Yeah. I just mention it because I’ve generally just used VNC myself; and wondered what the fuss with fancier tools was about.

But then I realized home Internet has getting worse for some folks, and so folks might be using a service to get VPN-ed together, or whatever.

I’m also a big VNC fan, but I imagine RustDesk is solving for CGNAT better? I’m not aware of anything in VNC that solves CGNAT being a PITA.

I tolerate continued existence out of a morbid sense of curiosity.

That’s beautiful, in it’s own way.

I felt that way at one point. It led me, eventually, to moments that I later decided mattered very much, to me.

If I hadn’t had that morbid curiosity, I’m not sure I would have made it to those moments I now cherish.

Here’s to morbid curiosity!

YouTube with a custom app seems to be the best way to actually watch your own chosen subscriptions, rather than bent force fed by the Google algorithm.

I’ve heard folks talk about how to get this from regular YouTube, but it’s wild to me that that put up with having to go to all the trouble with the official app.

Nebula is great.

It’s pretty funny to watch a quick “check out our extended content on Nebula” video exit, then just immediately watch the extended content roll along with a thank you message. (Many creators simply add the Nebula exclusive bits directly to the end of the video, on Nebula.)

It makes me feel like a fancy rich person.

Nebula is terrific!

It does take some time to find everything. It’s not (much of) an algorithm, so I just had to explore and start subscribing to things.

I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don’t hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don’t want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don’t know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

There’s lots of other reasons I’m glad I switched, of course.

I find the windows update and Linux graphical updater processes identical. They only diverge at the end when the Windows one fails with a mysterious error message and offers to retry or open a troubleshooter that won’t work.

Windows arguably is, indeed, two or three different systems stapled together. There’s the C code kernal bits, the .Net runtime higher level bits, and the Electron “this didn’t need to be fast anyway and we only knew how to write JavaScript” bits.

until it came time to install new software.

That is the big giveaway. I used the term “It’s free” too many times when setting up software for them. “I used to have to pay for all of that.”

I always hard code IPv4 addresses. Load balancing and DNS resolution are an admission of weakness.

(This is sarcasm. WTF Steam?)

I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough

People who have accounted for their own spent time often feel the coupons are wasteful. That’s before accounting for the costs of purchases made that could have been skipped, or where the discount led to buying a worse product, and needing to rebuy a better one later.

wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

I’m not familiar with that service, but it’s a safe bet that it has privacy costs. People don’t set up and organize discount programs out of kind heartedness. At best they plan to sell us something we don’t need. At worst they’re selling everything they can learn about us to anyone with a nickel.

Linux Mint is so nice.

I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.

It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.

That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.