I can echo the frustrations expressed about social media becoming a necessity as it becomes the primary channel for communication by an institution. Both my university and student dorm use exclusively Discord to communicate events, exams, and general announcements. I don’t run Discord on my phone and due to this I have come close to missing several important things, if not for a friend letting me know. I’m not sure what if anything could be done to change this…
Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha
I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn’t work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead. A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/
A Hat in Time!!! That’s awesome, I remember having crashes with the proprietary drivers. Looking forward to playing this wonderful game on NVK.
I use this and love it! I can’t remember whether it was a “FairEmail Pro” feature though (one-time donation to unlock pro features). Regardless it works great.
Cool! Might make me reconsider the next laptop I get. The all-AMD Zephyrus G14 I currently run has been an awful experience (overheating after 15min of gaming, random iGPU freezes, fTPM stuttering, no video accel on Wayland, HDMI is broken, wifi randomly stops working, and mic disappears on 99% of boots), and I was looking to replace it with an Nvidia laptop, but maybe Tuxedo can fix these issues on their own hardware and make AMD viable.
I really, really hope this leads to development of data portability/server migration options. When I set my homeserver up, I chose Synapse as I didn’t know about the other servers. Now that I do, and would like to switch away because of Synapse’s performance problems and the new CLA stuff, I realize I and all my users are fully locked in, and would have to start from scratch (lose all chats, profiles, etc) to migrate.
I held on to my Time Steel for so long, but I finally switched to AsteroidOS on a Huawei Watch. No AOD, way too bright with lights off and unreadable in the sun, and have to charge it every night (barely lasts a day). I’m heavily considering going back.
I self host Whoogle and it’s a really nice interface. However, recently is has started to take longer and longer to load, sometimes giving up and returning a 502 error. If you don’t run into that however, it’s super nice!
I use Bitwarden and, though all the features are very nice (self hosted Vaultwarden), the clients are really bad. The autofill is super inconsistent on Android. The app takes 20s+ to load on my Pixel 3a. You can’t trigger a sync from the quick autofill menu, you have to open the full app. The “desktop app” is just an embedded browser. I really want to like it, but it doesn’t make it easy.
I don’t understand where and how I need to file complaints. I live in France and Belgium, and have encountered several large and popular websites which enforce a “cookie wall”. This does not appear to respect the cookie law.
I’m seeing others recommend the G14 2022 all-AMD one. I have owned this model since it released and use it nearly every day. Despite the performance being pretty okay, it does have its share of deal-breakers which, if I knew them at the time, I would not have bought it:
The laptop itself would be the best Linux experience I’ve had if not for these issues. The trackpad is excellent and great for Wayland 1:1 gestures, the display and speakers are great, and the battery lasts a good 2-3h with light web browsing.
I’ve really enjoyed using PINE64 products. I use the excellent Pinecil soldering iron which is fully open source. I used a PineTime smartwatch until I got it water damaged (rip) which was a ton of fun to use. I have a pair of PineBuds wireless earbuds (default firmware is not open because of proprietary ANC, but last time I checked this is being worked on). I can’t speak for their laptops or phones, but I can definitely recommend the devices I do use if you’re willing to get involved in the community to work through and fix some of the existing issues.
Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.
This is a good option for most of it, as the bridges seem quite solid. Sadly it won’t make up for calls (some courses have extra content in the form of “Discord Stages” which is like a big video call).