Spyke

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linux

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Linux phones

I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.

I tried a couple of distros/environments:

  • Mobian
  • Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
  • Manjaro + Phosh

My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.

I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.

Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.

If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.

lemmy

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I like the idea of defederation, but conflicted about it's use in practice..

Defederation is simultaneously very useful and very dangerous.

Large instances have the power to kill smaller ones by defederating them, since they control an overwhelming share of Fediverse content. That is a lot of power in the hands of a small group of people, each potentially with their own views and agendas.

I think defederation should be reserved for openly malicious servers and used as an absolute last resort. Think of the Internet and how horrible it would be if countries decided to just disconnect from other countries based on conflicting ideologies.

The vast majority of users on legitimate instances just want to explore interesting things, share some thoughts and have a good time. Defederating hurts legitimate users the most, trolls can easily hop instances and find another way to troll.

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How much data can I download on umetered connection?

In practice UPC will probably have some kind of fair use policy buried in its terms of service - your best bet is to go through those terms and see what you find. Fair use typically means they will start throttling you beyond a certain point. Most ISPs keep this reasonably vague (e.g. if your usage is in excess of what they deem to be reasonable, but no actual data amounts defined).

Not all ISPs have a fair use policy though, and typically you're better off on large ISPs where your usage doesn't really stand out that much.

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Best services to self host with a Raspberry Pi 4? (4GB RAM)

My 2 cents:

Simple, no domain required stuff:

More advanced, should pair with a domain:

  • Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won't be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
  • Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.
linux

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Best chipset for Linux laptop, Intel or AMD?

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that is by now almost 10 years old, it runs perfectly on Linux and is a fantastic choice even today. It's built like a tank and that Intel i5 powering it is immortal. DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap now and it takes up to 16Gb, you can swap its HDD to a SATA SSD (if not done already) and batteries for it are still cheap and plentiful.

If you're looking for something affordable for software dev, I can't think of a better choice for $200-$300

https://www.lenovo.com/lt/lt/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t430/

They really built this one right, they don't make them like this anymore.

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Lemmy.world down, probably following the upgrade. A reminder to move to smaller instances for a better experience

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I think they're stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they've done their bit for a while, and that's if they're still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.

My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It's a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn't have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn't mean it's well configured or secure either.

I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.

Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.