I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.

Indeed, I only use Mail and VPN but still have to pay for all of them. I did consider just paying for Mail and getting VPN from Mullvad but then I only get 10 SimpleLogin emails which is nowhere near enough

Speedtest.net isn’t rigged, I can exceed the speed I get on it with steam.

Reminds me of the monty python sketch, “what have the romans ever done for us? except sanitation and roads and canals and public health” lol.

Steam gives devs a huge marketing presence that smaller devs simply wouldn’t have otherwise, it gives countless high bandwidth distribution servers that automatically scale to demand, you can integrate the largest PC social community for matchmaking or other multiplayer features, you get a community page where people can post fan content or mods, etc.

That is worth way more than 30% to most devs. The only ones who it’s not worth it for are huge companies like Blizzard and Epic who can manage all that themselves, hence why they’re pretty much the only ones who don’t sell games on Steam.

In my experience if Windows decides it doesn’t want to talk to your hardware because of some undecipherable 20 year old spaghetticode reason, You’ve no recourse except reinstalling Windows and it might suddenly work. At least with Linux you can debug and get things working

Google Pixels with GrapheneOS were the only Android phones to withstand the backdoor software the FBI used to access the Trump shooter’s phone.

Bitcoin is terrible for that though. High transaction fees, slow transaction speeds, everyone can see your balances and transactions (and with KYC requirements it’s very easy to link a wallet and a coin to a person).

Monero is the only digital currency worth having.

Pixels are the best degoogle phone thanks to GrapheneOS…

Pixel is the only game in town for anyone who wants a secure and privacy friendly smartphone as they’re the only ones that run GrapheneOS.

I do like the look of the 9, especially finally being able to get a smaller Pro model but the prices are getting silly and my 7 Pro is still working fine. Maybe the 10 or 11.

I’m also keeping an eye on Fairphone but they need to add all the hardware GrapheneOS needs to support them for me to be interested. And it’d help if they weren’t launching with last gen specs. Fairphone 5 came out after my P7P but is inferior in most ways, I just can’t justify paying for a downgrade as much as I support the mission.

I use it both daily and for long trips. I use it daily because as I’ve said when I don’t use it, I get stuck in a queue on the motorway that was easily avoided with traffic info. And also for long trips because again, there are multiple routes and there could be hours difference between them depending on traffic. I frequently travel from North England to London and depending on the day I’ll use a route either on the western side or eastern side of the country based on the traffic.

The issue is, that people always say this but then people don’t donate.

People have server costs and living costs and ads are realistically the only way to contribute to those. I always swing €5 here and there to developers whos apps I use often but most people don’t: look at the Ko-fi page of small devs and they probably have less than €50 total, That’s a couple months of server costs probably.

What a bizarre comment. Of course I need traffic data in a navigation app. Why would I want to sit in an hour queue on a closed motorway due to an incident when I could be using the alternative route that’s still moving?

This is tricky. Luckily mine works on custom ROMs so I’ve not had to fool safetynet for a while.

Does it still trip if you install a custom ROM and relock the bootloader, without rooting? I know there used to be packages to hide you had root and keep safetynet

Depends, every tech company I’ve worked at has had Windows machines for project managers, account managers etc, and Mac for developers and designers. So it is possible to support two OSs as standard. I’ve always just picked the Mac but when my next laptop is due I may ask if anyone uses Linux

As time goes on you’ll be exposed to more and more security vulnerabilities with no patches.

Nothing wrong with running an old phone but you should unlock it and put Lineage OS on or similar.

It would move the queues to the next bottleneck. “Just one more lane bro” planning never works.

Rail between London and Cornwall needs improving instead, as does local transport around Salisbury (active travel, public transport) as a large portion of the queuing vehicles are local drivers avoiding congestion in the town.

Authy is trash anyway.

Ah, my girlfriend’s approach. No matter how much I show her a pwned password or set her up on my Vaultwarden, she’s not interested

Then they enforce the chipmakers to put backdoors in the chips themselves

Google absolutely update most roads every year or so. Busy roads multiple times a year. Even my cul de sac in a minor town has photos every 5 years