elagost

This looks quite nice. Are you outside of Japan? If so how did you acquire the kit?

Upon seeing this project I immediately searched the HN thread for fellow PocketCHIP owners. Mine's still on my shelf next to a few other handheld Linux portables that showed promise, but ended up with poor support and no updates. The real clincher for me is eMMC storage - with no way to back up or modify the storage other than their web-based flasher, the CHIP was a headache and a half to deal with, compared to other microSD-card-based SBCs, which are simple to backup and restore when needed.

I'd love to have a device like this with the longevity of a Thinkpad (still using mine from 2012) or at least my Nexus 5 (2013, and still in use!) but it seems after a year or so these all just get abandoned.

That is what prompted me, actually! My coworker alerted me to this sale and I jumped on it. Something about Absolute OpenBSD spoke to me, and I had to pick it up first... maybe it's the "Practical Paranoid" part.

This weekend I started digging into OpenBSD. I'd never used a BSD - been a Linux user for the past decade. While the table linked might show OpenBSD as the "least complete", what seems to be the case is that they pick one tool to fit a use case and then use that one. There aren't 400 different shells installed by default or 5 different process monitoring/inspection programs, because they have the one they like and use/improve upon it.

OpenBSD is a fascinating operating system. I'm only a few chapters into Absolute OpenBSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_OpenBSD) by Michael W. Lucas, but from a Linux user/admin perspective it is enthralling. I can't wait to learn more about it.

The way to do that is just to use Tor Browser as your regular browser.

Quite insightful - thanks for writing this.

I'd love to see evidence otherwise, but I do think that desktop interfaces are pretty "done" at this point - you can have a couple different paradigms and layouts, but usually it's the same thing - either a Windows 7-style taskbar/start menu layout, or a macOS dock/statusbar layout. There's not been much change in the desktop space in a long time. Features here, animations there, but desktops are relatively stagnant. The cool thing is that you can extend them with other programs if you want, but mostly they're just a way to launch programs. Not a lot of messing around is needed if you ask me.

Although older software usually does what we need it to do, I question the wisdom of running an Internet-connected machine with software that no longer receives security fixes. If the various Linuxes might give you what you need, I encourage you to check them out. Debian with XFCE and Xubuntu's LTS are both very good options that stay stable and secure.

Out of curiosity, what would you lose functionality-wise by upgrading? What's your mission-critical workflow?

I apologize for not being clear; I was referring primarily to 4.4 "KitKat". Still have a tablet that I run with that on it (offline) to read ebooks. Quite nice. You are correct though - pre-4.0 was pretty rough.

Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again.

Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4 times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the features end up getting removed later.

As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here https://xfce.org/about/screenshots) It has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades.

(edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a year.

I run all Linux at home (and LineageOS on my phone). For things like this I keep an old Windows laptop (Core2Duo) in the closet. For IOT/app-based stuff (none are mine - they all belong to my parents/relatives), I have my brother's old screen-shattered iPhone.

For documents I just use LibreOffice and suffer; if I absolutely need Office I suppose I could use my old discs and install it on the Windows machine, but have not had any need to in the past 3 years since I switched. When I send documents to people I just export as PDF and they're none the wiser.

Save for extracting BIOS updates from custom .exe files (thanks HP and Dell) I never use either of them.

There's a third kind of person - one who doesn't want their personal data beholden to a bunch of faceless for-profit companies who have proven they care less about security and privacy than they do about money.

I don't self host a lot of services (and the ones that do could go away tomorrow without hurting me much) but I only have one cloud resource - email. It kind of has to be that way for various reasons; I'd self host if I could reasonably do so. I also think I value my $75/mo more than I value an endless stream of entertainment.

(edit: just wanted to say, thanks for posting this. It is a valuable discussion point.)

Using Eclipse, any jetbrains stuff, android studio, and xcode (even GNOME builder!) is super helpful for me. They have completion features, a robust set of build tools, and everything in one window with all the controls visible. I love the autocompletion, console, build environment, and when I think about the time it took me to get my .vimrc to where it is now, just for writing text and basic scripts, I shudder to think of how much I'd have to add to make it even close to something like Eclipse.

I am hobbyist programmer and a parent, so I don't get a lot of time to do programming these days. When I do I don't like fiddling my half-baked tmux/vim setup. I just wanna write code. So I use IDEs.

I'm convinced that people who use solely vim/emacs started off before there were any good GUI editors and now have too much momentum. I'm not that old, but I frequently spend time on headless *nix boxes, so I use vim all the time and love it. I have a portable .vimrc that I take around with me because I have spent so much time that I want to configure things the way I like them.

Despite my love of vim, on the desktop, I fall back to gedit or Notepad++.

Vim and Emacs are great editors when you're SSH'd to a headless server, but they will not replace an IDE (or even TextMate). That is completely ridiculous.

Official support page: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032577632...

Well that's not too bad. I could live with 3G personally, given what I use my phone for, but I doubt many others could.

I've wanted one of these for years, but live in the US. Would importing it work, or would my provider not support it?

The second sentence is "This does not include accidental errors" but then an accidental error and a bunch of third-party program are cited as primary examples. Things are cited multiple times - the recent "battery DRM" news, App Store censorship, and remote wiping. How is it Apple's fault if someone writes and distributes malware for their system outside the App Store?

I agree with the premise, but this article is a little bit of a mess. Things like this don't help convince people. Were it shorter and more cleaned up, and devoid of things like "cr...app store" it might actually help people realize the importance of Free Software.

A tablet, built on open technologies, with a wide variety of ports, and replaceable parts?

Count me in. I would replace my laptop with this.

So does anyone know if this actually works?

You are correct. Thanks for pointing that out; I tested it out this morning and verified I was able to send/receive messages on the desktop program with my phone in airplane mode.

With the rapid churn of various chat clients it's hard to get something to stick, and I attempted to settle on XMPP+OMEMO (or OTR), since it's a protocol, not an "app" (eww). Not a single person I know still uses XMPP, and it's easier to just tell people "Download Signal". However, that requires a phone number, and is useless on a desktop if your phone's off. Despite being Free Software, it's fairly locked down.

Secure communication with most people is nigh impossible these days, because nobody wants to not use SMS.

There has to be a better solution, and despite email+PGP's flaws, it's the only system I've seen that's stood the test of time. There are pretty good plugins for Mail.app (macOS) and Outlook (Windows), and if you use Linux you probably can deal with gpg. We use it at work for email, and pretty much everyone can work with it at any level of technical expertise. Anyone else have any solutions that have worked in their circles, including non-technical family members?

I use stickers to differentiate two laptops I have that are otherwise externally identical. I also like to cover the logos with other things instead.

At my previous company we all had stickers on the laptops that showed they were company property.

Running Arch as well and I use the Calibre Flatpak to manage my Kindle. I plug it in every month or so and haven't had any failures in the last year. I've found that Flatpaks solve the problem of some older programs not working well on Arch or some programs not getting updated on Debian.

I use a ton of flatpaks on my system and don't notice the difference between them and "real" packages. I use Signal, Telegram, a few games, and the Steam flatpak, which is a great way to use Steam without enabling multilib on Arch.

On an Ubuntu system, snaps works great as well.

I personally don't. A lot of the same crowd that uses ancient Thinkpads uses Coreboot or Libreboot. I used an x220 for 3 years before buying an x230 last month, and I flashed Coreboot (plus me_cleaner) on both of them.

wpa_gui does come with wpa_supplicant in many distributions and is easy enough to configure. This helped me configure it: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-953484-start-0.html

If necessary I can SSH in (if the pi is on) and troubleshoot. No one runs a business out of my home so Internet isn't super critical, and the smartphones have data connectivity if need be. I have a couple fresh SD cards in storage and take quarterly SD card images, so if it fails I don't have to rush out and buy anything. If the pi itself blows up, I can talk my wife through changing the DNS server on the router config page from her laptop, or she can just wait until I get home. Not a huge hassle.

Even so, normally you can set a fallback DNS server on your router, and you could have two little Pi Zeros on a plugstrip in a closet somewhere! (Or just set the fallback at opendns or something)

If yours has wi-fi (Pi 3 and above or Pi Zero W) you can always just leave it plugged in somewhere innocuous as a pi-hole. It's super useful and takes almost no time to set up, provided you can change the settings on your router to use it as DNS.

I used mine as a NAS for a while with an external USB HDD and a samba share. It was also set up to be a VPN and pi-hole. I have a pi zero that I use to flash coreboot on laptops.

My PS3 isn't doing so hot as a media server client for my NAS's movie library - the network connection is poor, the interface is fiddly, and it can't load subtitles embedded in files. I was going to buy a pi3 to replace it as a media server client and hook up an external DVD player, but now I'll be getting a pi 4!

It's an actively-developed, secure, professionally-usable distro that uses musl libc and doesn't have systemd. It's not super easy to configure as a desktop system, but it's very small and I like to keep it around for VMs and such.

If I asked my dad what the technical merits of Chrome or Firefox were or why he used what he used, he wouldn't have an answer for me. He'd say "I use Chrome because you told me a few years ago to use it and it still works."

The reason we switched from IE was because IE just straight up did not work. Sites were broken. Now it doesn't really matter but for these invisible things that normal people don't see or care about. Most people are like my dad.