As always, I got the username wrong…

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • Simplex is really easy to install and use, unfortunately it’s still kinda buggy, specially with public relays, I personally don’t mind buggy, I’m willing to make sacrifices for the same of freedom and privacy.

    I just keep a second chat app as a failback so I can send them a message saying “ur simplex broke again, pls restart”

    Xmpp has been stable for decades, tho I guess otr/omemo is hard for family to install, also doesn’t support e2ee calls (or rather, it does, but it’s complicated). But I haven’t used xmpp in a long time.




  • Idk about GrapheneOS in particular but I find the sandboxing solutions for GNU/Linux like bubblewrap to be much more granular than standard Android.

    “give us access to manage phone calls or we won’t you me answer internet calls (which have nothing to do with actual SIM calls)”, “give us access to all your files or we wont let you share that file via the share function (which doesn’t need fs access to work)”.

    On GNU/Linux I can only give a program exactly the resources it needs, I can disallow dbus, I can block it from accessing potentially troublesome things like /dev/dri, can overlay filesystems and pretend that’s my real home dir. Or can just mount the whole / to some other system.




  • The fuss is that every time you transcode to a new format you accumulatively lose quality.

    So for example if you have an 320kbps mp3, but then that takes too much space so you transcode it to 192 mp3, but then you discover the opus codec is more efficient so you transcode it again, but then you want to make a fan video of the same song, so your video player transcoded it again into video friendly aac.

    The quality on your final video is going contain the faults of all the files upstream.

    Meanwhile if you edit the video from a lossless source, it will only get encoded once.

    So it doesn’t matter for streaming, but it matters if you want to download and convert to other formats.




  • Because not everyone has the skills, the know how and the time to learn a new operating system.

    Most people if they were to try to install Linux would probably endup breaking their systems somehow, most don’t wanna risk it.

    It may seem simple to us, but think of it from the perspective of someone who is afraid to install a program because thinks it’s going to make their computer explode, have no idea what a bootable USB is, and have never used a command line their whole lives.

    With modern computers with UEFI and secure boot installing Linux is even harder, no average user is going to mess with any of that.

    For the average person, the computer is just a very secondary thing in their lives that doesn’t get any attention besides the average “my phone is full, I need to copy my photos to the computer”. Tech companies know this so they exploit the user’s ignorance.