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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much, much better than the old days.

    OMEMO is supported by every major client, and they interoperate successfully. Unfortunately, most clients are stuck with an older version of the OMEMO spec. It’s not ideal, but it doesn’t cause any practical issue, unless you use Kaidan or UWPX, which only support the latest version.

    All popular clients and servers support retrieving chat history now too.

    In practice, I’ve been using it for several months to chat with friends and family, and haven’t had any issues.



  • ambitiousslab@lemmy.mltoLinux Phones@lemmy.mlpinephone?
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    29 days ago

    Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you’ve done on the mobile stack as well. It’s made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I’ll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)





  • ambitiousslab@lemmy.mltoLinux Phones@lemmy.mlpinephone?
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    29 days ago

    If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you’re into that kind of thing.

    Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

    You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn’t work very well - either one side can’t hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It’s probably possible to fix if you know what you’re doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing :)

    I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you’re happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

    Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

    Good luck!



  • Now: terrorists are terrorists, right wing rioters are terrorists, climate protestors are terrorists and misogynistic people are terrorists.

    Soon: asylum seekers are terrorists, people who go on strike are terrorists, members of the opposition party are terrorists.

    I support reducing violence against women, but prevent is the wrong tool for this problem. If the government actually want to address this instead of just looking like they are, I feel they should take an approach that actually works. We need:

    • More consistent and holistic sex education, from a younger age
    • Explicitly teaching about sexual violence, the services available and the punishments for doing it
    • Investing in local policing, so that there is bandwidth to look into these cases
    • Giving more funding to charities who support domestic abuse survivors
    • Training for police, so they actually listen to women when they raise concerns at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until it’s too late
    • Tougher sentencing for any form of sexual violence

    Prevent is both ineffective and discriminatory. It increases government surveillance, and raises the burden on GPs and teachers. The National Union of Teachers want to get rid of it, the Communities and Local Government Committee found a multitude of problems that haven’t been fixed, and human rights orgs like Liberty and Amnesty International want to get rid of it too. It doesn’t work and in many cases has made things worse.







  • I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

    I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

    But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

    There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.