Punica granatum @PunaisetPimpulat@qoto.org

@boilingsteam Did you notice the date when that was released? 🤔

@louiscouture @lewlepton@mastodon.social I can highly recommend getting a used enterprise grade laptop and installing your favorite Linux distribution on it. Just make sure that laptop doesn’t have an Nvidia card on it. Go with AMD or Intel instead. You’ll thank me later.

@mesh4545 @Hawk1291
As far as my video watching habits are concerned, YT is going to die within a year or two. That company has been heading for a very unfortunate direction for a while now, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that eventually it will be very much like a TV channel. When TV died for me, YouTube took its place. Now that YT is dying, Odysee will take its place.

@pganssle Add YouTube to your list. Originally it was the wild west of videos and film makers of all kinds. Then it started serving adds, and started to dislike that place a bit. Fortunately that thing could be fixed with ublock origin, so I kept watching. Eventually I started hearing stories about video makers being treated unfairly, and nowadays that’s just getting way out of hand. It’s clear that YouTube want’s to be like TV or Netflix. It no longer wants independet video makers of any kind and the only way to get rid of them is to make the environment more and more hostile towards them. Fortunately #Odysee is there for everyone who want’s to publish videos without the fear of being demonetized, ignored by the algorithm, banned, deleted etc.

@danie10 I've had a similar path with phones. I've been an Android user for about as long as those phones have been around. Every now and then I've played around with iPhones wihtout actually owning one so that I know what's on the other side of the fence.

Every time I did that, I came to the same conclusion: This product is limiting my actions at every turn. It's imposing all sorts of artificial limitations and I just can't tolerate any of it. At the same time Android gives me the freedom to do just about anything I want, so the choice was very clear.

That lasted a few more years until one day you couldn't use the external SD card for installing apps. I just switched to LineageOS at that point and continued along that path for a few more years. Another reason for doing that was the fact that phone manufacturers usually abandon all phones that are older than 12 months. That sort of business is just not ethical since it enocurages people to buy a new phone every year and it punishes the people who use the same phone for more than a year. #LineageOS doesn't do that. As long as someone is supporting your phone model, you can expect to receive updates long after the OEM has already forgotten that model ever even existed. That's why I was still able to use my Galaxy S5 in 2019.

However, eventually I got tired of Google knowing too much about me and the way I use my phone, so I decided to get rid of Gapps on my phone, and installed just Lineage with no ties to Google. That #degoogle experiment revealed that there are in fact some vital apps that really don't want to work properly in plain Vanilla Android with no Gapps or any sort of Google stuff in it. Also, Updating stuff through F-droid is incredibly inconvenient, so a degoogled LineageOS just wans't daily driver material for me.

At that point I had to make a decision: Do I want to switch to mainstream Android and buy a new phone as soon as the OEM decides to abandon my model, or should I get the phone I've hated for years. Honestly, I hate both options, but I have to say I hate the iPhone less, so got one of those. The privacy level you get with an iPhone isn't quite what I wanted, but at least it's better than allowing Google to track every step you take.

I got a used iPhone 7 and I was pleasantly surprised. Apple had finally fixed vast majority of the annoying restrictions they had in the previous models. Sure, ringtones are still a nightmare, and there's no real file management, but so many restrictions are gone that iOS is actually becoming a barely acceptable operating system. Previously iOS was completely unusable, but now it's merely annoying.

@RTP @freddylove@distrotoot.com
I like to think of privacy and security as complete package with three different layers.

Level 1, criminals: If you make the wrong compromises in this level, criminals will take whatever they can from you. Get started by making sure everything is updated and you understand what you're clicking on the web.

Level 2, normal people: If you make the wrong compromises, your friends, relatives and other people will know things about you that you didn't want to tell them about. If you don't use social media, this isn't really a concern for you. If do, make sure you understand that when you are posting something, you are standing on the stage with millions of people looking at you.

Level 3, computers: This is the hardest level, because Google, Amazon and Facebook are tracking nearly everything on the web these days. You can easily reduce this a fair bit, but those tricks are outside the scope of this post. Reducing it greatly requires some serious dedication and pretty harsh compromises most people aren't willing to do. Completely eliminating all tracking is something I don't think is even possible any more in this day an age. if you know of a method other than going completely offline and living in a cabin off the grid in the mountains, please let me know.

@OTheB@mastodon.technology That seems to be a cultural thing. When I meet with consultants for the first time, we all use cameras, but once we're a bit more familiar with each other we use audio only. I think there's a time and place for video, but expecting people to have their camera on all the time is just silly.

@fribbledom I can highly recommended it. Standing desks are just great.