Nice article! Are you the author? If so, I’d like to give you a suggestion: the part about the deepin Linux story and technical background is interesting enough to be its own article. That way, it would be more findable on web searchers and probably help a lot of people who look for information on it, which is a bit scarce in english.

Some software developers prefer to host their own repos and have more control over the release process and/or don’t want to fill all the criteria for being included on f-droid, so they create their own repos. Some of these apps can still be found on vanilla fdroid, but often aren’t updated so frequently.

Izzyondroid, on the other hand, is a different project, aimed at hosting different apps that are usually from smaller devs and can’t be included on fdroid yet, for different reasons.

The greatest thing about fdroid is that it allows anyone to create their own repos and you aren’t forced to depend on anyone.

5 years already? Shit, I’m old.

Gnu can be used to describe the gnu project, the gnu license or the gnu coreutils. In this context, they mean that Linux by itself isn’t enough to be the a free desktop, and needs the gnu software to be the system they care about. (There can be controversies on whether gnu is needed or not, since it’s possible to create a distro without the coreutils, but let’s not get you confused right now)

Good idea, worth checking.

But still good reasons, anyway.

That’s amazing.

Here in Brazil, we had the government encouraging free software in the 2000s, but the projects and policies were all abandoned.

And to think we could have a similar adoption to yours today… sigh…

Back then, people didn’t understand how such projects give benefits in a long timeframe, and wanted immediate results, something impossible.

Even more important is to see the windows downtrend. We need competition, keep it going!

One trick is to have anold android phone. I created a couple of accounts last year without giving any personal data by using a device with android kitkat.

I feel the same. I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore.

I was thinking it was something like what pidgin does on desktop, adapted for mobile, and was highly enthusiastic, but realized it works using matrix bridges and doesn’t process locally…

Well, at least it can be self hosted.

App lounge looks really interesting.

When I first heard about /e/ os, it looked a bit too weird, and I was too skeptical, but they’re growing so nice and creating interesting tools. I think I will give the project a shot.

Such definitions are becoming more and more complicated. I think we should standardize a name for the family of systems we use, or it will become uglier and uglier.

Recently, I had to write an academic work in the area, and an entire section was dedicated to explaining this controversy and defining what kind of system I was talking about, so that the work is reproducible.

Everything adds a little. Another thing happening are the newer Windows versions requiring stupidly high minimum requirements, pushing people with older machines into alternatives.

Like already mentioned, they still do, in addition to other sources, but they’re also developing their own index.

When it comes to search engines, I value not only privacy, but supporting independent indexes ans avoiding Google’s monopoly.

Ddg is working in this aspect, so I consider them to be ok.

I can see where you came from. We can’t expect to be free from powerful corporations without some sort of tradeoff. However, in this particular case, I prefer my upvotes to be private, so I don’t feel like I have any incentive to hit that button again. I will only read and comment from now on, because my comments and posts are what I expect to be public.

Well, the good thing is that we have the option to refrain from voting. But this information isn’t easily available to new users.

To be fair, I don’t feel comfortable with that. I believe people are so excited about ditching reddit, that they’re in denial about any possible flaw or inconvenience about lemmy.

I hope future updates bring more privacy to the users.

+1 for syncthing.

If my pc fails right in the middle of some serious work, I will be no longer in despair. I will simply use my second machine to finish it, and repair the main one later.

Do you think it’s safe for the average joe to forward ports in the router to access things from the outside?