Also got the same impression back when I used XScreenSaver from jwz. I looked in to customizing the logo shown on the login dialog and some of the screensavers, only to find a rather preachy write-up on the advantages of XScreenSaver and a very stubborn affirmation that the logo is hard-coded and should not be changed because it is the identity of the program or something.

It bugs me how, within a month after Apple releases a new iPhone, small-time manufacturers put together the hardware, custom ROMs, and tooling to pump out bespoke knock-offs of the latest model. Which sell for maybe $200. While we’re stuck worrying that the development of a new Linux phone, with completely ordinary hardware by today’s standards, might get mismanaged to hell or ends up costing a fortune.

This thread is kind of depressing to read. What a privilege it is to have supportive parents.

Makes me realize that I shouldn’t put off having a quality phone call with my parents so much. There will always be more work, but there won’t always be more quality time with them.

In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

Lovely day of volunteering. Not sure how to tackle the mountain of work waiting for me on Monday though.

I have a mug that’s twice the volume of a condensed soup can. I’ll put an arbitrary amount of water in the electric kettle, dump the contents of one can into the mug and then fill the rest with the boiling water. Result is soup at the perfect temperature for consumption. Makes me feel better than having instant ramen when I’m lazy imo.

I didn’t

Electric kettles with plastic parts that touch boiling water, particularly the removable mesh thing. It’s like a microplastic infuser that’s good for about 300 liters, after which it falls apart. Then the kettle doesn’t know when to stop automatically and you can’t buy a replacement mesh piece because they discontinued that model of kettle last year.

I now have a kettle that doesn’t have the funny mesh, but if you don’t open the lid while pouring, the scalding hot water just runs down the side.

The old fridge had condenser coils out in the open and you’d just dust them. The new fridge has them under the unit and I can see quite a bit of dust accumulating on them. But I’ve no clue how to clean them without tipping the entire fridge over.

Also, the newfangled rice cookers. The nonstick coating in them chips off much easier than in regular pots and pans. Then there’s 3 or so gaskets, one of which is impossible to remove without breaking the lid. I really hate cleaning rubber gaskets, especially if there’s a perfectly fine way to design something without them.

I’ve also wondered about this too. In my opinion, at least several layers, but not more than 25. No good reason, it just feels right to me.

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

Of all the e-waste components I’ve tried out, the one used part that should not give you any trouble is the CPU. Except in the case of 13/14th gen Intel CPUs degrading, the CPU should be either dead or alive with no surprises.

An Intel Atom notebook with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage acquired for $200 on Black Friday. Despite many attempts to optimize it, it was practically unusable 4 years in. If I had the foresight to buy a used ThinkPad for the same price instead, it could have been my daily driver to this day.

Also a faux leather wallet. The “leather” started turning to goo and powder about a year in. Some of my cards and my wallet photo still have some of those decayed fake leather bits stuck on the edges or rubbed in.

Side-loaded apps could be anything, ad-free or ad-infested. It costs money to publish an app to Apple’s App Store, even if the app is going to be free. For commercial developers, that’s an incentive to monetize and recuperate the $99/year Apple charges. For open source developers, that’s a barrier to entry.

On the Android side, free and ad-free apps are correlated with being open source. Many open source developers are philosophically against publishing on Google’s Play Store, or at least know that their main audience does not want to sign up for a Google account to download it from the Play Store. But that’s not saying that the Play Store is inherently superior to Apple’s App Store. It just happens to overlap with open source apps that are guaranteed to be free and ad-free, given the lower barrier to entry (one-time $25 fee).

This is more an exception than the rule so far, but one final case is an open-source developer wants to publish their perfectly safe and legitimate app, but is rejected. This happened to Organic Maps on the Play Store.

Contrast these app stores with F-Droid, where users do not need to sign up for an account and developers can publish for free without handing over personally identifiable information. However, it relies on a form of sideloading that is not possible on iOS devices, at least outside of the EU.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

If you still are using it, try this:

• Disable RAM Plus under Battery and device care > Memory
• Reduce transparency and blur under Accessibility > visibility enhancements
• Disable the home screen media page, if it’s there
• Use 3-button navigation instead of gestures

Got just a bit more performance out of a friend’s A03s that way.

My workplace has an e-waste bin we can rummage through and I’ve scavenged many an upgrade for my machines. If it weren’t for that, I’m not sure I would have the same confidence troubleshooting used parts. Making a couple of assumptions here, but upgrading with used parts one by one would be a good starting point. I’ve had good luck returning eBay items that were described as working but were in fact defective.

You had me in the first part, but that last paragraph reeks of Apple fanboyism.

Anyway, I also had an iPad 2 back in the day and it was a pretty solid machine coming from media players and digital photo frames of yore. Also an amazing mobile gaming experience compared to the cramped iPod touch or iPhone of the time. But terribly frustrating if you wanted anything outside the walled garden, even something as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash support.

What plumbercraic says though is absolutely the case today. Some of my family use Apple devices. Mind-blowing what ad- and subscription-infested apps they endure on the regular. Sometimes they’ll ask me to recommend friendlier apps and I really wish iOS had its F-Droid equivalent. Yes, the Play Store also has terrible apps, but when only the Apple App Store exists, I have to spend time hunting for the one good app, which could just as well enshittify the next year.

There’s probably worse, but off the top of my head, a Sandisk Curzer Fit USB 3.0 drive. It would overheat about 15 seconds into a file transfer and throttle to well below USB 2.0 speeds, perhaps even USB 1.1. I tried to alleviate the issue by using it through a USB 2.0 extender (thereby ruining its entire appeal to compactness), but it developed bad sectors soon enough. It was satisfying smashing it to bits with a hammer though.

Happened to me with a laptop case. Made me nauseous and suspicious of anything made from neoprene since.

Limitations

• Debian with XFCE: I want all of my Linux machines, both older and newer, fast and slow, to be consistent, with the GUI customized to my taste. I accept that I will miss out on whatever security benefits Wayland or distros like secureblue may provide.

• Networking: In the grand scheme of things, I know jack shit about networking. OPNsense, Pi-Hole, VPN, etc. would probably help my cause but I have yet to implement many network-based measures.

• Corporate conveniences: There are colleagues I need to reach with Whatsapp or SMS and there is software for my job that requires Windows. I try to sequester all of this among my work devices.

All of my frequently-used computers on Linux have “hardened Debian”

• hardened to the best of my ability according to Madaidan, with compromises to avoid obstructing day-to-day work
• LUKS encryption
• MAC randomization
• Mullvad DNS
• Hyper-threading disabled
• Rootless Xorg
• Firewall defaulting to deny
• unattended-upgrades
• LibreWolf
• Passwords in KeePass

Personal devices

• Desktop: The usual software. Non-FOSS components are mostly gaming-related.

• Server: Jellyfin, NAS, Local LLM / Stable Diffusion, and secondary workstation, each hosted on LAN in their own VMs. SSH password authentication disabled. Would like to set up a VPN so I can access it away from home someday.

• Backups: weekly to server, which is pulled to an offline encrypted 8TB disk about monthly. Repeat for the off-site disk that I store in a drawer at work.

Phone:

• Pixel with GrapheneOS and FOSS apps only
• Messaging primarily using Molly (Signal client)
• Email from important work and family contacts forwarded to my inbox on PurelyMail
• Looking to get a non-KYC eSIM once I learn how to pay in Monero
• Mullvad DNS

The “DMZ”

• Tablet: Samsung Tab A7 Lite received as a gift. Installed an AOSP GSI ROM (no Google Play services or GApps), mostly used as a NewPipe and travel device.

• Laptop: ThinkPad X230 with Coreboot and soft-disabled Intel ME. Also hardened Debian with the usual software, nearly all FOSS components with the exception of intel-microcode and the VGA option BIOS. I say it’s the DMZ since personal stuff resides here, but most of my work also ends up here. Logged in to work-related websites and email in a separate user profile for LibreWolf.

“Work” devices (for context, work has BYOD policy and does not provide devices for us to bring home)

• Laptop: can’t be bothered anymore to fuss with Windows VMs or debloating that go stale twice a year, so I just bring a separate lightweight ThinkPad with full-fat Windows for everything that requires it. While some proprietary software packages support Linux, I’ll also just throw the Windows versions on this laptop.

• Backup Phone (unused for now): Samsung XCover Pro with removable battery, waiting for the day I encounter apps that demand a stock version of Android. When not in use, the battery is removed.

• Occasional check of social media also takes place on one of these devices, though through the browser rather than an app.

Phone:

• Old Pixel with GrapheneOS
• Nothing I use really needs Google Play services
• One user profile for work apps, including proprietary 2FA and Slack
• Another user profile for various proprietary apps that aren’t necessarily work-related, but that I’m not entirely comfortable having on my personal phone.