My pleasure, thanks for sharing all this important knowledge!

PS: I have few related things on https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/DigitalSelfSovereignty so I’d be curious to hear your opinion on it.

Link https://www.punchinguppress.com/post/disengage-from-the-internet and ToC :

Part 1: Why Disengage?
    Chapter 1: What We’re Fighting Against
    Chapter 2: How Do We Reclaim Our Lives By Disengaging?
    Chapter 3: Giants In The Dark

Part 2: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Data
    Chapter 4: Pay Attention to Privacy Policies
    Chapter 5: Control Your Online Accounts
    Chapter 6: Bash The Brokers
    Chapter 7: Surf In Secret
    Chapter 8: Escape Email Tracking
    Chapter 9: Protect Your Phone
    Chapter 10: Stop Being Loyal

Part 3: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Home
    Chapter 11: Hide Your Home Address
    Chapter 12: Remove Your Home Photos From The Web
    Chapter 13: Banish Smart Products From Your Spaces

Part 4: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Content
    Chapter 14: Protect Your Posts
    Chapter 15: Retract Your Reviews
    Chapter 16: Say Sayonara To Social Media

Part 5: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Attention
    Chapter 17: Don’t Surf If You Don’t Need To
    Chapter 18: Annihilate Ads
    Chapter 19: Say See Ya To Your Smartphone
    Chapter 20: Ghost Corporate News

Part 6: Disengage By…Quitting The Big 4
    Chapter 21: Say Goodbye To Google
    Chapter 22: Say Au Revoir To Amazon
    Chapter 23: Say Arrivederci To Apple
    Chapter 24: Say Mmm-Bye To Microsoft

Part 7: Live Your Life

Same here, I’m not a pro but I tried few years ago and it wasn’t that stable. Now I can’t remember the last time it did crash on me, kudos to people behind Kdenlive!

Valve’s Debian based SteamOS

Not to confuse with the Arch based SteamOS running on the SteamDeck which is very functional.

I haven’t dig into it but I’d check https://lucaweiss.eu/post/2024-06-24-esim-manager-for-mobile-linux/ i.e. yes, in theory “normal” distributions as you list “should” support it… but rarely do modems on desktop (or even laptops?) support eSIM. Consequently it’s more on other devices, e.g. phones, and those tend to have dedicated distributions, e.g. PostMarketOS on a FairPhone but not on PinePhone as it doesn’t have eSIM support.

Angry update.

I also have a PinePhone and PinePhone Pro… but I wouldn’t (yet) recommend them as daily drivers unless :

• you are REALLY committed to privacy
• don’t care much for the camera
• don’t need mobile “Apps” and fine using the Web or Linux (which are great) apps
• don’t need much battery
• you are eager to tinker.

If you’re in EU https://murena.com/smartphones/ is a good compromise IMHO and it will radically cheaper than an iPhone. I imagine elsewhere there are other companies selling new or refurbished deGoogled phones. Again that’ll probably set you back 300 € versus 1000 € for an iPhone. One is a tool, the other is, again from my biased perspective a former iPhone user, a tool too but mostly a status symbol.

Edit on parental controls : from a technical standpoint, which I’d argue it’s only part of the challenge, I’ve found https://doc.e.foundation/support-topics/parental-control specifically but more broadly https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.timelimit.android.open/ or https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.timelimit.android.aosp.direct/ which are more about self discipline. There is also https://github.com/xMansour/KidSafe but seems outdated.

Android always sends requests to Google.

If you meant even deGoogled Androids (e.g. /e/OS as suggested here), not stock Android, then can you please send references on that?

A de-googled phone with no Play Services is too limiting.

Isn’t microG with alternative app stores sufficient for most people?

Nice, how does it compare to Kdenlive?

The general consensus amongst the Android community is that rooting is detrimental to privacy. In a sense, I agree with them since privilege escalation because of human error becomes a much bigger threat if the user has root access.

No, that’s BS. It entirely depends on your “threat model” just like security.

Namely if you go full OSHW/FLOSS and yet you volunteer your data on Facebook.com (or whatever that website is called today) then you have no privacy. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a behavior problem.

If your threat model is about government hiring dedicated staff to know what you are up to, or that the infrastructure you rely is can’t be trusted, then rooting is the last of your problems.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t worry but I don’t see the relevance of rooting Android in that situation. Root or not does not somehow change how your modem behaves, you’re still at the mercy of the drivers.

I recommend you check projects like Precursor (at https://precursor.dev/ redirecting to the CrowdSupply page) which try to tackle, if I understood correctly, the kind of worry you have, namely actually understand the entire stack.

That being said, even in such context, you still rely on some infrastructure to relay messages to others so you need that and the recipients to also respect your privacy. If not (which would be a fair assumption) then at least you must understand the cryptographic primitives you rely on… and if you don’t (which most people don’t, me included despite my interest in the mathematics behind that, in particular one-way functions) then you have to some trust in the public research in the domain.

So… I do have a Precursor, tinker with it, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, had an iOS phone until recently, switched to (rooted) /e/OS and my personal position is that while interacting with others (and a mobile is 100% about that) one has to make pragmatic about their choices.

oculus software for my vr

Check https://lvra.gitlab.io/ for plenty of options. I’m playing VR on Linux but it’s using SteamVR with the Index.

the world runs off GitHub whether we like it or not

It doesn’t and we don’t like it anyway.

PS: to clarify, yes GitHub is wildly popular but, and the kernel is a particularly interesting example, it does not host ALL projects, only a lot of popular ones. A lot of very popular ones are also NOT there but rather on their own git, mailing list, GitLab instance, Gitea, etc. It’s a shortcut, I understand that, but by ascertaining it as “truth” it’s hiding a reality that is quite different and showing that reliable alternatives do exist.

It’s federated, so one can setup whatever instance they want on whatever domain they want.

If the admin feels “.wtf” is edge, cool. If someone else believe it’s NSFW or wouldn’t help promote the cause, they can setup another instance on another domain. If the content itself is federated, they might share that link instead.

True, in fact I’ve done so myself (simplifying a curve resulting of hand sketching). Still I’d argue that’s not the expected behavior of storing the vector file but rather explicitly modifying it.

main difference between raster graphics and vector graphics was the quality

It’s not. The primitives, the most basic constitutive building blocks, are different, for raster it’s the pixel (a mix of colors, e.g. red/green/blue) whereas for vector it’s the … vector (a relative position elements, e.g. line, circle, rectangle or text start with).

This is a fundamental distinction on how you interact with the content. For raster you basically paint over pixels, changing the values of pixels, whereas for vector you change values of elements and add/remove elements. Both can be lossless though (vector always is) as for raster can have no compression or lossless compression. That being said raster does have a grid size (i.e. how many pixels are stored, e.g. 800x600) whereas vector does not, letting you zoom infinitely and see no aliasing on straight lines.

Anyway yes it’s fascinating. In fact you can even modify SVG straight from the browser, no image editor or text editor needed, thanks to your browser inspector (easy to change the color of a rectangle for example) or even the console itself then via JavaScript and contentDocument you can change a lot more programmatically (e.g. change the color of all rectangles).

It’s a lot of fun to tinker with!

Switched from iOS (iPhone XS) to Android (/e/OS on CMF Nothing, installed by Murena) and 0 regret.

I switched the same day but I didn’t transfer all content, only contacts, 2FA auth and installed most apps I needed. Transition was very easy thanks to Firefox Account and because most of what I really is Web based anyway (e.g. HomeAssistant for my self-hosted IoT setup). KDE Connect was indeed a great surprise, I thought it’d be the same as on iOS but it’s a LOT more functional. Also using Termux (rather than iSH on iOS) with access to the storage made tinkering way easier and powerful.

My new phone is actually 1/3rd of the price of the flagship I bought 6 years ago… but they feel the same. I like that a lot because I do NOT want my phone to “feel” special, I want it to “just” be a functional piece of tech, valuable only for what it does, not what it “is”. It’s not a totem, it’s just a thing I rely on. So yes switching made that very striking.

Overall if you want to “just” move away from iOS or Googled Android I find Murena value proposition to be on point.

Meanwhile https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/petition/content/0729%252F2024/html/Linux%2Bstatt%2BWindows just closed with 2474 Supporters