I appreciate the freedom feeling, bought a Pocophone F1 a couple years ago just to flash it with custom roms.

Have you tried Lineage? How would you compare the experience of using them if so? Some of the custom roms I’ve tried had some things I missed UX/functionality wise but as people seem quite happy with Graphene I assume it is nice to use.

How do you find the battery life? The ultra looks interesting (I feel I would get good use out of the pen), but sadly a bit too expensive for me to consider it good value.

Great minds think alike! (Or the availability of compact phones with more than 2 years of software updates is unfortunately small)

Ah cool, waiting for the pixel 8a might be an interesting option as well assuming they release it within a couple of months

Was looking at the pixel 7 as well, but it is technically a hardware downgrade from my current zenfone 8. Very happy with the zenfone performance so a bit worried the 7 would feel sluggish, or at least slower…

AnySoftKeyboard is a great FOSS one!

Okay, cool! Several people here seem to recommend it so I will add it to the “scale”

Okay, good to know! Do you know whether banking etc is a problem on graphene or not? Last time I used custom roms I got it working with microg but I heard there might have been some regressions?

Is it still that bad huh? I had an A50 before and the bloat was one of the reasons I disliked that phone.

Yeah, that is one of the reasons I’m intrigued. Havent looked at it since the Rossman/Daniel Micay thing though, is it still good?

• Nobara for my gaming rig, same as OP + lots of out of the box gaming fixes.

• Tumbleweed for the laptop, rolling release while (in my experience) being a bit less likely to break than arch.

• Ubuntu/Debian/MicroOS/Alma for servers depending on whether I want stability + some fresher software, mountain-like stability, automatically updating container hosts or if I need redhat compatibility.

• Mint if its someone elses old computer they want to “just work”, since I dislike being tech support more than necessary.

1. That happens whether you’re subscribed or not.
2. Sort of agreed, not really relevant to the parent comment though. 3+4. You can’t have both “no ads allowed in-video” and “creators are paid a majority share of the money we make serving the video”. YouTube was (and still is if I understand it correctly) barely profitable, and if it is profitable right now I’m sure it is because of the worst kind of data-mining.

It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.

Normally I wouldn’t even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough so that they don’t actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.

Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.