So before you can message anyone you have to download whatsapp?

I love how this seems like a near insurmountable hurdle. Install an app?? On a phone?!

I have a relative who is ~85 years old; he uses WhatsApp. It’s really not that hard.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is literally only a problem in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, folks are totally fine using messaging apps. WhatsApp is pretty popular worldwide, and there are regional favorites too. But, the point is, it’s only in the States that people seem to be against this idea. The answer for why is very much up for debate, but the conversation is, at this point, just getting exhausting.

Can confirm, as a Brit. We probably would have a sardonic explanation for why only people in the States are against using other messengers too…

The app “Island” sort of does this already.

For as long as Magisk has been going, that’s been my root strategy. I’m new to hearing about KernelSU though. Any advantages?

(If I can pay with mobile)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but so long as you root with Magisk and configure the denylist, installing the SafetyNet Fix and changing the Props if you need to spoof a device ID, then you’ll always be able to use Google Pay/contactless, regardless of whether on Lineage or another custom ROM.

This is my problem with every keyboard (FOSS or otherwise) since Swype finished. Gboard is the best of the bunch now but I’m loath to use it. I have tried Floris and Open (a fork of it which has swiping) and others, and they are all painful on this front.

My naive understanding would be: a passkey replaces a password for an individual login; a biometric authentication replaces a password for the vault that stores individual login passwords.

I have not found another launcher that has the swipe up and down on home screen icons to open other apps

Do you mean using folder icons as app list covers, so that a tap opens the app and a swipe opens the folder? If so, Action Launcher does that (if I’m not mistaken it was the first to do so, and it’s swipe up or down). Neo Launcher also has it (swipe up only).

but apparently nobody wanted SD cards so they dropped them from all the devices.

I think you have that the wrong way around. It is not that nobody wanted SD cards, but that phone manufacturers realised limiting storage capacity while making continually thinner devices (up to a point) would increasingly drive cyclical demand. “Is your phone getting full after a year or two? Well this one has MORE storage and look how slim and sexy it is by comparison!” It is not as though there was an organic consumer demand for phones without memory cards; the profit-motive drives these changes.

He would have been better off not talking about harm directly but the ability to cause harm; he actually used that wording in an earlier comment in this chain. (Basically strawmanned himself lol.)

Because as a standalone argument for encryption, it’s fairly sound – hey, the ability of somebody to cause harm via encrypted messaging channels is the selfsame ability to do good [/prevent spying/protect privacy, whistleblowers/etc], and since the good outweighs the bad, we have to protect the ability to cause harm (sadly).

The problem is it’s still disanalogous – the ability to cause harm via LLM use is not the selfsame ability to do good (or to do otherwise what you want). My LLM’s refusing to tell me how to make a bomb has no impact on its ability to tell me how to make a pasta bake.

Let’s just turn everything into TikTok, hey.

Well the sync across devices would be the main thing that people would deem worth having, just not at that price.

Yup that’s my one issue, otherwise I’d swap in a heartbeat. You can do it through nextcloud servers but not any free one so far as I can see. Wouldn’t know where to start with a paid alternative.

Edit: Podverse, also FOSS, has a sync feature as part of their subscription. It’s $18/year. Haven’t used it to know how well it works, but much cheaper than Pocket Casts anyway (and a 3 month free trial it seems). It’s on F-Droid.

I’ve been learning French on there for awhile now and it’s been extremely effective por moi.

I wouldn’t normally comment on a spelling issue, however, in this case…

+1 for LT. The guy that runs it certainly has an open source ethos. The German one despite being a “Complete” series is frustratingly very incomplete, but that aside it was a useful way into the language. The word order explanations were particularly good. Everything is always free and the project as a whole is expanding with the help of volunteers and donations. It’s a good thing to be a part of.

Just a pointless comparison really, based on very particular use cases and tastes, taking all the objectivity out of “objectively better”.

I would never use an iPhone for a daily device. But for some people it clearly makes the most sense.

Me, I have to block ads at the system level (so I root), I like custom ROMs, sideloading, pirating, tweaking, changing how my phone works and how I work with my phone. On any of those grounds, an iPhone makes zero sense. But most people don’t care about any of that, and nor should they really.

Is there a paid tier? I always thought it was all free. Unless it’s a donation option?

+1 for MiX. It’s FOSS and has everything you could want in a file explorer, functionality wise.

Edit: scratch that. God knows how long I thought it was FOSS for!

I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren’t only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.

Always wondered how good the Remarkable series is. Have been tempted but the hardware isn’t that cheap really. Since discovering the PDF reader of Zotero and running it with a night mode plugin, I’ve found myself mainly just wanting to use that. The annotations are stored separately as well, so you don’t get massively inflated PDF filesizes (though if you want the option to export with embedded annotations, you can do that; you can also import embedded annotations to Zotero and then clear the file of them). Very cool.