Cool which are the palantir data centers? No reason

For most relatively-nontechnical users, UX is among the most important parts of any OS. As long as it “feels snappy” and doesn’t run out of memory too quickly, marginal differences in resource usage won’t even register. Ideological considerations about being in control have been there since the beginning of Linux – it’s only the absolute horror of Windows 11 that has brought that to a crisis point that has more people switching.

I make these points out of frustration with some linux software devs who seem to hold UX in contempt. Darktable, for example, is powerful enough to pull tons of market share from the ever-more-expensive-and-resource-hungry Lightroom/Photoshop, but the mediocre UX is a powerful disincentive. “Fork it!” is… an answer. But, despite using Linux, I’ve never written a line of code. Neither have most of photographers in the world currently using Adobe products. UX is extremely valuable and shouldn’t be a second-order consideration.

grapheneOS isn’t security through obscurity, they make efforts to harden the phone’s privacy. You’re right that, if it was mainstream, Meta would target it directly though.

The solution is to remove the profit motive from acquiring, selling, and monetizing our data. Laws alone don’t stop big corps from doing things.

Also the US has had a strong right wing movement basically forever. Was the original American Nazi Party in the 30s Russia’s fault?

Doomscrolling is scrolling through your phone wallowing in depression/anxiety about these things. Moderate your news intake, spend some time doing mutual aid, ice watch, whatever appeals to you, and get more sleep.

Joplin

Alternative OSes for phones use the same carriers as everyone else. You can choose to use your phone on wifi only, without a carrier, to avoid using a carrier. You can also choose to use a VPN to make your data inaccessible to the carrier (although they’d be able to tell what cell towers you connect to).

In order to switch over, check the compatibility information for each of the OSes you’re looking at. If you don’t have a compatible phone, you’ll need to get one. Then you follow the install instructions for the chosen OS. GrapheneOS was very easy to install for me – I switched to it when my old phone broke.

So doge is doing that work. Why get rid of it if it does what they want?

DOGE is not just a Musk thing. Privatizing government has been a long term goal of the republicans and capitalists for a very long time

A digi camera + a backlight + film holder will do a great job. It won’t take much post processing bc they’re already positives.

Linux is super configurable! You’ll just need to try out a bunch of different window managers, taskbars, etc to see which one you like best, but maybe look for some videos to preview a couple first.

The unixporn Lemmy community also has examples

Don’t pick a whole distro based on the UI. The distro choice is about stability vs bleeding edge packages, package manager, minimal/maximal installs, security hardening vs convenience, use or avoidance of particular systems (e.g. systemd), and things like that.

The UI will come from your choice of desktop environment, window manager, compositor, etc. Those can be installed on most distros. You can also look at dotfiles for more theming. Ofc it’s silly to install a different UI on a particular flavor/version/spin of a distro built for a given desktop environment (like Kubuntu), though it’s still possible.

I’m enjoying Niri rn. It’s a scrolling & tiling window manager. I have it running on opensuse.

Dual boot

Try searxng

Check for new terms about ai use of your data

Mailbox.org is great

If you buy “digital signage” or “commercial display” monitors, they won’t have built-in ad-tracking; some models have a recent version of Android built-in that makes it easy to load Jellyfin, Kodi, and other such apps; and they’ll be built to commercial specifications, meaning they’ll last longer. They can also have better screencasting features.

On the downside: they are more expensive, you’ll need to check their specs for things like bluetooth, wifi, HDMI, and other things you need; the built-in speakers are not good. The TV of course doesn’t stop any particular app from serving you ads on its own, unless you load in another app to block them.

I have a setup like this, connected to a seedbox with transcoding, and it works great.

Use a seedbox and the arrr suite instead of streaming services

This is amazing and should be in a tabletop rpg session

Telekinesis