onkoe

I've seen a lot of discussion about Android and its various downstream distributions. Many folks are also confused with "security" and "privacy" distros!

I wrote this post (and rant) to clarify what these mean - and how we got to this point. It's a worthy discussion, given the relative stability of these distros.

Please let me know if you have any additional suggestions for the article - I can edit it pretty easily!

Everyone wants to be the one eating - no one wants to be the foodless researcher.

Me neither, though if there's a decent and open source solution available, you know that's going on my devices ;)

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that there's almost a counter-Google-fu these days. Finding something that isn't on the front page, or even just trying to use an older search style often leads to Google showing the weirdest results.

I use Searx or DuckDuckGo for these searches. While their results are often worse at the top, they provide a wealth of understanding and documentation that Google seems to just.. skip? To me, finding things is more difficult when there are two opposing sides trying to outsmart one another.

A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

No one should want to test this - it's terrifying for companies and developers alike.

Is that an X issue or a GTK issue? Haven't heard of this before and it sounds scary

Personally, I think it should assume that you don't want to be bothered and allow the user to change it from there.

I find that some things do require a !g, but it's becoming increasingly rare in my daily life. It's often, as another commenter said, when researching something that uses terms from another, more popular thing that Google really shines. That said, I still use DDG for almost everything. :)

+1, these things (gen1) make my ear ache after only a few minutes and fall out like crazy. Luckily, I just tried a family members' so it's not too big a deal, but had I bought these...

It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest, you can start a private session to make sure their history is ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that most people would use history deletion at some point

SteamVR works fine on Linux, but the only wired/lighthouse headset that works well is the Index. Most wired headsets, especially consumer ones, don't bother, so you'll have a hard time with really anything but the Index. As for Quest on Linux, the closest you'll get is with ALVR, which only has experimental builds for Linux. Sadly, it has 2-3x the latency of VD and poor NVIDIA support. I follow their development very closely, though, and it's certainly getting better.

There is almost certainly one package maintainer out there who would love to do that ;)

I love the term "collective fuck." Also, thanks for feeding my curiosity. I gotta look this up now.

Carbon's been trending recently. Seems like everyone and their mother is using it. Can't complain, though... Looks great!

Sadly, I'm just a secondary source as someone who uses Linux full-time (and thus can't use Virtual Desktop). I'll ask my friend who did this and get back to you if he has any information.

This kinda breaks online and also kneecaps some offline apps. Still, if your Quest is just your portal to Virtual Desktop, you'll find this very useful as it removes the worst parts of the Quest as a wireless PCVR headset. Good luck!

Better late than never! But.. yikes!

It's pretty darn good and you can find it everywhere for quite cheap.

Google collecting enough data to be used for this purpose is, in my opinion, not a good thing

It's terrible how unsurpsing this is. :(

Bit unrelated, but I really like that domain name. Looks like "mad"

Everything looks nice, but I really don't mind these devices if I can't install my own desktop software on them. Seems nice for things like casual content consumption though

There is an open-source server called Vaultwarden, but it is unofficial. The only truly open source part of Bitwarden is the client. :(

It's useful in specific cases and certainly nice to have in the main UI. I understand their reasoning for moving them, but I still disagree

I'm really glad Discord used them. They're becoming more mainstream and easier to use in projects without people asking about the emoji

It is out of malice. And I have the same malice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AEnable_mobile_ve...

Speaking of Anbox, development has almost halted after their kernel modules were effectively made worthless so that any "host" system's kernel has to be built with Anbox's required features. I love the fact that it's starting to come back with these Linux phones. :)

It's everything you could want, but this a lot of asterisks. A lot of things are limited (check other comment), but most importantly, their policies force you to hand over any text you write on their platform. But frankly, I'm not sure if there's anything near a perfect solution. A lot of companies use a big clump of services including both self-hosted and "rented". I hope to one day see a better, more comprehensive solution in line with the future of online work.

Please consider putting this on F-droid. Many people here don't use Google services and you're likely missing out on many downloads (including mine)