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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • I guess depending on size and colour rendition of displays it can be easier / harder, but overall I’d still say it’s a poor choice.

    A choice of different colours is OK, but specifically those 2 are pretty hard to distinguish. Simply changing one of them to black, which looks like no other colour used in the map, would be much better.

    I don’t think a gradient works for colouring a map like this: we can distinguish gradient colours when they are next to each other, but if 2 countries far away have adjacent values the colours would probably be too similar to tell the difference.












  • I’ve read that the FairPhone comes with a standard, vanilla Android OS on it, no bloatware. I cannot say if it’s true, but you could have a look at the FairPhone forums and see what people think of the OS.

    I know you don’t want to tinkle with the bootloader et al., but if you’re willing to try a different OS without the hassle: it is posible to buy a FairPhone with /e/OS or iodéOS preinstalled.




  • Yes, I feel like F-Droid has been getting some shit lately for no reason. I think it’s good that Obtainium exists and that we have more options of easily getting apps outside the Play Store, and even better: FOSS apps.

    However, I see a trend towards “F-Droid is bad and Obtainium has arrived to save us from it” and get the feeling that many times people don’t even understand how both things work. Obtainium is basically doing what some people were doing for long time using RSS, it’s not a revolution. When I tried it, it failed to properly detect the latest versions and updates of several apps, so I was personally not impressed.


  • Thanks, I know about reproducible builds, but I still don’t see how the GitHub release is more secure than the F-Droid build. In both cases you need to trust whoever built the apk.

    It is known that F-Droid uses the published source code, reviews it for anti-features, and they build hundreds of apps used by thousands of people. If they did any tampering or had a security hole we would learn about it pretty fast (we just need one user of one of their built apps to report).

    On the other hand using a GitHub release we need to trust the developer of the app: trust that the source code has no malicious code in it (or review the code ourselves, does anybody do that?), there’s no third party reviewing it, and trust that the apk they release uses exactly the published code. The user base of an individual app’s GitHub release is way smaller than that of all apps built by F-Droid, so by chance it would take way longer for users to detect any security problem.

    So, as I see it, it boils down to either trusting a big community with a long story of building and providing FOSS apps, a good reputation, and offering reproducible builds on all apps that managed to achieve them; or trusting dozens of different developers, most of whom we know nothing of.