Of course I love other people telling me what I am or am not supposed to want out of my tech. That’s why I exclusively use Apple products. Oh wait, I actually don’t.

…

And BTW, this is in fact a shitty joke, because even iPhones and Pixels and Teslas actually let you set a charging limit.

It is definitely an overreaction.

The rational part was that I have to mantain his installation anyway. I have a lot of experience with KDE, and having seen trouble with GNOME from the get go, I ran back to the safe choice.

I don’t know… Friday I installed Linux on my dad’s “new” Thinkpad T495.

I tried to go with Gnome. It’s supposed to be the user friendly one, right?

First thing I want to do is change the charging limit of the battery to 80%. It’s not impossible to replace the battery, but it would be nice to not blow it too fast.

After 20m of trying and failing I switched to KDE, where the whole thing was 3 clicks.

And even if I didn’t know how to do it, the systemsettings window has a search function that will get you the right option in a split second.

I found switftkey rather buggy, and stopped using it as soon as GBoard added decent multilingual support, so I really can’t remember the key placement. All are pretty heavily customizable, I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t get them to a state where you’re comfortable.

Which one of the three I suggested?

FUTO is definitely a bit more resource hungry. Try Heliboard, you need to add a separate library to enable swiping, but it’s definitely way lighter.

AFAICT their license does not fulfill the OSI definition and is therefore ineligible for inclusion in the main F-Droid repo.

They have their own F-Droid repo:

https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo/

The repo is also pre-included in clients such as Droid-ify, which I use anyway because I like it better than the official client.

As far as I can tell, the closest thing to a European supplier of ereaders is Pocketbook. They have much better privacy policies than most of their competition. From what I gather most of their line up is pretty good, I didn’t read great things on their note-taking 10" device when I checked it around Christmas time (pretty slow, apparently).

Tolino devices are for the most part rebranded Kobos, though I’m not sure how much the firmware differs, and it may very useful if you desire a high Integration wirh the european bookstores, which should at least have to respect GDPR to a meaningful degree.

All non-kindle eBook stores use the same Adobe DRM anyway.

On any ereader, the first thing I would do is still install Koreader right away.

FUTO Keyboard is hands down the best option.

If you have philosophical objections to the FUTO license, then your options are Heliboard and Florisboars. Heliboard is currently better, but Florisboard has promise.

Whatever “has joined futo” even means.

In the end the devs got hired for a few years to do full-time what used to be their passion project.

Are we really doing the whole “this community based project producing privacy friendly 100% offline app is from country X”?

By the look of it the original devs are from Belarus, and are now living elsewhere, including at least one in Switzerland.

So what?

Heh. I have mixed feelings myself.

The bad:

I don’t really like their license. It somehow means that the forks are never on equal footing with the original, until all original code has been replaced. If OpenOffice.org had been under that license Oracle would have been successful at killing it, and we wouldn’t have LibreOffice. Yeah, that sucks.

They mostly stay out of politics, but what little I hear from them reeks of a brand of libertarianism that really isn’t my cup of tea.

The good:

Their software, from what I have see so far, I awesome. Their keyboard is great, Immich is great. Grayjay is… Pretty good. I have no use for Zulip but I expect that’s also great.

And to me theu really sound like they are trying to do good work, and their heart is mostly in the right place. I believe we need to be tolerant enough to be able to live with people who have slightly different politics from us. In the end it’s not like I had zero exceptions on the politics of RMS or ESR.

Yeah, IMAP is the way.

About the alternatives to Google Maps…

Navigation apps are a dime a dozen nowadays, and it really all depends on what you want to get out of it.

In order:

Organic Maps

It uses OpenStreetMaps, which are waaay better than GMaps with finding the nice things of life that are not paid. Such as trails (if you’re in hiking) finding a water fountain in an airport, a public toilet in a town… But no traffic info whatsoever. It’s 100% offline.

Magic Earth

Very good driving and general Navigation app, very pricacy friendly, has crowsdourced traffic information, IIRC you can opt out of contributing if you want (they only keep your data for a couple hours anyway). It’ll get you to where you want to have dinner, but won’t help you choose where.

HereWeGo

A bit more tracking but still Dutch, so not too bad. Has crowdsourced traffic info, and integrates TripAdvisor scores for restaurants. It’s the only alternative I’ve found with some degree of reviews.

Yeah, did the Chinese invent a mechanism for rapid growth of 3D printed ladies?

Because since the change in policy was 10 years ago, your 23yo chinese factory worker better like his ladies very young.

But I would also be careful attributing all the selective abortions to the OCP.

Sex ratio in live births was still something like 110% or 115% in 2020, and looked stable.

India also has a sizable sex imbalance in live births, and never had a OCP.

I think Breeze already includes folder icons of all colours, you just have to find them with that icon picker.

All the girls that just do not exist because of selective abortions?

Put in a SSD and you’ll be surprised how far it can get you.

My father is still using a 13 year old 14" Dell I gave up 6 years ago. He’s even using it with windows 10, and having a SSD it works almost bearably well. They keyboard broke, and with the laptop not being Win11 compatible, he asked for an upgrade.

I got him a 6 year old Thinkpad, but I’ll install Mint and give him a VM for the few SWs he needs Windows for.

They can read them, obviously, but this way they are stored in an encrypted format in case of breaches or warrants.

But why would you need to delete your account? Just stop giving then any more money. Don’t renew your subscription, and watch the movies when you like.

Or, you know… 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

As an empiricist I cringe at any statement given with 100% certainty.