OpenBSD admin and ports maintainer

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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.orgtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs pixel 4a too old for a new phone?
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    11 hours ago

    Random hardware suggestions, using mobile Linux support as a litmus test

    • Pinephone (Pro): Main downside is that OG Pinephone has extremely anemic hardware, and the charging circuit is not controlled through hardware for some insane reason; hope the kernel devs of whatever OS you put on it knows how to not turn your phone into a bomb. Also Pine64 as a company has gotten flak for their support of Manjaro. Can’t deny how good the price is though.
    • Fairphone 4: Good hardware, but expensive. I don’t own it, but it works good on postmarketOS according to the wiki.
    • Librem 5: Overpriced compared to the earlier members on this list, but you can guarantee the phosh interface will work well considering it was developed by Purism as well.
    • OnePlus 6 and 6T: I don’t know much about these, but they’re very popular with the mobile Linux crowd.

    As for the pixel, there’s work on it but it’s still broken at the moment. As for the hardware being too old, I haven’t used anything Android in a while, so I don’t know how much performance degrades each release, but a mobile Linux distribution should run just as good today as it will 20 years from now, assuming you use the same interface.




  • It’s as easy as following any set of instructions. Whether or not you actually understand what the instructions are doing is an entirely different story. If you actually want to learn how to operate a posix system, doing a bunch of command line installs of Linux isn’t going to help you with that. What will help is living in something with excellent documentation like OpenBSD, with minimal reliance on external tooling. Once you have the skills, they’ll transfer anywhere.

















    • Use a fork of Firefox (librewolf), or a different open source browser
      • even if you modify Firefox to remove all telemetry, Mozilla are bad actors, and will update to add new telemetry like Anonym or Cliqz by default after an update. Unless you really trust your package maintainer, use a fork or a different browser
    • Force a common useragent
    • Disable javascript everywhere, or use a browser without javascript, whenever possible
      • trying to defend against fingerprinting with javascript enabled is futile, even things like your number of cpu threads (navigator.hardwareConcurrency), list of fonts, webgl support, supported codecs, browser permissions, and variations in canvas rendering can be used in fingerprinting
        • tor browser is the only project I know of that can come close to avoiding fingerprinting with javascript, but even then you’re advised to avoid using javascript with tor browser
      • use 3rd party clients for things like youtube that would normally need javascript