Wait unti you have to upgrade Zorin to a new release. I still haven’t gotten mine to work. Stick with Mint or Bazzite if you want a Windows alternate

I wouldn’t exactly put up Mint as an example for a smooth upgrading experience…
Maybe I lack the technical understanding, but it’s absolutely baffling to me, why one has to download mintupgrade. It’s a reasonable setup wizard once it’s running, but why on earth is that not part of the whole Update tool interface in the first place and gets downloaded automatically?

Yeah, but the binary of the program won’t be platform-agnostic, that’s what I meant!

Ah, I see. No, that’s not the kind of use case I had envisioned. I don’t think my suggestion is relevant to your problem then, sorry. Maybe one of the many calendar applications has a portable version that can entirely live in a Syncthing directory…? But then that wouldn’t be platform-agnostic. Hm.

If it could just store all calendar content in 1 local file, then that could be so easily auto-synced across devices with !syncthing@programming.dev. Does anyone have any leads?

Isn’t calendar syncing a solved problem? If you set up your own CalDAV server you can pretty much use most any mainstream calendar app you want without having to rely on 3rd party services. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your request?

Fedora: I have it on my PC and since I will be the first person to be asked, I thought it would be best if I know the distro well

I think that’s the most important consideration here. It’s your recommendation after all, so you have to be comfortable with it.

Thr cheapest one I can find is $600, for a phone that is 4 years old. I would prefer not to do that.

Reasonable, I suppose, although age really shouldn’t matter that much if the hardware features are sufficient and you’re running your own OS.
The low-end models around here have become cheap enough that I’m considering a second one as a testing environment/travel phone/untrusted device 😅

If I didnt have to pay 2x - 3x the price for a fairphone in the US I would’ve already switched. Unfortunately, $1k for a device with USB 2.0 is really not worth it for me or anyone else I know.

Going for a used FP4 should address both those concerns!

What does the app do?

Just got a fairphone 4. It feels so much more solid than my old pixel 6a. Its battery lasts for almost 2 days. Same performance that I can see. Spare parts for cheapish on the site. Anyways just wanted to share.

Running LineageOS on mine. By the way things have been going for the last couple of years, it’s probably the first phone I’ll be using for as long as my old Nokia brick, even though I don’t like its gigantic size.
I do see a future problem in there being no aftermarket components available, but maybe that will change and official manufacturer spare parts are still better than no spare parts.

To what? 😶

My knee-jerk reaction to that kind of headline is always to start mentally typing out a response warning of inflationary use of the term “Nazi”, but… er yeah, I guess that’s a Nazi blog alright.

Says AIGENPRO at the top. Not so pro then.

People trying to make a quick buck of ads in AI generated articles …

I have a problem with bots like @cm0002@programming.dev automatically pumping content into communities. With the concept of bot posts in general and then with external bot-generated content itself, for obvious reasons. Who controls the automatic behavior of those accounts? Is it up to the specific instance admin teams?
I’d really prefer a Fediverse where only people talk to other people, but I don’t feel like I can do much more than voice that preference.

It’s pretty awesome, thanks for the tip.

Thanks, I didn’t know most any of that stuff!

So the bootloader also gets updated, and new versions of the bootloader need to get signed. So if the BIOS is responsible for signing the bootloader, then how does the operating system update the bootloader?

Does that happen often? I had, apparently incorrectly, assumed those things were more or less fire and forget.

Kinda. The problem here, IMO, is that Secure boot conflates two usecases/threat models into one.

Huh, I think that might indeed be the central problem, good call.

You must explicitly ask for this setup from the Linux distro installers (at least, all the one’s I’ve used). By default, /boot, where the kernel and drivers are stored, is stored unencrypted in another external partition, and not in the LUKS encrypted partition.

Wait what, that just seems like home directory encryption with extra steps 🤦 I guess I’ll go back to Veracrypt then.

But this breaks automatic updates without entering the BIOS

Maybe I’m misunderstanding a technical aspect here, but wouldn’t only the bootloader need to be signed? To my understanding a tamper-proof system already assumes full disk-encryption anyway, so any kinds of automatic updates would be happening in a black box anyway, wouldn’t it?

and is just not feasible except for the PC on your desk at home

That’s probably a different and more value-based discussion and I’m quite sure you didn’t intend it that way, but it’s hard for me to put into words how much this sentence structure offends me 😅
A benefit to the users in front of their personal computers can never be an exception, it is (… ought to be) always the point of everything, the end goal. Having a solution that benefits end users and puts other entities at a disadvantage is always preferable over a solution that puts end users at a disadvantage for the benefit of other entities.

As almost always the answer is “it depends”.
From a security perspective you want to make sure that what your system boots is trusted and not tampered with by a third party. If your threat model includes people with physical access or malicious software (root kits) manipulating your operating system, then secure boot can help mitigating if you set it up correctly.
If that’s none of your concern, then you probably shouldn’t bother with it.

It’s such a silly system. Could have just had it in a way that automatically trusts only whatever system(s) is/are installed while the BIOS is unlocked so any user benefits from secure boot as soon as they set a BIOS password.

Users shouldn’t have to care about jurisdiction if the servers cannot ever read their messages in the first place. Any app that fails to meet this requirement should wholesale be disqualified.

What madness is this? Surely this is not about the servers reading a message, but about the user having or not having legal recourse against a server abusing whatever it is they can read. Metadata is data. Someone somewhere will know how much and when and in which patterns I communicate with who. And how much control I have over what they do with that knowledge simply depends on the jurisdiction. Technical considerations are irrelevant for that 🤷

Thank you, I’ll check it out! It’s great that they have a raw .apk download available, I don’t have access to a Playstore.

I’m a user. I just want to run the software. I don’t really care about the means of delivery. If it’s not available via package manager, then I have to get it some other way.

Is there any solution to getting DOS games to work on Android? There seems to have been an old DOSBox version but all information I can find at a glance seem to be outdated. I feel like all the old 90s adventures would be great to run on my phone. Maybe even much earlier stuff like Zork. Or is this a fool’s errand?