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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

I know the privacy approach Apple has been pushing was just marketing, but I didn't care too much because I enjoyed my iPhone and M1 macbook.

Because of this decision (and the fact that my iPhone more-or-less facilitates poor habits throughout my life), I'm considering moving completely out of the Apple ecosystem.

Does anyone have any recommendations for replacements?

* On laptops: I have an X1 carbon extreme running linux, but it's entirely impratical to take outside of the house: it has terrible battery life and runs quite hot. I also cannot stand its trackpad. Is there any linux-capable device with an okay trackpad?

* On phones: are there any capable phones out there that aren't privacy nightmares? All I want is a phone with a long lasting battery that I can use with maps, a web browser, and texting.

* On cloud: I've considered executing on a NAS forever, but I'm unsure where to start.

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Laptop | Desktop: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...

Router: https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/

Media Center: https://osmc.tv/vero/

Cloud (Use TrueNAS Scale): https://www.truenas.com/systems-overview/

Phone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

Watch: https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-smartwatch-sealed/

Smart Thermostat: https://hestiapi.com/product/hestiapi-touch-one-free-shippin...

If you go this route all devices will be running Linux. The one OS route is kindof nice, hence the pinephone over open android alternatives (like Graphene OS).

I sorted from least to most technical. I also tried to pick the least technical challenging in each category. The Dell stuff should just work. The Phone will require some tinkering for the moment.

I'm sympathetic to remove Apple and Google from my life, but this list looks so sad. You know the experience, integration and headache of all this is going to be horrible.

Depends what you're looking to do - if you really value your privacy, yes, you're going to have to give up some convenience, but I can assure you, it's really not that bad if you put in a little work on an occasional basis, it's not the constant maintenance nightmare that some people seem to expect.

I fired up Syncthing on my phone and NAS and restic to perform encrypted backups nightly to B2, sure, you're not going to get some magical cloud image recognition stuff, but do you really need or even want it?

Everything can integrate quite nicely, but plan to do the connecting work yourself as a one-off with some occasional maintenance a few times a year.

I used to think that privacy arguments are ok in principle but we aren’t really loosing much by sharing some personal data with Apple or Google’s algorithms. In return we got so much convenience, software and products that worked well with each other and even shopping recommendations that were great.

But with this move, they have just crossed a huge threshold. Now it’s clear that we are hurtling into a truly dystopian future where our personal thoughts and experiences are simply not our own. America at least seems to be heading towards some form of corporate fascism that may not be dominated by an individual or a group, but will eventually lead to social ossification and societal decay by outlawing dissent.

To introduce this tech under the disguise of fighting child abuse is just amazing. This will eventually lead to identification of individuals who for example may hold sympathetic views for political views that are currently out of favour.

At some point you have to swallow the inconveniences outside the garden and recognise what this is leading to.

If you had the option of buying this hardware stack through an integrated third-party brand/storefront that offered support for the products and their integration would that make you feel differently?

That's an interesting idea. The amount of work even for a techie to maintain all this, is considerable. Could it be set up for a "user". Tech support, would be; Interesting.

I made an example storefront a few months ago and jotted down a plan in a bout of procrastination. I have a few thoughts on a pragmatic lazy (in the cs sense) approach.

If you or anyone one else is interested email me: ipodopt@pm.me

This has the potential to be a great laptop, if execution is good:

https://frame.work/

Laptop: Dell XPS 13 and very happy. Maxed out specs and clearly higher price range.

Or: Lenovo Yoga Convertible. My second device. I just don't do games. Or bigger data stuff on this machine. Some design work. Some photo and smaller video stuff. I love the flexibility of the convertible when working with PDF and doing annotations by hand.

The battery on my xps seems to be swelling and messing up the trackpad. Apparently it’s a pretty common issue

Edit: seems to be the precision line too

> The same problem is happening with the Precision 1510 line with the same batteries. I purchased 10 of these laptops for my department around the same time you did. We've had four of these failures so far in three laptops.

reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/6bzhtw/dell_xps_15_9550_battery_swelling_causing/

Good to know. Will watch for it. Currently not an issue.

Another phone: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

Laptop: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14

I have their laptop and do not recommend them. Honestly, I sort of regret the purchase.

- They lie about specifications like battery life (and other things). I get about 1 hour on my ~5 hour battery life when web browsing.

- My laptop had a race condition at boot that would prevent boot 50% of the time. There was a workaround.

- Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).

I am sure there new laptop is better however I do not really trust them after my interactions. Especially for something more novel like a linux phone.

On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack. All their products are running a very similar hardware unlike Purism. They are moving way more product then Purism and are better liked. Hence they have a stronger community. They are also much cheaper phone-wise for a similar feature set. And you can actually buy and receive the phone.

In terms of alternatives I think System76 is pretty good desktop wise right now. Laptop are alright. Waiting for their upcoming in-house laptop.

This is quite interesting. I'm writing this on their Librem 15 and can't recommend it enough. No problems with booting or anything. Battery life got short with time (but I never cared about it).

> Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).

Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.

> On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack.

And the software is provided by Purism (Phosh, for most Pinephone users). Pinephone is great, I'm using it, too. But Librem 5 is much more performant. Many videos show it's working fine, except of the non-finished software (same as for Pinephone).

> Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.

Not the wifi card, the surround material like the chassis are attenuating the signal (the librem 14 should have fixed this issue). I swapped mine out for a well supported and performant Intel card and only got marginal improvements to the signal.

My "ten feet" was using it at coffee shops. I was traveling with the laptop. It was hard. The card switch did get it over the hump for this use case. Not an issue most of the time but still will have get a spot closer the router for video calls (like standup).

So the constraints for work were getting a seat close the router AND a power plug. I ended up USB tethering with my phone alot.

I do appreciate their contributions to the ecosystem but was wronged as a consumer. They need to be truthful.

I take it you have the v3 with the standard boot drive?

> I take it you have the v3 with the standard boot drive?

Yes, v3. What do you mean by "standard boot drive"? Using SSD if that's what you mean.

The v4 updated the screen which burned more power. I remember telling them my real life results and them proceeding to not update their product marketing page while admitting it was based on the v3. I feel like they were already stretching it to begin with with v3 but you would know.

I also got the fastest SSD they had in checkout. Which I think contributed to the booting race condition. I never got a link to an upstream ticket so I do not know if it is fixed.

When I emailed them they said they do not have a laptop in that configuration to test, haha.

Sad the high DPI displays didn't go well. My eyes can't take the 1080 vertical pixel displays that are still so common on open laptops nowadays. But I really want to like the Librems; there aren't many trustworthy laptops with kill switches out there.

I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 with a high DPI 16:10 display, 32GB RAM, and anywhere from 4 to 12 hours of battery depending on workload. It's worth a look for people who can tolerate Lenovo's history (BIOS rootkits targeting Windows in the non-ThinkPad lines).

This looks like a similar problem to yours. They fixed that, even though it affected SSDs that they did not themselves sell: https://forums.puri.sm/t/support-with-booting-from-nvme-ssd/....

I think it's about time to say: "Thank you, Apple!" Finally these awesome projects will get the funding and the support they deserve.

Also, has anyone tried the FXtec phones? https://www.fxtec.com I am thinking about getting the FXtec pro1 version, which promises to get a decent UbuntuTouch support as well as lineageOS.

I feel that with the comeback of Vim, there might be a sufficient user base for devices that use the keyboard for most tasks. I miss the days, when I could send a text message without taking the phone out of my pocket.

Edit: Just found a relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659150

I just ordered the pinephone! Looking forward to trying it, hope it can keep up with most things I use my 6S for.

Guess, I'll dig out the old digital camera again, since that is a weak point for the pinephone. :-D

Is there a Linux Laptop at 2560 x 1600 resolution like Macbooks ? System 76 still runs at 1920x1080. It really makes a difference wrt crisp font rendering and less eye strain.

Most of them I believe should allow you to get HiDPI (aka Retina) displays.

I've been looking at replacing my now 9y-old Macbook Pro (primarily running Manjaro Gnome as my daily driver) with a dedicated Linux laptop, and I've narrowed my selection down to the Lenovo ThinkPad P series or the Framework laptop. For the ThinkPad's, the 4k display (3840 x 2160) is recommended I believe (over the WQHD ones). The Framework laptop comes with a standard 2256 x 1504 display.

- https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/c/t...

- https://frame.work/products/laptop

I hadn't come across that Omnia router before - it looks great! Bit of a shame it doesn't support 802.11ax, and it is more expensive than I'd like, but still...

Might be a good idea to wait. It's coming soonish I think:

- https://github.com/openwrt/luci/pull/4994

- https://forum.turris.cz/t/wifi-6-ax-adapter/10390/77

I think the router might be my favorite open hardware piece:

- It was easier to setup then my old Asus router

- Schematics and source are easy to access.

- It has never not worked.

- It is made by a company that is a domain registrar with a good track record on open source projects (click the more button it the top right and you might recognize a few projects): https://www.nic.cz/

- And if you need to do something advance with it, you can. Mine is has Bird runing BGP.

The Omnia was quite expensive, but I've gotten frequent updates for the last four years. It's a nice mix of hackable and "just works".

I've turned off the WiFi at this point, and just use it as a router now. The UniFi access point that I installed provides better coverage in my house since it's easier to place in a central location.

Overall, I'd rate it as a good value.

The dell and lenovo laptops are nowhere the quality of the apple machines, sadly.

I have a maxed out xps and it is a downgrade in all respects but privacy. :/

Yeah, I figured. When waiting for lsp autocompletes in emacs, my entry level M1 MacBook with no gccjit is orders of magnitudes faster than my almost maxed out Lenovo with emacs and GCCjit.

The difference is so stark that I cannot bear to autocomplete on type on the Lenovo machine, it lags too much and frequently locks up.

My thinkbook g2 14 are is almost the same speed as m1 macbook and runs linux without any issue. It has "only" 9 hours of battery in my usecase, but that's completely fine by me.

I can't complain. But can't compare it to the M1. I had a 2020 MBPro and am currently using a XPS 13 with maxed out specs.

The camera on the XPS is some leagues below. The microphone had driver issues from the start and it cost me two days for a software workaround.

Other than that I am in every way more happy. Keyboard, track pad and resolution. Performance even with crappy corporate spy-and crapware is definitely way better.

I thought I would miss the Mac more. Not looking back once the mic was fixed.

Speakers. Apple finally fixed laptop speakers. Nobody else has figured out how to copy it yet. :/

OK. Not my use case. I have never really listened that intensely.

But totally understand when the milage varies.

I saw your blogpost [1] mentioning how the iPhone 12 is likely your last. Have you given any thought since then to what your next smartphone would be? Or if you still use smartphone at all?

[1]https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

I already don't put a SIM in my phone; I use a dumbphone for GSM.

I will likely begin using Lineage OS or Graphene. I'll begin testing soon and will probably post what I end up doing, either on my blog or the bbs.

Have you considered Purism and Fairphone or are their specs too underwhelming to consider?

With regards to your laptop, does not being able to use Mac-specific development tools (XCode, etc.) interfere with your work in any way or do you just limit the work you take to ones that are friendlier to Linux?

I run macOS on some of my laptops, connected to the internet only via a VPN router on which I have root and can filter traffic.

Rarely do I need to do macOS-specific stuff though.

Laptops with an "s"? How many do you have and how many do you carry on your person? When you say you run MacOS on your laptops, do you mean as a VM or on Apple hardware? Did you keep the M1 laptop you blogger about or did you send it back?

Nothing quite like apple. The step down is short enough not to stumble though :)

> On laptops: I have an X1 carbon extreme running linux, but it's entirely impratical to take outside of the house: it has terrible battery life and runs quite hot.

I have X1C (not extreme) and it has excellent battery life with Linux. Consider using TLP (https://linrunner.de/tlp/), if you want to significantly improve your laptop power consumption.

It's possible he's got an old X1C and the battery is just on it's last legs as well. If that's the case, he'd probably be better served using his M1 laptop sparingly until Linux support for it is better.

I understand the impulse to turn away from Apple. However, it’s not a practical solution. How long until this tech or worse is mandated in all products? I think the real answer is for the people to stop bickering about primary colors and work together toward passing legislation that limits the pervasive invasion of privacy by governments and corporations.

You can do both. Boycott Apple because they're the ones who committed this violation, whilst also protesting government efforts to spy.

As someone else mentioned, for a NAS using TrueNAS (used to be FreeNAS) is easy enough and quite satisfying. You can find plenty of guides.

In general, you need to balance budget, capacity requirements, and form factor. Old servers are often great. Big disks seem like a good idea, but for rebuild times going over 4TB is horrible.

However, unfortunately HDD prices right now are horrible...

define horrible? i have a 8x18tb raid-6 array and it rebuilds in 2-3 days.

I guess it depends. Personally I don't like having rebuilds longer than a day.

I have a Lemur Pro from System76 and it has insane battery life. I feel like I never charge it b/c it's always got juice. I run Pop_OS! on it b/c at my age I just want to get work done and not tinker with a distro.

acer nitro 5 is my choice for a laptop for running ubuntu, good battery life, I get about 5+ hours.

Laptop: Framework Laptop

Phone: Pixel with GrapheneOS or CalyxOS. In the future a Linux phone when the software improves.

> Phone: Pixel with GrapheneOS or CalyxOS

I've seen this recommendation very often lately. As I am shopping for a new phone: Why is it that hardware directly from Google is recommended for putting another OS onto it (I've seen recommendations for LineageOS as well). What makes it better than any stock phone supported by LineageOS?

Consistency. All the Google hardware forever has allowed easy factory unlocking without a fuss, easy ways to restore to standard OS images without jumping through hoops, and are widely available. Plus they allow re-locking the booloader and the phone equivalent of enrolling your own custom secure boot keys. They also provide firmware updates for a long time so you can get platform/hardware patches too. CalyxOS does provide these in their images.

The 3a/4a are cheap and have headphone jacks and good cameras. What's not to love? Until they change their policy on unlocking bootloaders and installing custom OSs they're great devices. I still have a Nexus 5 that runs PostmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch, and if it completely breaks I can always use ADB/Fastboot to flash the Android 6 images that are still on Google's website. Don't even have to log in to get them.

Devices supported by the Sony Open Device Program shoukd be also a good target:

https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/

There are projects such as Sailfish OS that make use of this to run on originally Android hardware.

See the GrapheneOS or CalyxOS websites for more details, they are significantly hardened for security compared to LineageOS.

Currently those two projects only support Pixels, mainly because they're all bootloader unlockable. If these projects had as many volunteers as LOS then more devices could be officially supported.

LOS on a supported Android phone is still a better option than a stock Android or iPhone at least.

My https://divestos.org project, while not as secure as GrapheneOS, provides lots of security to many older devices.

Interesting project. Thanks for sharing! Any reason why at least some of those patches couldn't be upstreamed to LOS?

Most things simply aren't in their scope.

I do send occasional patches to Lineage if they are in-scope and am in contact with some of them reasonably frequently.

The big blocker is that their Gerrit instance requires a Google account to login.

Example of a recent fix I emailed them: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_device_htc_...

CalyxOS is fantastic. You can get a like-new Pixel on swappa.com for cheap, and have a virtually Google-free, Apple-free phone that supports most/all the apps you would want via MicroG. Can't recommend it enough. GrapheneOS is similar except without support for MicroG if you don't need it.

If I were to buy a laptop, it would be the Framework laptop that just started shipping. It doesn't have a Ryzen chip, though, so that's a deal breaker for me. Otherwise, that laptop ticks all of my boxes.

Phone-wise, there are many options to choose from. I like the idea behind the Teracube 2E[1], as they take some of the principles behind Framework and apply it to phones.

> On cloud: I've considered executing on a NAS forever, but I'm unsure where to start.

Depends on how much you want to tinker. You can't go wrong with a Raspberry Pi and some external harddrives, but there is also dedicated NAS equipment that requires less setup and maintenance, some of them are Linux based, as well.

[1] https://myteracube.com/pages/teracube-2e

I'm suprised nobody has mentioned GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/

> On laptops

My XPS 15 does about 6 hours (it's a maxed out i7) on Linux and 3 on Windows.

On phones: I'm considering a Pixel device with https://calyxos.org/ The main limitations will be the featureset of MicroG (no ~maps~/wearOS/auto). Possible issues with important apps like those for banking.

On cloud: Synology Diskstation is amazing. Only use it through a local VPN though.

edit: maps work (see reply)

Are the only phone options iOS or Android? I’m also considering leaving my iPhone behind because of this privacy violation but I’m definitely not moving to Google. That seems like two steps back.

Calyx is a degoogled Android ROM. It's probably the best choice until mobile Linux improves.

What are the benefits over graphene OS?

microG support mainly, it's needed for some Play Services APIs like push notifications and maps, though the choice all depends on what apps you use. GrapheneOS is great also and even better for those with very high security and privacy requirements.

Sailfish OS (built on Maemo/MeGo legacy, for those who remember those) is what I have been using for years (and this is typed from).

Also there are a lot of Linux distros targeting the PinePhone maturing by the day.

I’m considering the Nokia 8110 (banana phone)

KaiOS, somewhere between a smart phone and a dumb phone. Still has Google maps, not sure if you need a Google account tho.

> no maps

I don't experience any issues using mapping apps on Android with microG instead of Google Play Services. Closed source navigation apps including Google Maps, HERE WeGo, and Magic Earth work just fine. Open source navigation apps like Organic Maps and OsmAnd also work with no problems.

I have found that my Pixel with CalyxOS and microG doesn't have any text to speech engine. So the maps apps work, but with no turn by turn audio.

RHVoice is a free and open source text-to-speech output engine for Android. Try it out:

- F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.olga_yakovleva.rh...

- GitHub: https://github.com/RHVoice/RHVoice

Alternatively, if you prefer Google's closed source text-to-speech engine (that is preinstalled on most commercial Android devices), you can download Speech Services by Google through Aurora Store:

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Instructions for configuring the default text-to-speech engine on Android are here:

- https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6006...

Most navigation apps come with their own voice banks for turn-by-turn navigation audio, and installing a text-to-speech engine isn't necessary for these apps. However, Organic Maps (which is a recommended app in the CalyxOS setup wizard) doesn't, and it relies on the default text-to-speech engine.

Thanks! I didn't know about RHVoice. I tried installing a couple others I found through searching F-Droid, but nothing worked. I just installed RHVoice.

Thank you for that insight! My comment was based on some (older) Reddit comments. I'm glad to hear there are working apps.

If you're not sure whether an app is compatible with microG or a flavor of Android without Google Play Services, Plexus is a helpful database of crowdsourced compatibility ratings:

- Plexus: https://plexus.techlore.tech

- GitHub: https://github.com/techlore/plexus

Alternatively, if you don’t use iMessage or iCloud then I don’t think these changes affect you.

lol. nope. trust is binary. you either trust apple or not. after peddling their privacy marketing for so long and doing this, they literally lost my trust.

For most people, trust isn't binary though.

For example, just because you hire someone for one purpose doesn't mean they should have the keys to your house.

If I hire someone to do X I trust them to do X. If X involves them getting in my house to do something while I'm not there I give them the keys. If they screw up I no longer trust them for X and I no longer trust them in general.

I'm not saying you trust someone for all the possible things under the sun.

I'm saying if I trust you for X and you mess it up I no longer trust you for X.

TBH I've been considering just dropping a smartphone all together, I don't really get much value out of it since i'm on my laptop most of the time when I want to internet anyway

For laptops I'd recommend the framework laptop (https://frame.work/). It's thin, powerful, and modular.

I use an hp spectre x360, it's not the most powerful thing in the world and has occasional issues knowing when to charge but otherwise I love it with ubuntu/i3wm

You know Google scans the CP database too, right?

From what I understand, you can use Linux on the M1 now, so at least as a stopgap.

For nas, synology is always a good brand.

Linux on M1 isn't ready yet for daily use, but we're working on it. Expect things to move pretty quickly in the next few months.

Link?

This person is the creator of Asahi Linux and the one who did the early work of Linux on M1 Macs. [0]

When it is ready, it will be ready and they will say so.

Until then it is not ready for general use and is still under active heavy development.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/

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