Thanks, I’ve been looking for a comparison like that but search engines have just gotten ridiculously bad. /e/ slacking on the webview updates is interesting and steers me away from it.

I’m leaning towards the fairphone right now because it’s cheaper at 256GB and not smaller than my current phone. DivestOS looks like it does most of what grapheneOS would do for me.

Yes and it isn’t rated IPX7 for that reason, just IP55. I wouldn’t hold it under the faucet but it should be perfectly fine for daily use.

Fun fact: It’s still entirely possible to make a phone water resistant even if it has a removable back. Samsung did it in 2014 with the S5. Glass backs are just there to make it easier to break a phone, not for any technical reason.

I already have Osmand and while it’s a great offline map, it can’t pick the fastest route for me every single day.

Yes and that’s why you stick to popular FOSS stuff.

Last time I checked, the secret chats had some severe downsides that make them unusable as normal chats.

And if you want to bring open-source to the conversation: Signal is AGPL licensed, both the apps and backend. Not that it matters because of the E2E encryption.

Telegram doesn’t have proper E2E encryption, so why are you using it for text messages at all? Asking this in privacy seems a bit weird to me.

If we wanted to own the devices we bought, we would have needed to start 20 years ago.

Now it’s too late, the only reasonable thing you can do is clawing back control over your device by installing a custom ROM.

How about privacy.com?

It lets you create a virtual credit card for every subscription and the point is that you can cancel those with a single click, but it’s also said to be a good way of keeping track of the subscriptions.

Oh, that’s from the installer and not one of those warnings you get after opening apps. Makes sense.

I missed that, thanks for pointing it out. The one without S is the correct one.

But that makes me wonder, how did OP not end up with two signal apps then?

The package name is correct, but signal was never on F-droid.

Do you have a third party repo that might be compromised?

Edit: Package name isn’t correct, so that’s almost definitely a compromised version. Get rid of it ASAP.

Ripped right from wikipedia: “A backdoor is a typically covert method of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in a computer, product […].”

Given you can’t be arsed to google that on your own, I don’t see s point in arguing.

Downloading and running binaries isn’t anything to worry about. Many apps do that to circumvent the update delays that apple and google put in place.

Browsers also download and run code from any website you visit. The security measures make sure that this code can’t just do anything, just like on android.

Tiktok is indeed more malicious than any other app I can think of, but it isn’t a backdoor.

US tech is backdoored just as hard as chinese stuff. None of the companies involved need to know when and for what the government uses backdoors, so they generally don’t.

Pen support on linux is amazing. On the T935 it worked without any setup and was much better than on windows in terms of input lag and turning the touchscreen off/on properly.

I used Xournal++ and while the UI is a bit small on a 13" 1080p screen, it worked perfectly.

Now I remember another thing you should probably look out for: Don’t get anything with a higher resolution than 1080p. Fractional scaling on linux is basically not a thing, so the resolution determines the size of any UI.

I put a similar amount of money into a used fujitsu T935 a few years ago for the same reason.

It was great for this, so I’d recommend looking into used 2in1 laptops. With linux and TLP you can easily get enough battery life out of pretty much anything.

I wouldn’t call that weird. Microsoft’s track record for anything involving security is absolutely atrocious, to a point where you now have to assume everything in azure and every single windows computer is compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702095

Classic Microsoft. They regularly use defender to harrass users of software they don’t like.

Steam puts everything into one folder that you can just delete if you want to.

You can just add the exe to steam and it’ll take care of setting everything up for you.

They better be trustworthy, otherwise my eyes will be very unhappy.

Amd what do they do if the battery runs out? Suspend to disk?

Yes, steam will create a prefix for any game or exe that you add when you first launch it. That’s why the first launch always takes a minute or two.

The same exe can be used by windows and proton, so having a dual-boot setup with all games on the windows partition is feasible.

But there’s one very important thing about that: Turn off fast boot in windows before mounting the drive in linux, otherwise you will have to wait hours when booting windows the next time (which can’t be cancelled because microsoft).

For proton games, yes. I still have some games in my old windows installation and they work just fine.

If you manually set your games to use proton, that will work for all of them. For the ones that have a native linux version, steam will detect that you have the windows version and download the extra files needed for the linux version automatically.

Google’s swipe typing is pretty damn good, but it isn’t magic. It gets a lot better after using it for a while so I’m sure they use reinforcement learning in addition to the dictionary.

They’ve had it for quite a while and it’s good, so I doubt they are putting much work into improving it. And since we have phones with TPUs and multimodal LLMs now, I think it’s possible to beat google.

The LLM would only need 3-10 words of context and the swipe data as input to generate a single word, so it can be very small. I don’t know much about the power of cellphone TPUs, but I think training an LLM with about 10M parameters on the fly should be possible. If that’s the case, we could beat google while doing everything locally on the phone, so no privacy compromises.

Now that I think about it, it sounds doable. But then again I never did anything like this so I’m probably underestimating it by an order of magnitude or two.

Florisboard is my daily driver and I have unexpected keyboard so I can do proper VNC sessions from my phone.

But it’s quite bad, given their care for privacy there’s no way they can compete with google who has all the data.

I know a bit of machine learning and I’m pretty confident I could hack something together that’s better than what florisboard has right now, but I’d have no idea where to even start integrating it.

I live in Germany and germans are bad at software, so they generally don’t work as well as cards or the respective web interfaces and I never tried using them.

GrapheneOS setup is very easy, anyone who can follow a manual is able to do it.

I was hoping it could be scraped somehow, but yeah, that’s very non-trivial for something like maps.

Seconded, I currently use unexpected keyboard but I really want something with swipe typing.

Is there a way to make it pull some data on road closures from google maps? There’s a lot of construction on my way to work right now so I rely on google maps to pick the fastest routes, which it does well. OSM just doesn’t have the data to do that.

At that point, why not just run mint instead?

I’d recommend against ubuntu (but not against derivatives of it) because they clearly don’t respect the FOSS spirit with their insistence on snaps.

I don’t quite get what you’re trying to say. Those issues exist both in Germany and Sweden, so they are similar in that regard. I’d even be more comfortable with everyone knowing my income instead of just the state.

Doing it online instead of on paper doesn’t compromise privacy any further.

Doing bureaucracy online versus in person is just a convenience thing, German government agencies still enter your data into computer systems, they just have a massively convoluted process for it. I expect no privacy in those cases anyways.

But bankID does seem scary. A single point of failure for basically everything and centralized tracking of every transaction.

If the past two decades have shown me anything, it’s that I definitely don’t want my data in any government’s hands.

How is scandinavia more connected? I know cash is dying out everywhere but here and that everyone’s earnings are public, but those aren’t too important to me. Private communication and browsing (and generally not being spied on) are what I mostly care about.

The current german government is trying to build a surveillance state and force chat apps into adding backdoors to their encryption and the culture is shifting for the worse with stuff like tiktok still growing.

Right now I’d say switzerland is better in the privacy department (and a few other ones, but that’s beside the point).

I use tailscale to access my PC from anywhere and good old VNC to control it. Tailscale literally takes 5 minutes to set up, it’s incredibly easy and completely free for what you’re trying to do.

For the VNC setup I run krfb on the desktop and AVNC on the phone.