookie auto delete plugin, or if you dont need to keep anything logged in even better just have it delete cookies on shutdown.
I don’t trust for profit venture capital funding, if you want to see where it ends up just Look at how telegram or wickr transitions from being “open” and free to getting stripped of features only to have them become paid only and the wickr sold off to Amazon and ended all non business support…the business model for making a profit off chat applications is bad for users.
Also now that signal supports usernames I have no reason to use anything else even for people I wouldn’t want having my real number.
Not sure I follow your reasoning here… Having commercial forks isn’t necessarily “competition” or if it is it’s not always a bad thing. I suppose you could look at something like say Debian as being in "competition” with Ubuntu, but they both promote the underlying linux kernel and benefit from each other’s improvements, while one is very much for profit while the other is a very well funded non profit organization.
Isn’t that literally what the GPL3 exists to prevent? So called “tivoization”?
You know what would really make stallman smile is if you licensed it under something that requires sharing the source and all modifications.
Also solves the cost problem since you no longer have to support the infrastructure for all users just a small subset. I already host searxng and it’s not great but I host it because I support projects that encourage self hosting and we need more free and open source search options
Also how is your product getting used by another company “going to waste” all your work? Maybe you mean take advantage of without paying? But if that’s the case and money is such a big deal how is advertising off the table? Unless you’re trying to compete with kagi, but you’re facing a huge uphill struggle if you plan to monitize and not be open source/self hostable…
If on the other hand you change your mind about it, I’ll be one of many self hosting fans who will happily deploy and contribute to improve the project in any way possible. (Currently self hosting searxng here)
That said, even if it’s not fully open, really looking forward to seeing the project grow, it sounds like you have your hearts in the right place and we sure do need something better.
They can’t get a phone number from someone if only a username was shared with that person. maybe the people who lectured you about it not also being for anonymity where not aware of plans to ad usernames or that a projects aims and use cases can change over time but signal can and has already been useful to a good number of journalists, not requiring a phone number to share your contact with someone is what id consider a major game changer in terms of what use cases are now open and threat models that can be accounted for.
If we’re talking about these agencies subpoenaing in order to get the data, that kinda sounds like privacy protections are in place for it. I think whats really happening here is that push data is now one of a hundred or so other things (like emails, google/app maps data, web search history), that’s now being included when agencies make requests for a users data… they arent specifically going after push notifications any more then they’re going after how many steps your fitbit is counting, they just want all the information they can get, and by voluntarily giving it to these companies we put ourselves at risk, its a very distopian trade off.
So assuming the app isnt E2EE then there would be many ways to read message contents, for example if the subpoena your email provider, or SMS provider. Google play store and apple store again also already have all the details of what apps you use, how often you update them or when you removed them… There is just no benefit to using push for this kind of data gathering, there is always one or more much better ways of obtaining any of this data… wanna know when a woman left the state to go to health clinic? Cell towers. Husband suspected of murdering wife and you want to know what dating apps he used? Google play store has logs of every dating app they joined, and all those dating apps will gladly hand over chat logs and other data to proper authorites when asked nicely… And its not like the pushnotifications themselves are just open air unencrypted broadcasts anyone can monitor, Law enforcment at the very least has to submit the requests to google and apple anyway, so why would they care about push notifications when they can get access to a suspects entire cloud storage and emails?
I’ll bet whats really happening here isnt even that cops are “super interested” in push data, but rather they realized that its one of many forms of data that they include when make a request. I’d bet tey also grab any kind of “fitness” related data , and things like your advertising preferences too, because why not? Investegators don’t usually go around asking for just the bare minimum they need to incriminate someone or prove an allegation, they just fill out the data request form and check “all of the above”.
Go look at how many different options google takeout has, and imagine they probably have a few bonus ones just for law encforcment, Push notifications is just a drop in the bucket in terms of the data that we’re all giving away freely by depending on the duopoly of google/apple for all our mobile communications.
Remember that “average Joe” is not actually signals only focus, it’s average journalist/ whistleblower/protestor living under a hostile government that may target them and their associates for what the rest of us “average joes” might consider basic free speech.
So a scenario might be, people use signal in Iran to arrange a mass protest on a specific day, word gets out and some of the organizers are arrested and pressured to give up their companions… They cooperate by unlocking phones, but police have no idea who the lead organizer “RndoUsr.40” is and the people arrested never met face to face so no amount of pressure would get them the organizers real ID
And yeah, for us average joes it’s good for aquaintences and because names are easier to remember so it’s handy.
How is getting a push notification any better at tracking someone than the actual gps and tower data that their phone is CONSTANTLY sending out to their cell providers?
Seems really overblown, like most people hearing this assume it’s including contents of the notifications but it doesn’t, and if law enforcement wants to put a suspect at a crime scene, they can just get the data from T-Mobile, if it gets to the point they’re asking Google or Apple for info, id be much more concerned about all the data and emails stored on the cloud, which they already have no problems giving out.
Am I missing something? What can law enforcement gain from push notification data that they can’t get with data from the cell provider already or the wealth of other data collected by Gmail, maps, Uber, etc, which is way more useful than anything a push notification would contain.
Not defending the practice of course, I don’t get push notifications because I don’t have Google apps installed on my grapheneOS phone, but I’m pretty sure T-Mobile knows my location just as well.
The main thing they lack is an easy to use Discord to [XMPP, simplex, session] bridge, If they have that then you could just hop on whichever you prefer and be in touch with the group. Love it or hate it, discord is the top chat app for the moment and being able to interact with it is a necessity.
Matrix has basically come in to place as IRC “2.0” with developers, nearly every fediverse project has Matrix channels, most open source projects in general are starting to have them. XMPP has many years on Matrix but it never took off in regards to that very critical niche of early adopters, developers and power users. XMPP was a good competetor to the web 1.0 chat apps of AIM and MSN but Discord and other apps are much more rich content focused.
Simplex seems to only have a command line interface for PC, it als owould be pretty clunky for groups i think, I have yet to see anyone advertise a Simplex “group chat” in the way they would a discord server, but perhaps there are examples out there.
Session is somewhat better but hinges on the success of a cryptocurrency for its continued development so thats a no from me, also seems to have a lot of scammers although perhaps not as bad as telegram.
Matrix has clients listed on F-Droid.
It is on f-droid too. This isnt being “unhinged” its just calling out google for their hypocrisy and pointless "privacy” policies and citing lots of examples.