You mean lost features? Remember when headphone jacks, microSD, & dual SIM were normal?

LibreWolf on desktop—fennec on mobile (tho I should consider Mull, my history is already in Fennec). Back desktop is Brave—with backup mobile being Mulch + Fx Android Beta (to handle DRM). In the terminal, w3m picking up a new possible maintainer means it will stay my favorite.

I want to follow Ladybird, but man is that hype way overblown relative to where the project actually is & you should not trust leadership that locks communications to US-based, proprietary services (Discord + Microsoft GitHub).

I wish more things used Nickel or Dhall for config. I don’t know why I wouldn’t want editor support for type information or the ability to make functions in my non-Turing-complete config to eliminate boilerplate on my end.

I mean we have a generation that thinks XML is bloated & JSON is superior but those two formats are about the same on performance & compressed size–which was the point. The non-plaintext-readable formats are superior along a lot of metrics but harder to debug & ultimately less common.

Balisage Paper: Fat Markup: Trimming the Fat Markup Myth one calorie at a time

https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Lee01/BalisageVol10-Lee01.html

XML is a fine format in comparison to JSON.

This project makes it so much less painful to get microG up & running. It all just works. If only they were the default for these unofficial LineageOS builds as it would seem like the tinkering types are more likely to be interested in takinga privacy step with microG than those that want Google Play.

Missing from the list: ASUS lost a lawsuit in the UK after lying about saying their unlock servers being down would come back up for Zenfones. While they have a headphone jack, offer good price/performance, & used to fall in the ‘small phone’ category, you can no longer unlock bootloaders with final statement being they won’t be allowing it going forward.

(I would contribute to the upstream, but I only use proprietary Microsoft GitHub when absolutely required—keep this in mind Privacy fam when setting up any unmirrored Git repository)

I want to support the Linux phones, but I feel you would still be required to carry a second Android phone one way or another with just enough things in life unfortunately requiring ‘the app’ with no web alternative. This isn’t really something you can overcome without reverse engineering entire apps—which usually violates some stupid ToS that gets your account banned for using an alternative client. That said, the more these exact apps are requiring no root, no flashing, no unlocked bootloader, the closer we are getting to needing a separate device anyhow. Maybe my next phone will be Linux 🤔

5a was the last version with a headphone jack, so they lost my respect

I would just add a +1 for Sony Xperia phones with LineageOS support (do check). They offer OLED panels, a 3.5mm headphone jack, & microSD card—with the last two once being standard now almost impossible to find despite their usefulness.

As for services, many of them can be accessed thru a browser. There are enough Firefox forks out there that you could stay authenticated with these grimy, untrustworthy apps & another fork with your typical web browsing.

That said some of this could be given up to an extent. If you have a microSD slot or carry a separate DAP, there shouldn’t be much need for Spotify where an offline library is quicker, saves data, & can offer higher bitrates (obv no ads too). Microsoft GitHub is not useful on a phone since no one codes on a phone & you can subscribe to the things you need either their Atom feeds or via email & all of your personal code should be living somewhere off the proprietary platform—especially if you want to help access to contributions since it is blocked for US sactions in some regions & they bow out to capitalist interests (see youtube-dl, or Switch emulators, etc.), while requiring your contributors give up their privacy as there is no way to report bugs or send patches without an account. And the chat options, depending on the situation you should see if you can get folks to consider your privacy too (else why on this sub?) & switch to something decentralized & with E2EE the default for DMs & optional for groups—XMPP is a great default choice, Mumble was built for games, but there are other options. Need is a strong word, & it might take a few years, but eventually, hopefully you can ween yourself & help friends get off these platforms as it is bad for them too, but you are not going to get much privacy if the corporations & governments can still read all your chats.

Did you mean computers are a bad choice for regular users?

Something something touch grass. Bugs exist in all OSs. If my data sold & being advertized + tracked by a US-based company’s closed-source OS is the alternative, then I am just turning off the computer & starting a farm.

More appealing? Linux runs basically all server infrastructure where even Microsoft bent the knee for Azure & Windows Subsystem for Linux. If we are talking about Desktop Linux, it will remain popular with those building software for easier/better dev tooling & wanting to better understand the systems their production code is run on. As software becomes more intergral to our lives & knowing how to write/debug it rises, folks will slowly keep trickling in as the have for decades where more & more software is treating Linux (& the web, & since BSDs, et al. are running similar software such as GTK they are also included) as a primary target. The other desktop OSs continue to shoot themselves in the foot injecting ads into the OS or denying system-level access to the machine you own.

A would say a better focus is mobile Linux… as casual users have migrated away from desktop OSs, where Android & iOS’s walls are holding them captive.

Huh. I still use proprietary software too—& I’ll make purchases for copyrighted music. But I have moved away from as much of it as I can when I had the opportunity or convenience to do so. Some proprietary software is basically irreplaceable & not built by megacorporations siphoning our private data. But things like chat apps? Music players? Code forges? There are tons of replacements…

Your friends should value your privacy too & your job shouldn’t be trusting their secrets to Microsoft either.

Linux the lifestyle will mean slowly embracing more open or otherwise ethical software. Slowly ween yourself off the Discord, the Spotify, the Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft LinkedIn, Microsoft npm, Microsoft GitHub.

For some reason we tend to give Steam a pass for convenience & investing as much as it has into the Linux ecosystem (even if it is selfishly & largely to avoid Microsoft lock-in/competition).

It is the exact opposite. Ligatures were created to help deal with the lack of clarity when symbols overlap. fi, ff, fl, ffi, have historically (like print press historical) been common ligatures where others are stylistic, where others are downright questionable & make things harder to read. The first category should almost always be supported, & the others can usually be disabled if not commonly off by default where you opt in for some design, not for general body copy.

What you are referring to about ‘programming ligatures’ is an outright abuse of open type features full of false positives, ambiguities, & lack of clarity for outsiders to understand what your code means. What you want is Unicode supported in your language so you can precisely what you mean than using ASCII abominations—like meaning → but typing ->, dash + greater, than which isn’t at all what you mean which is a rightward arrow. (with a non-exhaustive languages with decent Unicode support: Raku, Julia, Agda, PureScript, Haskell with Unicode pragma, & all APL dialects).

Strong opinions. Sometimes Linus’s takes are ‘bangers’ &, while probably fewer, he’s had a lot ‘woofs’ on the opposite end.

like Rust

But no one is talking about that that is doesn’t need to be Rust. There are alternatives that can do as much if not more with the type system & safety while being as low-level as C without some of Rust’s restrictions.

Best way to combat the issue in this example is to create zero Discord accounts & embrace open, encrypted communication options like XMPP & Mumble, etc.

A surprising amount of services block Google Voice for 2FA (where a surprising number of services both required 2FA & only support SMS despite the security issue); I wouldn’t rely on it (but sometimes it still makes the most sense since you can’t beat the price, free). My favorite was PayPal deciding to block Google Voice & the only way to message support is by first authenticating—where asking on Twitter was an immediate block so… fuck PayPal & never used it since.