I’ve used several iterations of Gnome, several iterations of KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Hyprland, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and several other things I can’t be bothered to remember. I can be productive on any of them given some time to set them up.
I do have preferences though, and I like KDE on a laptop/desktop and Gnome on a tablet. I just wish Gnome would do something about its horrid onscreen keyboard.
Wafrn might be worth a look. I’ve been meaning to try it myself.
Mastodon’s character limit is pretty easy to change when self-hosting, but it has other limitations like a lack of even basic formatting and images inline in posts. I think that’s true of several of the others as well.
There is a risk Google could tamper with the app for specific users if they’re installing it from Google Play. I think it’s likely security researchers would discover that if it was widespread, but there’s a chance Google could do it undetected if they targeted it selectively enough.
People who are concerned about this can download the APK directly from Signal and check its signature before installation.
Signal uses reproducible builds for its Android client, and I think for desktop as well. That means it’s possible to verify that a particular Signal package is built from the open source Signal codebase. I don’t have to trust Signal because I can check or build it myself.
If I don’t have extreme security needs, I don’t even have to check. Signal has a high enough profile that I can be confident other people have checked, likely many other people who are more skilled at auditing cryptographic code than I am.
Trusting the server isn’t necessary because the encryption is applied by the sender’s client and removed by the recipient’s client.
I’m still using a phone from 2020. It’s fine. If I got something new, it would probably be bigger and lack a headphone jack.
A new phone would have a better camera than my old one, but it would not be as good a camera as my Olympus, which I use when I care about the result.
The airline probably owes you money under the EU 261 passenger rights regulation.
Thus, a seatless bus. A what?!
That’s pretty common at European airports. It’s rare in the USA, but I’ve seen it.
I had four overnight delays in three round trip transatlantic flights in 2025. The airline was at fault for three of them.
When the airline is at fault for a delay of four hours or more on a long flight that starts or ends in the EU, they owe the passenger 600 Euros, a hotel room, and meals, so those were long delays but not exactly terrible experiences.
Getting stuck for 20 hours in the Newark airport due to weather wasn’t as pleasant. The airline did not owe me anything because weather is not their fault. There were hundreds of other delayed travelers sleeping on cots in the halls of the airport. They did not have a cot for me.
Here are some more options:
It’s worth thinking about whether dimensions like these are cause or effect, and political or personality traits. zlatiah points out that there are techniques for identifying which ones cause political behavior.
I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99
Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com with whois privacy. $30/year for email hosting might be worth it if you’re getting very good service, but I think you’re overpaying.
$11.08 for a .com. Source: just renewed.
Power consumption in ultra-low modes is usually mostly something other than the LED and power conversion process. It’s often the MCU, which Anduril tries to minimize with low-power modes when they’re available, but they’re not always available.
An efficient power conversion step (almost always a buck or boost switched-mode power supply) is most helpful in medium-low to medium-high modes where 20% more runtime matters on realistic time scales. A 14500 EDC light that can do 300 lumens for two hours instead of an hour and a half is enough improvement I don’t feel like I need to bring a bigger light in a lot of situations.
It also means less heat and higher sustained output, which is likely a priority for those picking the larger 21700 size.
A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I’m thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.
The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?
I wonder what an alternate history where Google chose not to become evil would look like.
What if they had looked at Microsoft’s Palladium proposal and thought, as pretty much everyone outside institutional IT departments did that locked devices with remote attestation was a nightmare scenario best forgotten, refused to build it, and made an effort to prevent anyone else from doing so on top of Android? Safetynet didn’t appear until 5-6 years after Android launched to the public. What if it never did? Android already had enough momentum by that point I don’t think the financial sector could refuse to be on it no matter what risk management said.
I had that in mind, but it’s been a while since I read it and skimming it today, it seems a little dated. The tone may also be a bit harsh to offer to OP in this thread.
Without seeing the entirety of the interaction, it’s hard to be sure.
Some people are assholes, and because nobody wants to interact with assholes, they usually end up congregating on whatever forum doesn’t ban them. Moderation is hard and ban evasion is often easy, so there end up being a lot of places like that.
The other side is that people in general ask a lot of bad questions, and a forum flooded with bad questions becomes useless because people who could answer good questions either get tired of it and leave, or spend so much time on the bad questions they don’t have time for the good ones. People get frustrated when they think that’s happening to a forum they enjoy, and programmers are famously better at communicating with machines than with people.
Here’s are some tips to ask good questions about programming:
Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.
I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.
This is a forum.
Forums and blogs could be classed as social media, but they predate widespread use of the term, and are fundamentally different from the corporate social platforms.
It’s the combination of an individualized engagement algorithm and user-generated content that defines modern social media.