Sounds help a lot. For most enemies it’s either sound or literal visible movement. The rest is just learning after getting hit i guess. But just these two things will take you far.

Expedition 33. Most sustained fun I’ve had in a long long time

I’m not using a VPN though

You want to run it on the phone itself? I don’t think any phone would be good enough for that. The issue with AI assistants is not just privacy. It’s also the resource consumption (and of course stolen content). It’s so high and only these big companies with huge server farms can do it.

If you just want a voice assistant for simple commands, I’ve heard of an open source local assistant called Dicio. But I don’t think you can talk to it like ChatGPT or something.

What do you mean suck up to? They’re our mentors in genocide. And collaborators

I remember trying all this on GNOME before finding the extension. But I’ll check again, thank you

Display & Monitor says Built in Screen. The brightness slider here doesn’t work either. What else can I check?

But Solus is rolling release.

Similar thoughts and after hopping a bit I’m liking Solus really well. It’s rolling release but what they call “curated” rolling release. They take a little bit of time to iron stuff out. There’s a weekly update cycle.

The installation is through live ISO and was pretty easy, took only a few minutes. They have a Plasma ISO too, since you mentioned wanting KDE.

As a plus, I’ve not once used the command prompt in the past couple of months since I installed (GNOME first and then since the last week, KDE). I’m not averse to commands but I do want something that I can recommend to my less techy anti-capitalist friends. My games have all been working fine too.

Edit to add: I think they’ve also mentioned that their aim is for a personal desktop.

Makes sense. Thank you!

Okay, yeah that sounds a little tedious. I’ll think a bit more

I’m not sure if I understand the last bit.

That’s great, thank you

Thank you. That does sound annoying but .com is both boring and more expensive.

Ohh, I maybe should clarify. I don’t intend to use my own server. I have a provider - disroot.

Makes sense if that’s something you’re worried about. I just meant that it seems to me like people immediately jump to cloud storage without even considering use cases and options. I wish I’d known about this setup that I’m using now a long time ago so I thought it’d be good to put the option out there.

You can use Thunderbird with Mailbox and I think Posteo too? Does disroot even have an app? Even their official pages directed me to other clients like Thunderbird

He said times have changed and Republicans are now the party for the little guys. He later deleted that, but did not clarify or apologize.

He also said he likes the Trump nominee to the cabinet for antitrust issues. But people were quick to point out that that person used to work for Big Tech lobby groups. I don’t think he ever took this back or clarified.

Why we should care - this is multifold, but I’ll just tell you how I feel. I’m not going to immediately delete all my proton stuff over one guy’s words. But I am definitely considering.

As I see it, there’s two possibilities (both come from a very generous place if I may say so myself). First is that he’s kissing ass like every other tech CEO right now (you can see the Trump inauguration pic), which is a really really bad thing because you need a spine if you claim to be fighting for freedom and privacy. Second possibility is that he’s naive enough to think that some nominee Trump got in will mean good things for anything to do with privacy, which is also a really really bad thing because the other thing you need for advocating privacy and freedom is actually being able to read between the lines and see what are the upcoming challenges and how to prepare for them.

And guess who’s going to pay for the naivete or the cowardice? The end consumer of these services - us, and a lot of other really vulnerable folks who use such sensitive services.

To wrap it up, I want to go to my earlier statement about not jumping ship because of one man’s words. The problem is, it’s been a while since that one man said this stuff and no one from the company or foundation has issued a retraction or taken any action. If anything they just seem to have doubled and offer more “explanations” that still don’t mean much.

Unless you’re somehow looking for tonnes of storage, I don’t think you need cloud services. I’ve set up just my 3 devices (phone laptop PC) to sync with each other using Syncthing. And that’s plenty of space for just personal stuff (including photos). And it’s so cheap (only the cost of the devices you’re already using, and no subscriptions). It’s something I wish most people did because of how prevalent Drive has become, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s necessary for a lot of use cases. You’re situation might be different though, just a suggestion.

There are a few alternatives in mind for me. Mailbox, posteo, disroot. Disroot is the only one among these with a free email. But posteo and mailbox do have cheap tiers. Posteo doesn’t have support for custom domains last I checked.

That’s just email. I’ve already not been using proton for almost everything else. KeepassXC for passwords, Addy.io for aliases, Syncthing and offline storage across my 3 devices instead of any Drive. VPN I rarely use so free proton is enough for that. Mullvad exists on the off chance I need it for a while (it’s a constant price per month how many ever months you choose, and you can just “top up” with some amount and it will last you the appropriate number of days).