sees capitalism capitalisming capitalistly What is this, communism?

I’m sorry to hear—that’s surprising to me tbh, the Arch and Arch-based distros ive installed have all worked out of the box for me, with the only issues being related to hardware not working well with Linux ie not distro-specific (I used to have Ubuntu on the same machine for instance which had the same issues with the nvidia gpu and 1st gen ryzen cpu). But if you’ve had trouble thats fair enough, use whatever works well for you

I never said Fairphone was more unethical than its competitors, only that it claims to be more ethical and its main marketability is on the basis of this claim. If you didn’t care about ethics in phone production, would you still buy a Fairphone over any other phone? I don’t think so. Aside from their claims about ethics, the only thing that sets them apart is the modularity, which I do think is a positive and possibly that’s enough for some people, but I’m personally more concerned about the ethics of phones. If Fairphone is not substantially more ethical than its competitors then a lot of their customers would buy other phones, because other phones may have features that Fairphones don’t have.

And for the record I don’t think any ethical phone exists nor do I think it’s possible to ethically make a modern smartphone. There’s no ethical way to mine cobalt, and if you dispute that I challenge you to go work in a cobalt mine. Phone production is evidentially terrible for the environment and many of the natural resources required to make phones cannot be extracted without incredibly unpleasant and frequently deadly labour, which nobody would voluntarily do. I think it’s good enough that Fairphone is supposedly making an effort to mitigate this, and if you need a smartphone I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying a Fairphone. But I think it’s quite obvious that the reasons to buy one are undermined significantly if Fairphone is engaging in much of the worst of industry standards.

It seems like an incredibly disingenuous representation of criticism of a tech company to say that it’s “all or nothing” to be swayed away from a company that specifically markets itself as an ethical alternative (which Google, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc do not market themselves as) when they could be getting something they may consider to be a better product from another company with similar working conditions etc.

Why Obsidian when there’s so many good foss note-taking apps?

Increasingly so over time. Will try to install coreboot on my laptop soon. I avoid proprietary blobs where possible too but for stuff like the kernel, proprietary blobs are kinda unavoidable if you want a fully functional system. Tbf I’ve not tried linux-libre but I just assume it won’t agree with some of my tower PC’s hardware.

Aside from low-level stuff, I do still use Steam (and the proprietary games on there) and Discord—Steam cause all my games are there and it’s convenient, and Discord cause a few of my friend groups primarily talk over Discord. Been considering setting up a Matrix bridge for Discord but I don’t think that meaningfully achieves anything since it’ll still all be on Discord’s servers which are proprietary. I also occasionally install proprietary software to read proprietary file formats and would usually uninstall once I’m done reading the file.

then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.

I don’t agree, but how people define “advanced”/“beginner” is mostly arbitrary I guess. I wouldn’t say that qualifies as advanced, maybe intermediate at best, but I think it’s entirely possible to understand eg the basic differences between init systems without ever touching Linux before in your life.

I don’t agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it’s Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That’s also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there’s a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it’s worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)

I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for “very advanced users”. It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you’re replacing, what you’re replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide documentation is not as important as whatever your reason for wanting to use a different init system, or a different C library, or whatever. Tbh, personally, I use runit right now and find it a lot easier to use than systemd. It’s very simple—services are just executables and symlinks. I’d have to check documentation and look at examples to make a systemd service, but to make a runit service I just have to create a directory with an executable in it, and to enable it I just make a symlink. The benefit of systemd is how widely used it is so you’re more likely to find someone with the same problem as you, not because it’s inherently easier to use.

Never understood why Arch got the reputation it has tbh, I’ve been using Arch-based distros since forever (and since being more or less a beginner in understanding how Linux and Unix-like systems work in general) and never found it hard since it was so well-documented and all the knowledge I needed was spoonfed to me by the wiki. Gentoo should have that reputation. Gentoo uses so many confusing concepts that no other distro seems to use lol

I didn’t say it didn’t matter.

Other phones have advantages over Fairphone. Nobody buys a Fairphone because they think it has the most cutting-edge features. They buy it because they believe it’s more ethical. So any way in which Fairphone fails to be significantly more ethical than mainstream phones, is a reason to go for mainstream phones instead, as Fairphone loses its main advantage.

You acknowledged yourself that Fairphone is also environmentally superior to its competitors, such as Google

I didn’t say this. I said that believing Fairphone is more environmentally friendly is a reason why people go for Fairphone. For the record I do believe its emissions are lower but I don’t believe it to be environmentally friendly because I don’t think there’s any eco-friendly way to make modern smartphones, but that’s besides the point, I never commented either way on what I think of Fairphone’s environmental policies, only its labour policies.

Oh fair enough lol

It isn’t necessarily. Had a police officer greet me by name once (had never interacted with this officer or the station they were from). They’ll have the data necessary to identify you by sight. If you’re a British citizen the British government most likely has a photo of you somewhere if you have any photo ID, not to mention if your face is known to the state through other means eg through interaction with the criminal justice system.

Where did I say it was all or nothing. I don’t think you’re reading anything me or the other person is saying

I think the point is, why avoid buying a more mainstream phone like a pixel if even fairphone can’t avoid slave labour? The two big reasons why people go for fairphones is ethicality of the manufacturing process (labour and environmental impact) and modularity/fixability. If their labour is unethical then that means they lose one of their most important appeals. The horrific treatment of miners in the global south is easily one of if not the most significant issue with modern phone manufacture.

Fairphones can also run CalyxOS if you want to look into that

Yes

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Tbh it depends on who’s trying to break in and what their interest is in you. If it’s law enforcement, unless you’re of unique national significance (eg you assassinated the national leader, you whistleblew on some really sensitive documents, you did a huge terror attack), when law enforcement seize someone’s electronics and they can’t get in the usual ways they normally just give up. If you are uniquely wanted by the government they may try to torture the password out of you. But most likely they’ll decide it’s not worth the effort if they can’t break into it with their standard methods. As for non-state actors, yeah the hitting over the head with a wrench method is more likely, although I can’t think of why a non-governmental body would want to read the contents of your laptop so badly.

dicewords are usually better because they tend to be longer, but if it’s the same length as a strong diceware password, it’d be stronger just because there’s a wider range of characters each character in the password could be (with a passphrase it’d be alphanumeric + spaces)

Because jammers are not inherently burglary tools. It provides extra information about the technology in discussion.

Well it’s not the company that did it, it’s the workers