So basically it’s UserLAnd with accelerated graphics instead of VNC.

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos

That’s actually a selling feature.

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

Totally agree! I can’t wait to put that granite-cased phone with wood-backed PCBs in my pocket.

It’s time to stop thinking phones are anything but commodity hardware with variable degrees of shittiness. There are no such things as premium phones, just premium prices.

Wow… If even Best Buy figured out those repair programs are designed to appease the regulators who ask for the right to repair but never actually be used, it should tell you how unappealing they are.

Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs?

Ironically, that now includes you 🙂

What’s privacy-focused ChatGPT? Is it like diet butter?

Hint: if it doesn’t run on your machine, it’s collecting monetizable data.

Install Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine to try it out. No change to your existing Windows system is needed.

Better: install it in a virtual machine on a second hard drive: if you like it and you’re ready to switch, switch to booting the real Linux hard-drive and turn the Windows hard drive into the virtual machine, to use within Linux when you need it.

If you switch to Linux, this will happen:

• It’s gonna be tough: it’s a different system, you’re not used to it. Like everything else, it’s hard to change and get used to new things. So realistically expect some learning curve and some pain. It’s normal.

• If you give it an honest shot but you decide Linux is not for you, you’ll switch back to Windows. You’ll be back to your old normal, but you’ll start to notice how infuriating and spirit-crushing it is a lot more, having been exposed to a non-insane, user-centric OS for a while. And then you’ll be that much sadder in Windows and you’ll wish you had the best of both OSes - which you can’t.

Just be aware than exposure to a non-Windows OS will probably make you hate Windows more and make your life in Windows ever slightly more miserable, even if you don’t stick to the non-Windows OS.

We have zero insight into the longevity of flash memory because it doesn’t matter: whatever it is, it’s a lot longer than the phone’s planned obscolescence.

That’s why you’ve never heard anybody complain about their saved data getting corrupted: their device has long since hit the landfill before that happens.

Absolutely! If you’re doing it to learn something, by all means compile your own kernel. Every Linux user should do that at least once in my opinion. But once the learning is done, the novelty wears off fast and it just becomes tedious.

Compiling kernels makes no sense anymore.

Back in the days - Linux versions 2 and below - the kernel was much less modular, and resources wasn’t as plentiful. So it often made sense to build kernels with the stuff you needed statically compiled for speed, and the rest left out fo save memory and shorten boot time. Not to mention, Lilo (the thing we used before Grub) had limitations with respect to kernel size.

Nowadays, Grub can load a kernel of any size from anywhere on the disk. There’s plenty enough memory and CPU to leave the kernel core slightly bloated with stuff almost nobody needs with zero practical impact on boot time and memory usage, and most everything else is compiled as modules and loaded as needed - again with next to no boot time or running speed impact.

If you custom-build a kernel today, you’ll boot a tiny bit faster and it’ll run a tiny bit faster, and you’ll have a tiny bit more free memory - all of which you will never notice. What you will notice however is that kernel updates are a PITA on a regular basis.

As a Linux user of almost 30 years, compiling hundreds of kernels over the years has given me a great appreciation of pre-build kernels, and a profound gratitude for those who package them up into convenient distros that work out of the box and let me get on with the rest of my life.

This is the best thing you can do to get a perfectly working Pulseaudio installation: switch to Pipewire.

Honestly, give it a try it: it’s easy to do, totally reversible and Pipewire is probably already installed on your system if it’s recent. Pulseaudio is such a turd, you’ll kick yourself for not having switched earlier.

I had no idea what you’re talking about so I had to look it up 🙂

I think you’re making assumptions on what I need many serial ports for and it’s nothing like what you think.

I work for a company that makes measuring instruments that talk serial (RS232, RS422 and UART), we have many variants of our products and I’m tired of plugging and unplugging devices to the same serial ports to test code. Also, I can’t do that remotely when I work from home. So I have many serial ports and all the different devices I need to test my code on regularly are all plugged in and powered at the same time.

No lighting here 🙂

Yeah I figured it might be something like that. But I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a kernel limit - or even a limit in the USB3 specification - because I actually only have one USB3-capable device connected (my cellphone). All the other devices are low-bandwidth USB2 FTDI USB serial converters. I thought it couldn’t be a bandwidth issue when all but one device can only use a fraction of what’s available.

I’m not sure it’s a kernel limitation or a hardware limitation. But it does throw an error in syslog when you connect the 17th device. Not as USB2 though.

My work machine isn’t too unusual, apart that it has 52 USB devices connected. And here’s something you may not know: Linux can’t enumerate more than 16 USB ports if the root is configured as USB3, so I had to force all the ports to run in USB2 mode - which is fine in this case, since most of them are serial ports.