Great, the touchpads are amazing for mouse-related stuff while handheld. I can comfortably use mouse heavy menus with them. Obviously, a lot closer to a laptop touchpad than an actual mouse, but still a lot better than a joystick as mouse.

A Steam Deck is a PC. If you dock it, you can hook up a mouse+KB and a monitor, and use “desktop mode” (KDE plasma) to use it exactly like any other Linux desktop. Docked “gaming mode” makes it feel more like a home console for PC games (and emulators). It is even possible (though not recommended) to install Windows.

Reminder that the license was changed to a “custom” non-free license.

I own a OnePlus 6 with postmarketOS. My daily driver is a Pixel 7 with CalyxOS and microg turned off.

Despite having effectively only FOSS apps on my Android daily driver, I can’t daily drive postmarketOS. It’s making great progress, but isn’t nearly stable enough as a modern smartphone, and several other issues hold it back;

• Sleep states. Currently you get to choose between your phone going to sleep (~ a day battery life) but without notifications, incoming calls, alarms, etc. Or your phone “staying awake”, where you’ll have those features but only ~4 hours battery.
• Hardware video decoding, which “can work” but only in select apps, and they’re not great for mobile.
• Audio issues, such as no audio from the earpiece, microphone not working, or no audio at all.

If you rely on non-foss Android apps, there is Waydroid, but it’s not a perfect solution and might have issues.

It’s not a “waste of money” if you want a device to experiment or tinker with, or if you want to follow progress of Linux mobile, but it is extremely unlikely to replace your daily driver.

Keyguard, which works on Bitwarden-compatible servers like Vaultwarden

Mint under the hood is still Linux, but for basic tasks like webbrowsing, it’s very similar to or easier than Windows.

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I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.

Linux on mobile as a whole isn’t daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I’ve only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).

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The Steam Deck is a PC. The most console-like PC experience you can get, but still a PC.

Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.

Not OP, but modularity. An X11 WM is just a WM. You can choose compositor, bar, shortcut daemon, etc. With Wayland, a single implementation holds most of that, and more. If you need a specific feature from your display server, you are stuck on WMs that support it. This has forced me to use KDE for Wayland on my main workstation, and although it works well, it’s not my prefered WM/workflow.

Alongside that, no clones of several X11 WMs exist. bspwm for example. Riverwm exists, but has major limitations, and the workflow isn’t the same.

Not only is comparing these not the point (CalyxOS has a different purpose than GrapheneOS), the chart is heavily biased towards Graphene. Take for example the whole section on privacy. They list Graphene specific features, note that Graphene has them, and make other roms look bad for “not having them”, or even provide incorrect information. “Storage Scopes” and “Contact Scopes” for example, two Graphene features, intended to make closed source apps “happy” with giving them fake permissions. Although there’s definitely a use for this feature, being much more FOSS focused, Calyx provides the option to isolate non-foss apps into a work profile. This is effectively doing something very similar, although more limited to the user. Or the “Tracking through Android Advertising ID?” column, which lists only Graphene as “Not part of the system”, and everything else as “Randomized ID”. Graphene runs the official Google play services “in a sandbox”, without modifying or patching anything significant. This also means Google’s implementation of Advertising ID is being used. This is not randomized, and worse for privacy than anything using MicroG. Calyx MicroG and Graphene Google Play Services are both opt in, yet the chart favors Graphene by claiming it doesn’t have the anti-feature.

This person does not understand open source or Android whatsoever. They talk a decent bit about “default installed apps”, without properly understanding what most of them even are. They complain about some apps “being out of date” when installing CalyxOS, calling it “concerning” that they’re not on the latest version out of the box, as if they couldn’t update the apps themselves. The whole “review” feels more like an iPhone user trying to switch to Android for the first time, being confused because it’s different, and complaining about it because they don’t understand it.

The main benefits of CalyxOS lie under the hood. It’s built to be more secure out of the box, and doesn’t connect everywhere without consent like most other Android ROMs. If you’re fine with the privacy and security of using something like LineageOS, CalyxOS doesn’t have much extra to offer.

The antivirus: Used to be good, decent free (in price) tool if you’re in a situation where you need one. Otherwise, Windows Defender is good enough for your needs. (And just don’t install goofy ahh apps on Android, you also don’t need one there).

The VPN: Same as any other VPN company. Chances are you don’t need one, and all of them are based fully on trust. “Least bad” VPN award goes to Mullvad.

NordVPN (and their entire service stack) is not trustworthy at all.

The extra y just forces a database update. The mechanism to detect when not to update the database is a simple timestamp compare, and shouldn’t break. archlinux-keyring might need a “manual” update if an Arch Linux system is left without updates for a longer period of time. That’s the only situation doing pacman -Sy, then pacman -S archlinux-keyring is recommended, and it needs to be followed with pacman -Syu to avoid a partial upgrade.

https://ntfy.sh/

Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple curl is plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).

I use mautrix/discord, it can work in both puppeting (sign into your account) mode and relay (bot account with webhooks) mode.

1. A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
2. It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don’t think anyone’s been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they “spammed”, most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
3. Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
4. Do NOT bridge a “large” server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.

I use mine for a single channel in a “medium-size” server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.

““compromised device”” in this scenario is any device with a chat app installed, push notifications on, and the chat service uses Cloudflare CDN. This is a very common setup, Discord and Signal were mentioned as examples. Many others are vulnerable for the same thing. With read receipts on the chat platform (like Signal), no push notifications are required.

The headline is sensationalist, but it isn’t something to be ignored. Especially for more privacy focused platforms like Signal, even leaking the country someone is in can be considered a risk. That’s effectively what this attack allows.

Sorry, posted that on mobile without checking that it’s not the mobile link.