Probably not what you’re asking for, but I have an impression, that your primary motivation is curiosity and just good feeling of using the open platform, so I figured I’ll mention it.

I’m using ESP32-C3 boards with some sensors and ESPHome to monitor air quality in my house. The board is RISC-V based and can be bought for real cheap. (single digit $ price generally) ESPHome is quite easy to work with and (If you’re realistic with your expectations around very low power device) also quite powerful.

Honestly the ESPHome itself is almost too good if you’re really curious as it abstracts the differences between various boards quite well. You’re just editing a yaml file to define your desired functionality.

Even if you’re hesitant to do some soldering, you can get pretty far if you buy board and sensors with pre-soldered pins and some jumper wires.

its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Perhaps I’m misremembering things, but I’m pretty sure the SysVinit didn’t run any “more restricted processes”. It ran a bunch of bash scripts as root. Said bash scripts were often absolutely terrible.

There’s also Rustic. It uses the same repository format as restic. It already has some pretty neat features and since latest release a ton of built-in backends.

Agree. And this is the first OSS keyboard I’ve found that can do multiple languages at the same time without switching the language/layout. (You can set secondary language) It requires a bit of setup (like downloading dictionaries) but I’d suggest to give it a try.

Obtainium will check regularly for new versions and update automatically. So that’s definitely a benefit if you’d like to keep the apps updated.

As for Mull, you could add its f-droid link into Obtainium if you’d like to have all updates via a single app.

I feel so sorry for recommending a closed source app in this community, but Genius Scan from Grizzly Labs is the only non-oss app I still use. I think I paid around €30 for the enterprise version so it doesn’t bother me with cloud nonsense.

It’s all local only (if you want) and the scanning quality is the best I’ve found. (I used OpenNoteScanner for a few months, sadly it’s not even close both in terms of quality and convenience)

I figured I’ll mention it as an alternative to MS Lens app that likely sucks in every bit of information it can get its hands on.

That specific repository has no releases so it won’t work AFAIK. You need a repository with releases, that have apk attached. (Typically the developer would set up a CI workflow to build and attach apk for every release)

Edit: For example AuroraStore has releases with apks. So you can just enter gitlab repo for AuroraStore into Obtainium and it will install it and keep it updated.

You can’t do much about users that just don’t care. But more technically inclined folks often do care and these are the people that develop the web and maintain the computer/browser for other people.

A lot of folks in my circle use chrome, but the moment the AdBlock plugin stops working they’ll likely switch to anything that works better. They are not necessarily too concerned about privacy, but they also don’t want to have most of their browsing made effectively impossible by ads everywhere.

I mean, just try and use the web without any sort of blocking. A lot of sites don’t even have their content visible.

butwarden login

That is different kind of protection. 😄

but it one would use a security key for the butwarden login, all of thst is pointless, no?

The phishing protection is still very valuable. Also presumably you’d protect your Bitwarden account better than any number of random sites.

You (practically) can’t. All components are available and open-source, but there’s still some work to be done to allow using a custom server. They are apparently working on this.

AFAIK you can use Kindle completely offline. Some family members do exactly this. They buy books online and upload them over USB. The main reason is that they read books in language that the Kindle store does not support.

But yeah, as far as I know the devices weren’t online like ever. Maybe except some initial setup that needs an Amazon account. You can just make a burner account, set the device up and don’t even bother storing credentials.

You lose some convenience like synchronization of reading progress and notes, but I’m not sure whether any of the open source options even have that kind of functionality.

Yeah, I was saying “no reason” in the context of SAAS. Once the management falls on the end user, it’s a different beast altogether.

I think we’re trying to say the same in a different way actually. 😅

“If” being the key word here. There are nuances to be considered. One DB might run really well on arm, the other not so much.

I’m saying it as huge fan of the arm servers. They are amazing and often save a lot of money essentially for free. (practically only a few characters change in terraform) In AWS with the hosted services (Opensearch, and such) there’s usually no good reason to pay extra for x86 hardware especially since most of the intricacies are handled by AWS.

But there are workloads that just do not run on arm all that well and you would end up paying more for the HW to get to the performance levels you had with x86.

And that’s beside all those little pain points mentioned above that you’re “left to deal with” which isn’t cheap either. (but that doesn’t show up on the AWS bill, so management is happy to report cost savings)

Laws across Europe are not uniform. Last time I’ve checked, there were a couple of countries where downloading for personal use was not illegal.

IIRC Spain, Poland were such countries? Maybe Switzerland? That’s on top of countries where it’s technically illegal but not enforced.

There are probably more countries around the world with similar laws or with no laws regulating downloads. But I’m on my phone so can’t look it up.

Feel free to correct me.

I think their point was that there are countries where piracy (or circumventing copy protection) isn’t illegal and only copyright laws exist. Thus downloading pirated stuff isn’t inherently illegal.

In some countries the copy protection removal isn’t dealt with in any way and thus it’s not inherently forbidden, in some it’s actually outright permitted by law in some situations. (personal use, education,…) Same applies to tools for copy protection circumvention.

As a side note, Obtainium is absolutely amazing.

I have found convenience store within 5 minutes walking distance from my house thanks to StreetComplete. I had solved most of the tasks nearby, so I took a small detour on my way home and found this shop there that I had no idea existed. At that stage I was living in the area for years.

Yeah I see your point there. It is indeed a bit of chicken and egg problem, but it’s not 35% for laptop with swap-able hardware. The customization is probably the main selling point. If you want Ethernet port in your laptop, that rules out pretty much any recent model out there. Add upgrade-able memory, storage (or an option for multiple storage devices), some more specific port selection (like full size HDMI) and you might only have handful of models to choose from.

Can you do a lot of that with USB-C dongle? Sure, but dongle isn’t built in and also costs extra money. Are there many people out there that don’t need any of these ports? Sure! But if you’re one of those that do, this might be your only real option. Especially once we get to the more exotic modules like that RGB Macropad.

I’m personally not in that market at all, but I definitely see why people might want this and saying that it’s 35% markup just for the ability to upgrade and repair is missing the point a bit.

Not everyone wants lightbar or webcam notch. Early 2010s were peak MacBook designs IMO. It still was solid OS and the laptops had magsafe and fullsize USB.