Spyke

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android

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[Question] rooting a xiaomi phone in 2026

*mi phones used to be the go-to for the enthusiast; stellar hardware for an awesome price and a wide custom ROM support base. none of those things is true anymore.

as you can tell from https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#xiaomi the support is lackluster. the way I heard it the dude who was in charge of publishing kernel sources quit/got fired (?) and now there's a backlog and they ain't super-enthusiastic about keeping up. the unlock process was a shit-show even before they tightened the torture rules, now it's downright masochistic to participate in that scam, with additional limits per year, evermore extending "wait periods", mandatory mi account, etc.

my advice, go get the F3 if you ain't tossed it and replace the battery, it's fairly easy.

privacy

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"The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden" (it isn't good)

if you were looking for an excuse to torpedo this abomination, here it is. hosting this gargantuan stack just for an encrypted csv file? at least the client (electron) gobbles up RAM like it's free while being bug-compatible with whatever chrome version was current half a year ago.

sadly, news ain't great on the other side of the fence - keepassXC dev is all-in on vibeshitting; latest non-polluted version is 2.7.9.; works fine and the stuff they're working on is pretty far from essential. some unknown folks forked it but who's to say what their expertise is.

never thought I'd disable my autoupdate timers but here we are. keep your eyes open.

privacy

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"The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden" (it isn't good)

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the dev vibecodes; I make a distinction between using the crap as a boilerplate helper and a full-blown agentic "hey computer, do this but do it super-good!". not only that, they got a super-asshole vibe as they removed claude traces from the repo and then flaunted that it's so people won't know what parts were vibeshat. "good luck finding the cutoff point", I'm paraphrasing here.

to each their own, but that's a hard pass for that fork from me.

privacy

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*Permanently Deleted*

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I'm gonna piggyback off of this to remind everyone to install OpenSnitch and go through the iinitial and super-tedious approve/deny outgoing connections.

there's stuff on linux that, despite being perfectly offline capable and having turned off everything related to clown sync and remote check this and that, still phones home.

linux

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You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went

I mean I can't stand the thing but this is basically paid-for nuthugging - watch me dunk on the team you hate. fluff, bereft of any semblance of standards. you're allowed to pay for office but not install 7zip and any other utility. haven't tried in the past decade or so, but I am sure you can make a usable workstation out of any windows - rip out the irritants, fall back on tons of stuff developed over what four decades?

it ain't GUI inconsistency issue; you got that plenty on the other side of the fence with Qt/GTK/Ayatana heterogeneity. and also not the thing where you can change a setting in three places, that's also present ova here, in spades.

the issue is MICROS~1 and I have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of "whose shit is my shit". no other thing can alleviate that clash of interests, this is someone judging the quality of the chopped onions in a shit sandwich - don't matter how skillful the chopping was or wasn't, I ain't having none of the thing.

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Jolla Phone 2 & Sailfish OS: A Real Third Option

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the video blows, dude. jolla are opensource takers, they don't have a free tier so you can't just install it and take it for a spin. so an actual "here's how it works" video is beneficial.

my contention is that sailfish should be the next thing, after wrangling it out of the hands of those fucks. not forked android, not tweaked gnome shell on postmarketos.

this video wastes time on converting imaginary people over who don't know they're being spied on (the three hour long, or so it felt, intro with pichai and friends) showing ubuntu touch (wtf) and the presenter's face in the frame for what feels like 90% of the video.

this is a shit video on its own and especially for the target audience here.

linux

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Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field

the issue is not the presence or absence of any one json field. the issue is this random bootlicker with a history of foss-antithetical "contributions" being let anywhere near the decision tree in the first place., poettering the benevolent dictator adopting this idiocy and then, faced with a fucking tsunami of push-back and negative sentiment along every step of the process, doubling down on the decision to include it anyway because fuck you that's why. unnecessarily, as it turned out but that is beside the point.

point is, none of the things above indicate there's a healthy system in place for something that's becoming an integral part of what we consider linux and can't so easily be ripped out no more.

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I feel like people are sleeping on the Minisforum MS-R1 as a good value home server PC

I've downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don't ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this "missed value".

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there's sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn't bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

privacy

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Between LineageOS and /e/OS which one would you pick for the combo degoogling, privacy improvements, and dailydriving?

eOS to lineageOS is like Ubuntu to Debian; a more newb-oriented solution with some stuff preinstalled but with less choices; e.g. you can't switch out the iOS-like launcher. if you know your way around, you're wasting your time with eOS. but if it's for a less technically adept user, you might be doing them a favor with eOS. the murena suite can be opted out of.

linux

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Steam in a Docker container - What am I doing wrong?

you're not passing dri and render128 to docker, how is this supposed to work? as X client?

to anyone else looking for a bit better security wrt gaming, you can limit home folder exposure to wine with winetricks sandbox (eliminates links to anything but c: inside the prefix) and firejail --net=none as command prefix, to disable network access. the latter obv doesn't work with flatpak lutris/heroic/steam.

linux

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Easiest distro for elderly parent

ixnay on anything but the vanillaest of the vanillas and that goes triple for bazzite and friends. you don't want "intriguing" shit left behind to take care of pops, that's a thing for you to play and experiment with.

your solution is already staring you in the face: the ubuntu you left behind persevered even under those circumstances. either fix it and update it or install a fresh one, with a tweak here and there. and don't touch nothing else..