I would just add a +1 for Sony Xperia phones with LineageOS support (do check). They offer OLED panels, a 3.5mm headphone jack, & microSD card—with the last two once being standard now almost impossible to find despite their usefulness.

As for services, many of them can be accessed thru a browser. There are enough Firefox forks out there that you could stay authenticated with these grimy, untrustworthy apps & another fork with your typical web browsing.

That said some of this could be given up to an extent. If you have a microSD slot or carry a separate DAP, there shouldn’t be much need for Spotify where an offline library is quicker, saves data, & can offer higher bitrates (obv no ads too). Microsoft GitHub is not useful on a phone since no one codes on a phone & you can subscribe to the things you need either their Atom feeds or via email & all of your personal code should be living somewhere off the proprietary platform—especially if you want to help access to contributions since it is blocked for US sactions in some regions & they bow out to capitalist interests (see youtube-dl, or Switch emulators, etc.), while requiring your contributors give up their privacy as there is no way to report bugs or send patches without an account. And the chat options, depending on the situation you should see if you can get folks to consider your privacy too (else why on this sub?) & switch to something decentralized & with E2EE the default for DMs & optional for groups—XMPP is a great default choice, Mumble was built for games, but there are other options. Need is a strong word, & it might take a few years, but eventually, hopefully you can ween yourself & help friends get off these platforms as it is bad for them too, but you are not going to get much privacy if the corporations & governments can still read all your chats.

Did you mean computers are a bad choice for regular users?

Something something touch grass. Bugs exist in all OSs. If my data sold & being advertized + tracked by a US-based company’s closed-source OS is the alternative, then I am just turning off the computer & starting a farm.

More appealing? Linux runs basically all server infrastructure where even Microsoft bent the knee for Azure & Windows Subsystem for Linux. If we are talking about Desktop Linux, it will remain popular with those building software for easier/better dev tooling & wanting to better understand the systems their production code is run on. As software becomes more intergral to our lives & knowing how to write/debug it rises, folks will slowly keep trickling in as the have for decades where more & more software is treating Linux (& the web, & since BSDs, et al. are running similar software such as GTK they are also included) as a primary target. The other desktop OSs continue to shoot themselves in the foot injecting ads into the OS or denying system-level access to the machine you own.

A would say a better focus is mobile Linux… as casual users have migrated away from desktop OSs, where Android & iOS’s walls are holding them captive.

Huh. I still use proprietary software too—& I’ll make purchases for copyrighted music. But I have moved away from as much of it as I can when I had the opportunity or convenience to do so. Some proprietary software is basically irreplaceable & not built by megacorporations siphoning our private data. But things like chat apps? Music players? Code forges? There are tons of replacements…

Your friends should value your privacy too & your job shouldn’t be trusting their secrets to Microsoft either.

Linux the lifestyle will mean slowly embracing more open or otherwise ethical software. Slowly ween yourself off the Discord, the Spotify, the Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft LinkedIn, Microsoft npm, Microsoft GitHub.

For some reason we tend to give Steam a pass for convenience & investing as much as it has into the Linux ecosystem (even if it is selfishly & largely to avoid Microsoft lock-in/competition).

Movim is another web UX option (comes with posts + feeds that can easily be crawled as well so you don’t have everything stuck in the black hole of chat).

It is the exact opposite. Ligatures were created to help deal with the lack of clarity when symbols overlap. fi, ff, fl, ffi, have historically (like print press historical) been common ligatures where others are stylistic, where others are downright questionable & make things harder to read. The first category should almost always be supported, & the others can usually be disabled if not commonly off by default where you opt in for some design, not for general body copy.

What you are referring to about ‘programming ligatures’ is an outright abuse of open type features full of false positives, ambiguities, & lack of clarity for outsiders to understand what your code means. What you want is Unicode supported in your language so you can precisely what you mean than using ASCII abominations—like meaning → but typing ->, dash + greater, than which isn’t at all what you mean which is a rightward arrow. (with a non-exhaustive languages with decent Unicode support: Raku, Julia, Agda, PureScript, Haskell with Unicode pragma, & all APL dialects).

Strong opinions. Sometimes Linus’s takes are ‘bangers’ &, while probably fewer, he’s had a lot ‘woofs’ on the opposite end.

like Rust

But no one is talking about that that is doesn’t need to be Rust. There are alternatives that can do as much if not more with the type system & safety while being as low-level as C without some of Rust’s restrictions.

Best way to combat the issue in this example is to create zero Discord accounts & embrace open, encrypted communication options like XMPP & Mumble, etc.

A surprising amount of services block Google Voice for 2FA (where a surprising number of services both required 2FA & only support SMS despite the security issue); I wouldn’t rely on it (but sometimes it still makes the most sense since you can’t beat the price, free). My favorite was PayPal deciding to block Google Voice & the only way to message support is by first authenticating—where asking on Twitter was an immediate block so… fuck PayPal & never used it since.

I also use Linux & Ungoogled Android on everything–and it is the best we got now that doesn’t involve a significant time sink or expertise to get things working. I would love to see alternative platforms be popular & with general hardware compatibility & either Nix or Guix support as well, I would consider giving it a run in the future since I like being open if something better is on offer. I like to keep light tabs on the Haikus, BSDs, OpenIndianas, & such of the world just in case… particularly if we ever got a memory-safe kernel with some proofs behind its logic (Rust doesn’t go hard enough, sorry fanboys). That said, generally, Linux is still good.

Only luck I had that route was getting a free coffee & b1tcted about the industry. Networking is better than recruiters 95% of the time anyhow. Microsoft doesn’t deserve your data or attention.

Nor should they

I would recommend against Manjaro for messing with the Arch packages & other weird decisions that anger that community, Fedora for not having LTS kernels, & sadly base Debian for desktop with the apps often being stable but way out of date.

Most distros operate about the same as far as software & will as a result likely feel more or less the same. The biggest exceptions are how GuixOS & NixOS do declarative, stateless config symlinking in config/executables from the store. If you wanna get into dev, these will force you into the right mindset & are worth checking eut, but will definitely be too cumbersome for someone that isn’t committing the steeper learning curve & ‘just wants to run things’.

Most filesystems now how encryption that is better optimized for their specific performance & might be worth choosing over LUKS… ZFS, Bcachefs, F2FS, ext4

ผีเสื้อ in Thai translates to “shirt ghost” 🤷 it sounds very similar to the tone-deaf as “tiger ghost” which is certainly a cooler name, but nope.

Deleting your Microsoft LinkedIn account is an option

Assuming this is just a sensor for air quality tuned to this use case, I would probably have to agree. So long as it isn’t tracking specific students or taking photos, this is about as privacy invansize as the motion detector that opens automatic doors… or any old carbon monoxide or other detector which are used to legit protect public safety, just as preventing children from the claws of the tobacco industry.