Captain Beyond

^ this

“Smart” anything is something of a misnomer as the “smarts” are on some “cloudy” server far away. One can only hope that without the “cloudy” connection the thing will continue to function on a “dumb” level.

“Smart” “phones” are even more of a misnomer since they’re basically pocket computers that happen to have a phone in them. I’ll use them because they can be useful if they do what you want, but I don’t install any proprietary apps.

Unfortunately vivaldi is proprietary and actively hostile to the software freedom movement, but if it weren’t I’d consider it as a daily driver.

All of my mobile devices use some Linux based operating system. I have a PinePhone running Mobian, a moto g7 play running LineageOS, and a Samsung Galaxy Tab s6e also running LineageOS.

I would prefer a GNU/Linux operating system like Debian to Android as I feel I have more freedom and power with a traditional GNU/Linux system, although I have come to accept that ungoogled Android operating systems can be just as good if the proprietary Google services and proprietary apps are avoided. I’d like to give the PinePhone another try as daily driver especially since Debian 12 has been released.

Edit: As for Apple, being locked out of installing your own apps from outside the Apple market is reason enough to avoid iOS. As a free software user I don’t think any perceived security or privacy benefits justify the massive decrease in freedom. I also would not say Apple is merely “mildly annoying” https://stallman.org/apple.html

Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account’s quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human “bot hunter” accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots “stealing” content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.

Fed-ih-verse, like un-ih-verse.

I sometimes still wish we just called it “the federation” though.

GNU Guix System. 100% free software, focus on reproducible builds, declarative configuration, packages are just Scheme modules stored in a git repository. I’ve written packages for guix (I helped with the Icedove package) and find it to be fairly straightforward once I understood the syntax and basic data structures.

One particularly nifty feature of guix is that you can specify a commit or version number to build a package with, so if the package is out of date you can still get the latest version (assuming it still builds of course).