Are there mobile desktops for Debian?

If you just want the DE and to configure everything else yourself, you can always just install phosh or sxmo on top of a debian/raspbian installation.

Mobian/Droidian are targeted for smartphone SoCs, so they would take a lot of tinkering to get runnin on an RPi

If you want a full OS that’s already configured to be a smartphone-like device, something like Glodroid may be your best bet. They’re an infrequent updater, the only reason I mention them is because they can target Broadcom devices (like RPis)

If you don’t mind getting away from building the hardware yourself, and just want a phone that you can run linux on, FairPhone/PinePhone/Librem 5 seem to be the way to go

Aside from that, afaict you’re in for designing your own device from extant components and then crowd-funding to pay for a factory line to assemble it for you (this is essentially what the PinePhone did)

“What are you, a cop?”

realistically how feasible is it going to be to have something be completely free of it?

It’ll be feasible if we encourage a culture of not using it. It doesn’t have to be the main mode of development — and all the big names can keep their slop generators — but as long as there remains a demand for slop-less software, there will be people willing to make it happen.

There’s also the saying “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”: besides the fact that I don’t trust slop-coders to put in any more effort into architecture/security/performance than they do actually learning the languages and writing the code, I also hate that they are willing to fund giant data centers that deplete local reservoirs and cause blackouts for small communities. In this case, I don’t care if it’s “no ai at all” or “no ai as much as is practical,” because both are still better than “full steam ahead.”

There’s probably a better way, but the way that works for me is apt show <package> and then copying everything from the Recommended section into an apt install command

Edit: people in forums are suggesting the simpler apt install --reinstall --install-recommends <pkg>.

I find this preferable because it means the recommended packages get marked as auto, which means an uninstall will automatically remove them.

On the other hand, it forces a redownload and install of <package> which might be unwanted. If you want the best of both worlds, you’re going to have to manually install the recommended packages, then also manually apt-mark auto <list of packages>—although that might make them immediately susceptible to an autoremove, so this might require some tweaking; I’ll work it out when I have time.

If you want to always install recommended packages, add APT::Install-Recommends "1"; to your apt.conf (which just includes the --install-recommends option by default, behind the scenes)

As a rule I don’t tell people to RTFM, because it has some rude dismissive connotations, although I will share when it helps me solve a problem I’ve been butting up against that would’ve been solved if I had just read the docs.

That being said, I do encourage people to read the docs, as others’ walkthroughs can be misinformational, and are usually tied to specific setups or software and hardware versions. It requires learning how to wade through a lot of information to find the info you need, but the info is usually guaranteed to be the most current and reliable.

That all being said, I’m more than happy to help when people want it.

Is keeping time one of the services you provide, or do you just get bent out of shape if people don’t respond to you immediately?

No thankss, I got tired of being surrounded by people like you

I agree with the sentiment, but I do have to argue with some of his points (because it’s fun, and it’s okay to do things just for the hell of it). Excellent point, ineffectively articulated

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early… But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first.

You’re your own counterexample. You got to experience the metaverse when it was still alive, which you wouldn’t have if you had waited for just a few years. And you got a Masters Degree out of it, not just bragging rights.

But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money

So you’re not struggling that much if you can start of the next sentence with an example of people who earned more than just bragging rights.

But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money.

This grossly overestimates the ratio of successes to failures. You’re muuuuuuch more likely to lose money on the gamble of The Next Big Thing than win; for every HTTP there’s a Gopher and Usenet and a dozen others that all look the same from the outside looking in.

For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

Flash is a terrible example, it ran its lifecycle already, sure, but it was HUGE back in the day. And people benefited from using it; some of my favorite animators and gamedevs cut their teeth on Flash, people’s work got recognized by a global audience, people landed jobs, Flash made it onto cable TV channels, people still light up at the mention of Homestar Runner to this day. People also made money, sure, but there are more benefits to playing with tech than “it makes money happen.”

Which brings me to my final gripe: this is all framed as if the only benefit of a technology is if it’s productive or profitable. When you discuss your favorite show with friends, are you considering whether the conversation can be converted into capital? When you watch a beautiful sunset, do you fret over whether the clouds will help you achieve your quarterly goals? Out on dates with your SOs, do you have to take a break in the bathroom to worry whether the evening is meeting KPIs?

Sometimes the benefit of things is just having the experience, instead of treating it as a means to an end. Yeah, don’t let the FOMO ruin your day, but maybe take some time to play around with a doomed technology before it becomes abandoned and the community ceases to be. Maybe you’ll become a recognized expert, maybe you’ll learn some valuable lessons you can transfer to tech with more longevity, or maybe you’ll just have fun.

And honestly, whats the fucking point of living, working and grinding and suffering, if not for the fun in between it all?

Matrix very recently has had e2ee calling since at least last april

I don’t host a server currently, so I can’t fully recommend it without knowledge of the backend, but i’m liking the experience as a user

Just looked at Session, and holy shit is that a massive downside…

From their own whitepaper:

Through the integration of a blockchain network, Session adds a financial requirement for anyone wishing to host a server on the network, and thus participate in Session’s message storage and routing architecture.

So you have to pay to self-host, and that’s somehow an upside???

This staking system provides a defence against Sybil attacks by limiting attackers based on the amount of financial resources they have available.

Which is a fine explanation in a world where everyone has a relatively equal amount of wealth. This is the epitome of dunning-kruger economics: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Firstly, the need for attackers to buy or control Session Tokens to run Session Nodes creates a market feedback loop which increases the cost of acquiring sufficient tokens to run large portions of the network. That is, as the attacker buys or acquires more tokens and stakes them, removing them from the circulating supply, the supply of the Session Token is decreased while the demand from the attacker must be sustained. This causes the price of any remaining Session Tokens to increase, creating an increasing price feedback loop which correlates with the scale of the attack

So the more nodes a single entity holds, the harder it becomes for other entities to buy nodes and break the monopoly? Did you take 3 seconds to think this through???

Secondly, the staking system binds an attacker to their stake, meaning if they are found to be performing active attacks, the underlying value of their stake is likely to decline as users lose trust in the protocol, or could be slashed by the network, increasing the sunk cost for the attacker.

“Assuming every user is a perfectly rational actor, malicious actors would be shunned. This is somehow due to the economic incentive, and not just how humans operate when they’re assumed to be perfectly rational.”

Also: malicious actors when they find out they might lose their money if they get caught: “welp, I better not do that then. Thanks laissez-faire capitalism!”

Jesus christ fucked on a pike, these dipshits really drank the crypto kool-aid, huh?

If my responses are as stimulating to you as yours are to me, why tf do you keep responding?

Thank you for proving my point

Podcasts?

If you really want to save some space, you can save a lot by opting to use command-line programs instead of the GUIs that basically just act as front-ends for the command-line programs. E.g. most FOSS audio converters just use ffmpeg behind the scenes, so really they’re a lot of extra libraries and such just to give you a graphical means of building up the CLI command. Same goes for videos. Same for images, though a lot of those might use imagemagick instead (even though ffmpeg also does images).

That being said, I use VLC for converting videos and audio files. I honestly can’t tell the difference between uncompressed (e.g. .wav), lossless (e.g. .flac or .ape), and high-bitrate lossy like mp3 v0 or mp3 320. Heck, I can’t even tell the difference between the aforementioned and mid-bitrate lossy audio like mp3 192 or Vorbis (the .ogg format) 192.

Quality is of course dependent on how sensitive the listener’s ears are, and how quality the equipment you’re listening with is. You’ll want to run some test conversions youraelf before committing to any specific format.

If your files are already in lossy formats, then you really don’t have much choice for compression, outside of bundling them all together in a tarball and compressing them with something like gz or zstd. This is only good for storing them, if you try to listen to them, your system will have to extract them, and that either takes time before it plays, or causes stuttering while it plays.

The good news is that Russia is only evil and fascist and so it’s always bad to be associated with them. Trust me, I’m one of the good Americans

You fool, you absolute bingus. You have fallen for one of the classic blunders, for I, in my infinite wisdom, know that all states are bad. And all equally so at that. 😎

So there are words I can say that get you to immediately stop listening to anything else I say and make broad assumptions about me and my beliefs?

Talk about being trained

Picking apart the single definition used by one entity doesn’t mean the term itself is completely meaningless.

But fine, I’ll bite, just for fun:

the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo

That’s every country

That’s “whataboutism.” Or alternatively, it’s “authoritarian realism”—a term I just made up which refers to any view that assumes a nation has to centralize powers to exist because that’s how the world under capitalism currently operates.

Reductions from what? The USSR was an increase in all of those things from Tsarist Russia.

So 1. You just gave a counterexample to your first point, and 2. I guess the metric depends on who you ask. It could be reductions from a historical state (as we could say of e.g. the current USA compared to North America’s political systems prior to european colonization), or compared to some standard of liberty (e.g. your use of USSR).

I can agree with your first point and still posit that the term is meaningful: e.g. authoritarianism isn’t a binary state of extistence, but rather a spectrum that different states can be compared on; all states can be authoritarian to some degree, but some states are more or less authoritarian than others.

Or to put it another way, saying “authoritarianism” is meaningless because all states exercise authority is like saying “conservativism” is meaningless because all living creatures seek to conserve resources (to some degree).

I agree that language is an imperfect map for the real world we inhabit—and I especially agree that the language (as with any social tool) gets abused to manipulate people—but I don’t agree that those facts make the terms completely useless in communication.

In most instances, “authoritarianism” is a more rigidly defined term than simply meaning “exercises authority.”

E.g. Wikipedia defines it as

a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

I had very few issues with a GTX 970 and i7-4790k. The only issues I hear about with either any more is the linux kernel not supporting some of the features of newer GPUs (e.g. I know ray-tracing was a pain-point at one point).

I don’t like recommending distros based on such a general use case, mainly because every distro can be tweaked and configured to exactly what you want. Instead, you should research the different mainline distros that have been around for decades—Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Guix, NixOS, OpenSuse, Slackware—and see what they’re about, what sets them apart from others, what the maintainers’ philosophies are, and what kind of package management system they work with. Once one sounds better than the others, look into it and try it out.

#Dos and Don’ts:

Don’t try a niche distro. They are harder to troubleshoot and less likely to be actively maintained.

Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.

Don’t dual-boot with windows. This just solidifies your reliance on windows, especially if you’re the type to give up on problem-solving issues that you didn’t have in Windows. It also can cause issues with making Linux unbootable.

Do try a live usb with persistence before you commit entirely. It’s not exactly the same as a complete install, but it’s close enough to let you know how the OS feels and what hardware will or won’t work with it. Some people say try a VM first, but that won’t have direct hardware access.

Do problem solve the little things. Anything that irks you or bothers you or just slows down your workflow. It doesn’t have to be an actual bug or glitch, just anything that could be better. This not only solidifies the feeling of ownership over your OS—you no longer have to settle for anyone else’s lousy design choices—it teaches you the resources for troubleshooting larger issues.

Do plan around things not being plug and play at first. Want to test if a game runs on Linux? Great, set aside a couple of hours beforehand: first to install steam and set it up, then to figure out Proton, then to troubleshoot the game not even booting up, then to fix any glitches or whatnot, then to get your controller working. This won’t always be the case, but it will irk you a lot less when it is if you expect it. The more you make time for solving these issues now, the less time they’ll take up in the future (either they’ll be gone, or you’ll immediately know how to fix them, or your troubleshooting will be more streamlined).

Do set aside time to learn about Linux “under the hood.” You don’t have to become a computer scientist, but it will save you a lot of headaches, show you cool things you can do, and make your computer a smoother experience. It especially helps if you take the time to learn as they come up: e.g. installer asks you what “bootloader” you want, but you’re not sure what that is, what it does, or why it’s necessary? Now’s the best time to take a little learning detour.

Do ask questions on forums.

Don’t listen to the people who shame you for asking.

Do listen to the people who try to show you a better way of doing things, even if it’s not your way.