BrilliantBadger

Clippy

Fantastic love to see it. No recommendations as you will find what suits your zen, Mint is loved by many

I comment to add a cheers for bailing on Amazon & not paying for streaming services. Did so also years ago, its a great feeling. Good luck!

Sure is. And if you ain’t surfing nasty sites, loading ‘free’ VPN spyware, crap AI dung & scammy apps it’s all good

Android OS is a very secure OS. Google recently moved their older devices to quarterly updates versus monthly. Are we now saying those older pixels (still in support life) are insecure because they could go 3 months w/o an update? In itself that move is telling & obliterates the marketing scare tactics used by some & some projects. It’s sad really.

Common sense and good online habits will take you further than all else

This is honeslty a shameful post. A personal rant with just a nasty agenda

People or projects attacking other privacy focused projects working on good faith intent to help us escape the duopoly are just sad. If a project doesn’t fit your personal needs, so be it, move on

As a whole we need as many of these projects to succeed & elevate as possible. Shooting at others because you got your feelings hurt elsewhere is childish and self-defeating for all. Last thing we need is creating a monopoly of privacy focused options

Legit concern & lots of good comments on the device side of things so I’ll just toss in that another perhaps far easier approach for fascist regimes would be to force telcos, ISPs to permit online access only once registered, similar to a hotel guest WiFi. Only of course more rigidly enforced & monitored.

Thus removing the device itself from the equation, and using infrastructure as the chokepoint.

Future generations are largely doomed by the apathy of the “we have nothing to hide” folks of today, or those who buy into the its “for the children” movement.

Horrifying for the generations to come, as it all advances from multiple angles to 1984 reality

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Nice. Similar, I got the N100 off the bay to give a try. VoLTE now works good in USA with Tello /Tmobile, at least in my area, that was certainly a show stopper for some time, huge win!

Got OpenVPN working, uWolf runnng my NextDNS so can filter/watch the logs, MMS has some issues (only works with wifi disabled, but I think they have a fix coming), no RCS as you mention.

As you say, not quite there, but good progress overall. Hope for continued progress, and love to see the many more posts on it than ever before!

Using a privacy focused Android phone project for now, but long term the real answer is Linux or some other new project to tear away completely from Bigtechs dependency & stranglehold. Thanks for your adding development to the cause!

Just ordered a cheap Nord N100 should arrive soon, just for purpose of testing/running UT. Tried UT little over a year ago, as someone else mentioned the VoLTE is/was a full stopper in USA, which sounds like progress made(?) based on user comments

I’ll work around loss of apps, for example banking app if I have a good browser. Sure, more painful but I only need that in a pinch. Same for many other missing apps

Build around a solid browser experience I think would ease the transition, for people like myself who are slowly heading toward a more “dumb phone” experience and back to PC/laptop for most needs. I am likely a minority there though

Looks like uWolf browser and a new one (to me) called Merezhyvo Browser are having good success

In any case, look forward to seeing how it goes this time around :)

Tuta is great, I like it has its own client, in particular Linux has so few options. Thunderbird is became concerning for me based upon FF underpinning & associated AI moves

That said, I team it with Posteo which is also great, and hard to beat the price

Both bring solid reputation & strong company values & ethics

Tuta works only with its clients

Posteo doesn’t do custom domains

In any case you can try Tuta for free.  :)

Fedora Silverblue has been utterly fantastic for me. Only item layered is Opensnitch which is of course also amazing

When I look for new distros to try immutables are highest on my preferred list, Aeon & Kinoite, also very nice, can’t go wrong with any of these IMO

You can set exceptions for cookies on per site basis. I know because I also thought this for long time before finding it.

Settings - Privacy & Security - Cookies and Site Data - Manage exceptions

One item off the annoyance list. :)

Last I saw Vivaldi had a very strong no AI stance

Happy long time user of librewolf so havent kept up though

Good article. Have used e/OS for quite some time and it’s excellent, just as IodeOS is. Not perfect for all, but every app I needed worked without issues, while blocking most if not all of known trackers.

Using these phones is also just as importantly about educating ourselves & changing some of our habits. Using the privacy tools, Exodus and such, find yourself making better educated decisions in all things privacy, almost instinctual over time. And across platforms.

Was quite infuriating to see one of my banking apps use so many trackers. But at least now they are blocked. Other apps you begin to weed out and switch to FOSS alternatives as you can. For some apps infested but service occasionally needed, switched to just using a browser and DNS filtering service like NextDNS.

It’s of course a cat & mouse game, Davids against the bigtech Goliath megabucks with effectively government power & policy control.

Appreciate the great work of Gael and others, they are all needed as we find our new way forward.

Started with Niagara so many years ago, never thought I could find a suitable open alternative then joyfully discovered Olauncher been using that for long time. Phone without icons is pure bliss, elegance and far easier to use/find apps