Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I’ve found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.

But, it’s really nice to have if I get lost when I’m in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.

That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don’t need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.

That said, I’d like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I’m happy with. I’m optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I’d like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.

It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.

I actually like Gnome’s paradigm. But I also used CDE-style desktops for quite a long time, so I’m not really locked to the Windows ways. I would say Gnome is CDE inspired, but with the weird activities fuckery.

Ultimately, Gnome is just too lacking in customization. No panel, no notification area, window switching behavior… I have to install extensions for basic functionality. Which is fine at first glance, but then I have to be careful with updates when a new version is released, until the extensions update. Then I have to chase new extensions for the ones that are really lagging or cease development. Which happens a lot, because most people seem to get sick of dealing with that shit and stop using Gnome at some point.

Honestly, if Gnome would let me show the panel when docked and banish it to activities when undocked, I could probably live with all the rest. Also, have they fixed reversal of swipe gestures when you reverse scroll direction? That’s just absurdly bad UX, which is actually out of character. We might disagree with a lot of UX decisions from the Gnome project, but they’re usually refined and precise. The swipe gesture issues are just plain broken, or were, it’s been a couple years since I’ve used it.

KDE is just too much, and there’s quirky stuff I’m really not fond of. I’m using it now, have been for about 6 months now, which is by far the longest I have going back to trying it occasionally starting back in the late 90’s.

I’m excited for Cosmic, I used that for a good stretch, and it might be time to give it another try soon. I’m also excited for my old friend XFCE, and some other mid-weight DEs, finally finding their way to Wayland.

This whole damned division is just trying to hang on for dear life.

I thought I was the only one, it’s just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.

I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but… I just love Quod Libet.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of proprietary crap going on between Google/Apple and carriers. Maybe instead of dangerous age verification logs, our law makers could focus on untangling these messes into extensions of existing standards. Maybe throw a few new ones in, like for casting to car screens.

I was having problems with MMS on Graphene, but it was more related to Verizon than Quik. I’d been able to solve it in the past by limiting outbound MMS size, but on my Pixel 9a nothing worked besides switching carriers. Too bad, because there was some amount of visual voicemail support with Verizon.

I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but…

I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE’s), small application suite, and some useful applets. I’m always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it’s not quite what I want ideally, but it’s quite good.

It’s still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I’ve long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.

But it’s lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We’ll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.

I’m hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.

It just blows my mind that Gnome isn’t good on a tablet, when the whole damned UI seems to make compromises with multi-monitor capability so that it can be consistent across tablet and desktop/laptop. Gnome has such a nice look and feel, too bad the devs are hell bent on making it unusable for the majority of users in an effort to make it suitable for a majority of users.

In my experience, it’s usually power users or basic users with very specific application requirements, who have trouble moving between operating systems. There’s usually a FOSS alternative to those applications, but often requires reworking a workflow or upskilling more than they want to. But they’re still basic users so it’s more a speed bump than a road block.

So yeah, most people can switch to MacOS without an issue, and the vast majority of those can switch to a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and quickly feel comfortable.

Power users get stuck in this situation where they’ve learned how to do advanced things in Windows, have things tweaked to support more complex and peculiar workflows, but often don’t understand the actual concepts behind them. And even if they do understand the concepts, they still have to learn the alternatives in a new OS, and rebuild their workflows. Now, there’s a lot more ability to learn behind the scenes about the why and how with Linux and BSD, so I’d argue they’d be better off to just suck it up and get started, and they’ll be better off before long.

Yeah, though I’m looking more to have it as a home phone with my music and downloaded maps and stuff. I’ve gotten used to not having much of any cell service where I live, so I moved my number to jmp.chat (considering voip.ms instead), and don’t even turn on data most times I leave the house.

Graphene is great, I’ve been using it for a few years now. But I started wanting more storage, so looking towards the Fairphone and Shiftphone, which would require a move to Calyx or Lineage. That got me thinking about the state of AOSP, seeing Google being rather abusive towards FOSS, and I think Sailfish attracts me more that Ubuntu Touch at the moment. It seems to get a lot more development effort, and has the C2 as a more guaranteed first class citizen.

Now getting one to the US, that’s another question.

This really puts some perspective on things. He’s clearly a goa’uld.

I’ve come to think of myself as trying to be outside of the social constructs that America is currently shedding.

I see society as layered. A social fabric that we weave by acting our beliefs within our communities, which layers atop nature. Upon that we build a structure of law, order, and an artificial economy that we see as beneficial in maintaining a healthy society. It’s important that these three layers closely conform to each other, and that the structures at the top remain minimalistic and efficient in their alignment to the fabric itself, which is more organic.

But the structure has become unwieldly, and is being used against us. It confines us. It enslaves us. The vast majority of people are acting out against this, and their actions are colored by their upbringings and beliefs combined with propaganda. Our diversity is being amplified through anger at our situation, the hate of the propaganda (edit: not ‘of the propaganda’, ‘generated from the propaganda’ is better), and the greed that has become systemic.

Then there are the people who seek to rule us. To some degree they recognize that they can manipulate a failing system to take absolute control. They’ve figured out that they can control us by our anger, and turn it into hate and greed. (edit: I should add that even these people are a symptom of the sickness, and while they may seek to perpetuate it, they’re not themselves the root cause)

Right, left… it doesn’t matter. The whole system is coming down. There’s a lot more to that, but as it stands… there’s a reason a lot of us feel driven to go live on a mountain top or in the depths of the forest. It’s a withdrawal from an unjust system. But we still need the social fabric, it’s our substrate that makes us who we are. We need to embrace our communities, locally, and focus on making the lives we want everyone to be able to have as we eventually pull through this period of authoritarian fascism.

Now if only I could get a meaningful reply to a bug preventing complete account deletion, either on github or from support. It seems they modeled their support structure on Google’s.

I think they care about their customers just about as much as they care about making money, and aside from GOG, the competition simply does not. It’s a pretty good demonstration to how capitalism has failed us, to be honest, because any of those competitors would have been able to compete if they hadn’t treated their customers like shit.

I’ve been using Thinkpads since the X61s, and used the trackpoint extensively back in the day. Hell, I had the X61s that didn’t even have a trackpoint(edit: didn’t have a trackpad), and I rarely used a mouse with it.

But I really don’t understand how anyone still uses the thing extensively. Once in awhile I’ll use it for some bit of specific precision work when I don’t have a mouse handy. I feel like the Trackpoint quality has gone down significantly over the years, and stuff like anti-drift seems to have been neglected.

If not for the horrible arrow keys that I already hate on my Macbook Air, I was all for this transition. I’d much rather have a great trackpad at this point. I want something more compact than a Framework, and I’m comfortable with Lenovo’s Linux support at this point.

What’s more, it’s attaching strongly negative feelings to a positive change. As a result, it’s driving the wedge down the middle of our society as deep as it can possibly go.

You catch more flies with honey, and you can also use it to heal wounds.

Wish I had a choice, at work. Technically I can run Linux or MacOS, but I’d need to run a Windows VM for a few things anyway.

TLoU scratched a lot of the same itches, for me.