I’m glad that it works for you but you have to know that it’s not like that for everyone. Last time I tried using MTP I had to write a script that would call rsync in a loop until all files were transfered because every time like one or two files would just mysteriously not make it across the cable.

Also, not me personally, but some people have usecases like playing video files from their phone on their tv or sending files to a printer over the cable. This wouldn’t work with MTP because most “dumb” devices like that don’t support it

It’s sad how root is still required on many phones to reach full functionality, yet they makes you jump through hoops to get it.

On my phone I needed root to set a battery charge limit. The rom I’m using only added that functionality natively a few years ago. I still need root to make backups ever since google kneecapped ADB backup. Seriously, do they just expect people to not make backups of the device they use every day!?

This is not USB Mass Storage. This is MTP. If this was USB Mass Storage, then the phone would have a drive letter (or two different drive letter for internal storage/sd card) and wouldn’t appear under “This PC”.

EDIT here are some screenshots from The Before Times, when some phones actually allowed you to switch between the two modes. First is UMS, second is MTP. source

I really miss USB Mass Storage mode. Back then you could plug in your phone into your computer and it would just expose the internal storage and SD card as standard usb storage devices. Nowadays you have shitty MTP which works barely if ever, so you’re forced to use either internet or ADB for syncing files. Old way was better.

IIRC you can still enable it if you compile your own kernel but I wish more ROMs shipped with this feature by default.

The reason they don’t want you to unlock your bootloader is because of security…

…security of their revenue stream, that is.

Jesus christ people in the comments here are pathetic. This clearly has nothing to do with racial slurs or otaku culture. It’s a play on the totally normal english word “tycoon” which just means “very rich businessman” and “mogul” which is a synonym for “magnate”. You can look these up, every half-decent dictionary has these words. They probably changed it because “coon” is a slur for black people and they didn’t want to cause any misunderstandings. If any of this offends you, please, please just step outside, touch some grass, take a deep breath, relax.

Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

No all anti-cheat is something that you need to install. Some anticheat solutions run on the game’s servers and analyse player movement to detect common cheats. Those are the ones you don’t need to be angry about.

What does privacy badger do that isn’t covered by UO? Is it worth it to install privacy badger if I already use a browser like librewolf that nukes all data every time it’s restarted?

if they finally decide to turn full evil.

Yeah this is the brave experience. Free and open source product that behaves as advertised… from a company that acts like they’re perpetually on the brink of fucking you over. Really hope this doesn’t happen, brave’s approach to antifingerprinting is actually quite interesting and completely different to what we see in the firefox-based hardened browsers.

I tried using it with a friend, and it completely nuked my phone’s battery, while my friend’s phone silently killed it (likely for using too much battery). I understand that truly privacy-respecting messengers will always use slightly more power than apps that use the google notification thing, but simplex is just a complete power hog beyond any reasonable limit. Hopefully they fix it at some point, it seems like a pretty solid messenger otherwise, and their approach to privacy and anonymity is unparalleled, at least in theory.

What desktop environment? KDE, right? Just make sure you aren’t using the encFS backend for your vaults, it’s insecure https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm

I don’t use KDE, so they may have already dropped support for encfs, idk. Just wanted to leave a warning for you/anyone else

but I do have encrypted directories for my sensitive data

What do you use for encrypted directories? Ecryptfs?

Looks like it works! Congrats!

Not sure if any of that is helpful for your case but I recommend trying something if you’ve got spare hardware, and see how it goes on dummy data, then blow it away try something else.

This is good advice, thanks! Pretty much what I’m doing right now. Already tried it with IPFS, and found that it didn’t meet my needs. Currently setting up a tahoe-lafs grid to see how it works. Will try out ceph after this.

How is ceph working out for you btw? I’m looking into distributed storage solutions rn. My usecase is to have a single unified filesystem/index, but to store the contents of the files on different machines, possibly with redundancy. In particular, I want to be able to upload some files to the cluster and be able to see them (the directory structure and filenames) even when the underlying machine storing their content goes offline. Is that a valid usecase for ceph?

Yep. Intel atom D525

If GRUB is too confusing, just uninstall it? You said you have a UEFI system, you don’t need a bootloader. You can just put the vmlinuz and initramfs onto the ESP and boot into it directly. You can use efibootmgr to create the boot entry, something like this:

efibootmgr \
	--create \
	--disk /dev/sda \
	--part 1 \
	--index 0 \
	--label "Void linux" \
	--loader /vmlinuz-6.6.52_1 \
	--unicode " \
		root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT \
		rw \
		initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img \
		loglevel=4 \
		net.ifnames=0 \
		biosdevname=0 \
		nowatchdog \
		iomem=relaxed \
		"

• --disk /dev/sda: What disk is the esp on?
• --part 1 What partition number (counting from 1) is the esp on?
• --index 0 At what index in the boot menu should the boot entry appear?
• --loader Path to the vmlinuz file. These are normally in /boot, you have to move it to the esp yourself
• root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT this is the linux root partiion. I’m using PARTLABEL to identify mine, but you can use pretty much anything that /etc/fstab supports
• initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img Again, you have to move the initramfs file from /boot into the esp. For some reason this uses backslashes, not forward slashes as path separator (double backslashes in this case are to prevent the shell from interpreting it as an escape sequence)
• The rest of the arguments are just misc kernel parameters that I use

Just search for EFISTUB for more info.

A lot of “hardware raid” is just a separate controller doing software raid. I thought I lost access to a bunch of data when my raid controller died, before I realized that I could just plug the disks directly into the computer and mount them with mdadm. But yes, hardware raid seems a bit pointless nowadays.

What on earth are you talking about?? Of course they don’t have to compete. It’s a meme. It’s meant to be funny, not accurate. What does my ego have to do with anything?