NewOldGuard [he/him, they/them]

Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.

Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.

A lot more people have android phones than iphones that’s all that is. If anything iOS is overrepresented

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So aurora with micro g is more private in the sense that you’re not required to have a google account which would be used to track the apps you use etc. But sandboxed google play on GrapheneOS is significantly more secure. It requires fewer privileges than microG, operates in a much stricter sandbox, and performs checksum verifications on your downloads to ensure they are legitimate. Aurora is hypothetically vulnerable to man in the middle attacks since it doesn’t check the file’s hash

I’m in a nearly identical position, I don’t have any advice except stay strong and know you’re not alone. It’s rough out here right now. Even temp agencies for IT work are a dead end, they want me to relocate for 30 days of employment lmao. I’m just doing gig work while I wait but the hiring market for this field is fucked right now

I think about him saying don’t tell my wife about the chicken wings at least once a week lol

Default Fedora workstation and Silverblue do it this way. First boot prompts you to create an account and set it up, then lands you on the desktop and asks if you want a tour of the UI

Yah I’m aware of their US backing and their oil deals. If Assad was still around he’d be the obvious bulwark against imperialism in the region even with his obvious flaws. I suppose I’d hoped rojava had more staying power than just what the US deals had supplied so they could fill some of that role. I just find it tragic to see the region pulled apart for plunder again to this extent

Terrible. This just emboldens fascist erdogan and HTS, and crushes any chance of sovereignty for Kurds or continuation of the flawed but progressive experiment in rojava.

I don’t have experience with dual GPU laptops but from what I’ve heard PopOS handles them really well. They also have an image with the nvidia drivers preinstalled which should make the setup process straightforward

Edit: I also found this github repo which documents some fixes for issues on that device specifically. Not sure how many of these have been patched upstream by now but it’s worth checking out.

Hey one thing I noticed in your safe mobile operating systems section is that you recommend divestOS as an alternative to graphene. I have made the same recommendation for years, but if you aren’t aware that project actually shut down in December so it’s just gone now. A good recommendation that is still maintained is CalyxOS, which also supports bootloader locking after install (at least on pixels, they have caveats for fairphone devices). I haven’t had a chance to read all of your guide yet though, but other than this I’ve enjoyed the parts I’ve gotten to. Thanks for making it!

This is not true. You may be thinking of the Secure Enclave, which Apple processors have had for a while and acts as a dedicated piece of silicon to protect encryption keys. But pixels have this too, idk about phones with Qualcomm or exynos SOCs but they likely have something similar. Either way it has no impact on battery life and all major smartphones have been capable of encryption for many years

It’s good that it’s gone, but this makes me think US imperialism is going to stop trying to curry favor with soft power and kickbacks for compradors, and instead go full mask off and just coup or invade everyone they want shit from. I know that the hard power has been used excessively throughout US history for these goals already but I worry it could ramp up to new levels.

Yes it’s proprietary idk why I phrased it like that. I should’ve said I fall back to proprietary services like iMessage, then if that’s not possible I go to unencrypted proprietary services like discord etc. My b

1. I keep my options open. I default to signal or matrix if that’s available, then my fall back is iMessage which I run on a macOS vm, and finally id relent to proprietary services like discord, groupme, etc. I minimize my communications on unencrypted and non-private channels, and only talk about benign things there if I have to use them. But I don’t let my commitment to privacy completely isolate me, I know my threat model and change behaviors depending on the environment.

2. My banking and money transfer apps all work under grapheneos in a user account with Google play services installed. I mostly manage these things on my computer though to minimize tracking and remove the need for safetycheck compatibility before it ever comes up.

3. I never use these services but pretty sure they also work on Graphene with sandboxed Google play services installed

4. Other users have posted programs to convert these coordinates on the fly, I have never needed those personally. When I need GPS I usually go for Organic Maps but thinking of switching to OSMAnd+ soon

5. Yes and this is an area where I need to improve my privacy more. I just use the garmin connect app with a garmin fitness tracker I got for cheap. I think it partially supports gadgetbridge so I might look into that but haven’t had the time to investigate.

6. Pixel+Graphene is really the gold standard for privacy, security, and compatibility. I’ve heard ok stuff about CalyxOS so that’s worth checking out. Also FairPhone devices tend to have good support for custom ROMs like Calyx and /e/os which are degoogled, but I don’t have personal experience with those so definitely research those topics before making any decisions

“People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”

• Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

Insert Césaire quote on fascism

Yes absolutely, it is the building block of my security posture. I encrypt because I don’t want thieves to have access to my personal data, nor do I want law enforcement or the state to have access if they were to raid my house. I’m politically active and a dissident so I find it vital to keep my data secure and private, but frankly everybody should be doing it for their own protection and peace of mind

99% of people with an iota of critical thinking skills agree: Elon Musk is an incessant moron

I personally like using UnifiedPush wherever possible. You install an app to serve notifications (I use ntfy.sh), then install applications which support the standard. Usually they have a setting to toggle unified push which should register them with ntfy, then you’re golden. Obviously this is limited to a small group of apps but support is growing, and where it’s present it’s fantastic.