• 25 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2025

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  • The LinkedIn-styled writing here is hard for me to get through, but I think the general gist is that for profit platforms are easier to onboard which I agree with. This line stands out:

    And what do we get in return? A worse experience than cloud-based services.

    I have to disagree somewhat, it’s a different experience that is absolutely more difficult in many ways, but for those of us who value privacy, control over our data, and don’t like ads, the trade-off is worth it. Also it goes without saying that the usability of selfhosted apps has exploded in the past few years and it will likely become less and less of an issue.













  • Been really interested in this and/or the Light Phone! I’m curious if your plan is to use it as a full-time daily driver? Or an occasional “I want to disconnect right now” thing?

    I really wish carriers made it easy to swap where your phone number is pointed because I would love one of these for weekend/evening use. But I’m pretty intimidated to switch full time.

    Would also love to see a follow up in a few months to see if you found it sustainable.






  • Eh, I would have agreed a few years ago. But now default Ubuntu boots up basically looking like MacOS with the browser (firefox by default, not Chrome) right there in your face ready to launch. For someone truly not aware how to use a computer beyond a browser it couldn’t be much easier (except booting directly into the browser). The only thing preventing that from catching on is that those people don’t even know what an operating system is, let alone that it could be changed.


  • The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it’s just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there’s a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there’s a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser.

    This is more or less describing one of the many immutable distros that only run programs with flatpaks. It’s entirely feasible if someone wanted to make a distro with even less functionality, but why?