What if, sometime after Win 10 loses support a virus takes advantage of the lack of patches and propagates across all the machines with a simple message "This operating system is no longer supported, please click here to upgrade." The button then runs a script to download and install a user friendly Linux distro. The world is then saved.

I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.

The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don't have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.

It's nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.

As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get "clogged" in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.

Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.

Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.

Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It's not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.

You taught your brother well! I'm glad he is having a positive experience with it.

Welcome back to Linux!

But that is sort of why it's the first step. You were using Windows and were bothered with ads. So you may have looked into an alternative you heard about called Linux. You are new to Linux and maybe ask some questions on forums and interact with people from all over the world that are taking time out of their day to help you, which gives you a sense of community. Then you learn that Linux is licensed as Open Source Software, and that people are working together to create something for the benefit of people, not for profits. Then you start to wonder, what else in my life that bothers me is a result of profit motivation?

What is the date and faces thing measuring? lol

It certainly shows the potential for mobile Linux for sure. There's a project https://postmarketos.org where you can install their mobile Linux OS on Android phones if you want to give it a try on a spare phone or something. The wiki lists what phones the OS can be installed on and what hardware features are working for each device.

I've used it, but mostly to contribute as the data for my area is sparse as well. I find it fun to map the areas I visit. I haven't added recently because I am using a mobile Linux device and I haven't found an application to easily contribute.

Welcome to Linux, the Fediverse, and FOSS communities! Never be afraid to ask for help. We were all newbies once.

Everyone sort of enforces the rules as they see fit now. The difference is there is an expectation to not resist when someone is abusing their power because they are an authority figure. Under anarchism, it is your peers holding each other accountable, and your right to question actions against you is accepted.

usually when I have problems with YubiKey being detected it is because the pcscd service has not been started, or I forgot to enable it so it would start automatically on boot.

You can follow the instructions here on how to do so: https://linuxhandbook.com/systemd-start-service-boot/

I think its reasonable to assume a perfectly functioning, yet old, piece of hardware could be repurposed. We have all just grown accustomed to mega corporations' design of planned obsolescence; when maybe we shouldn't be.

It's funny how the author is complaining about the incentive for companies to become monopolies under capitalism, and leaves it up to another corporation to lobby for a change. And that voting democrat will help prevent the monopoly too.

Direct and collective action might be better. Such as gathering the tenants together and everyone agreeing not to pay the internet service provision that was forced on them. That would pressure the landlord to not make a deal like that again.

I didn't know they were planning a gaming laptop. That would be nice because I do some gaming but bot enough to want to buy a whole new rig every couple of years. Having a modular means to upgrade it would hopefully make it more affordable.

It sounds like you have a few devices, so I would recommend trying out this testing distro with MauiShell. There is a testing iso under the heading "Downloads and Sources" in this most recent blog post about its development progress.

https://mauikit.org/blog/maui-release-briefing-4/

From what I remember you have to set up some DRM stuff to play Blu-Ray in Linux also.

There are already a lot of great suggestions posted already. I thought I would toss in https://mauikit.org/ which is working in making a convergent UI for desktop and apps.

I get wanting a distro to look modern and cool by default. One that I like a lot that uses a modified KDE is Nitrux https://nxos.org

For dual booting with windows, I find this guide from System76 to be pretty good. https://support.system76.com/articles/windows/

If you want to try some niche music service there is resonate.coop which encourages exploration by making it cheap to listen to a song once. However, if you like the song and keep going back to it it will be considered "purchased" and you will no longer be charged when you listen to it. Last I checked there was no offline mode for purchased songs but they were working on it.

I see you use Arch, btw

Looming back it was probably Windows XP as the last time I used Windows as my main OS. I switched not because Windows was enshittified like it is now, but because the FOSS movement sounded interesting to me. I loaded Ubuntu on an old laptop, and once I got drivers working it covered everything I needed besides gaming. As I became more of a casual player I used Windows less and less until now where I only use it at work. It's been an interesting journey.

That's really what I use the terminal for too. GUI stores still tend to feel very slow to install things. If I know the package name it's much faster to just type the command in a terminal.

Same for making simple modifications to config files. 'Sudo nano filename', make the tweak, save and exit.

It's better for OP to explain, but from what I read they don't mind it being used in a collective work, but they want to make sure that collective work will also be CC-BY-SA. What from what they read it is no guarantee.

When the phone is not set to suspend, and mostly idle with a couple of apps running, and some occasional web browsing, its about 4 hours. Under similar conditions using suspend (meaning it will keep the modem powered and wake up the rest of the device wen receiving phone calls and SMS) then I can get through a 9 hour workday and have about 40% battery left.

I have been daily driving the phone for a couple of years so I'm sure the battery has degraded some, but I don't know how much difference I would get with a new one. It can be easily replaced, so I may do that in the future.

It took me a second to get it, but I got there eventually

When I did some research on hardware keys I was between Yubikey and Nitrokey. I ended up going with Yubikey because KeepassXC supported it.

Something to keep in mind is purchasing a backup key. I bought one for my wife and we use each other's as a backup.

For KeepassXC it does not support registering multiple keys (at least not that I have figured out), so I have a copy of my database where it uses my wife's key as a backup.

I like the default look of Nitrux

For my ISP it's actually cheaper to not use their modem+WiFi router as they charge a monthly lease on the equipment. I declined it and they provided me with a modem for free. All I have to do is plug the modem to my own router and that's it!

The features you listed seems pretty standard to all routers these days.

I have bad handwriting and my friend misread something I wrote and I just added some numbers to it

That looks.pretty cool!

I honestly went into the post just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. It’s very good news indeed!

There can only be... NONE!

True, no one was arguing against repurposing, and I wasn't accusing you of such.

Your comment said the answer was not to purchase an old iPad and use the money to get a cheap modern android tablet. My response was just to point out that not everyone may be aware of the planned obsolescence, and the particularly aggressive stance Apple takes.

Although if the OP found Lemmy I guess there should be some assumption of being knowledgeable about the tech world 😅

An immutable distro with a heavily customized KDE desktop is Nitrux. Check it out at nxos.org

Haha, true. I was referring to routers specifically, not the all in one's.

You can use a VoIP or SIP provider and then to send SMS and MMS messages you can install an app called Chatty: https://flathub.org/apps/sm.puri.Chatty

I'm not sure what you mean. The project is developing a framework to help make the UI convergent.

It's a question worth asking, for sure.