I am assuming dialup is still a thing in parts of the country

Fun (sad?) fact: AOL will soon shut down dial up on September 30th 2025: https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued

How are you doing it?

I only tried X11 forwarding over SSH. It was slow and ate up a Gigabit.

And I thought otter was referring to the specie of their fursona.

Oh well.

“I donated money to them so I am going to use it.”

Although not much, just 20 EUR. Not sure how much the bundled Windows license costs, but surely Microsoft has other ways to earn from spyware.

I am not alone!

At first I installed Arch because I got an Arch sticker, and if I put it on my laptop that felt like the only appropriate solution.

Arch. After every update I check what broke. And then discover things I forgot to check.

I am still not sure if it’s already safe to upgrade VirtualBox and iio-sensor-proxy, but I am too lazy to just downgrade them yet again.

So I just…

IgnorePkg   = iio-sensor-proxy # Issues in Wayland after suspend
IgnorePkg   = virtualbox virtualbox-host-modules-lts virtualbox-host-dkms virtualbox-guest-iso # Segfault in 7.2.x, reverted to 7.1.8 - see sys-management-log.txt entry 2025-08-29

If you’re curious about the log entries:

2025-07-06:
        downgraded iio-sensor-proxy to 3.6-1 as 3.7 caused issues after suspending
        added iio-sensor-proxy to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf

2025-08-29:
        downgraded virtualbox packages to 7.1.8 as 7.2.x was broken (segfault)
        installed linux-lts-headers as the downgraded virtualbox suddenly wanted that
        removed and reinstalled related packages a couple of times (virtualbox-host-modules-lts, virtualbox-host-modules-arch, virtualbox-host-dkms), as well as switching between linux-lts and linux. Hopefully that didn't create any brand new funny business.
        I want to die
        added IgnorePkg   = virtualbox virtualbox-host-modules-lts virtualbox-host-dkms virtualbox-guest-iso to /etc/pacman.conf

I recommend writing some documentation about your system. My Manjaro install became a total unknown mess after a while. I know I had to create some symlinks at some point to fix something, something something custom “XDG_CONFIG_HOME” dir with separate theme to un-break Cisco Packet Tracer on dark theme, edited startup script for Packet Tracer.
On one Ubuntu VM I edited a bunch of config files that I didn’t remember so it was just don’t touch it while it works.

But hey, I feel better after knowing that during high school our internet was down for weeks because something broke on main proxy server and nobody had documentation for the 2 decades old backup server, including the password, so it just ended up running in a “don’t touch it” mode, except that it also limited download speed on unknown PCs (based on MAC) to something like 32Kbps, which after 20 years meant nearly any PC so the solution was to copy MACs from basically ewaste.

Anyway… write documentation for what you do.

Either that or Linux, PostmarketOS seems most interesting to me. Not perfectly daily drivable yet it seems, but that’s what Android is destined to become for me as well, just likely even worse.

Honestly, I kind of even just like the idea of saying “I don’t have a supported smartphone” when someone pushes me to download some stupid app, but would you look at that, it’s not some ancient device.

Although it seems there’s no way to access SIM Toolkit on Linux, which I kinda need.

We need reboot of N900. Although it lost support long time ago as it was launched in 2009, you can still install latest PostmarketOS onto it: https://postmarketos.org/install/

A commercial Linux phone with backing from some larger company could succeed.

It still looks like that, aside from the datk mode issue, but only in landscape orientation.

Why do we even call it “sideloading”? I can install whatever I want on desktop, even whatever OS, so why not my phone? It is my phone, right?

By default you choose between Cloudflare and NextDNS.

It is going to cost money to buy phones, unpack them, upload the OS, test the product, then repack them and ship them. I would expect that to cost at least $20, probably more.

Well, proxysto.re does that with GrapheneOS: https://shop.proxysto.re/de/i/pixel/

€50, based on the discount on stock ROM, although €20 out of that goes to GrapheneOS apparently. Based on donation amounts, they sold 67 of them in 2024

Like Fairphone shipping with e/OS? https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-system

I was looking to get one, but a lot seem to be mono only. Otherwise Retekess TR606 looked interesting, even if just mostly as a toy.

And sure as fuck never use a free one for anything remotely sensitive.

I think ProtonVPN might might be an exception here. They’re pretty trustworthy as far as I know, and have some free servers.

But my go-to is Mullvad, mainly for the flat pricing. I hate how most only have good prices if you buy a full year or so.

Meanwhile this was a stupid proposal over here in Slovakia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/20/slovakia-targets-wealthy-book-buyers-with-steep-vat-rise

Announcing the new VAT rate this week, Slovakia’s finance minister, Ladislav Kamenický, claimed studies had shown that books were “primarily purchased by wealthier segments of the population” and could therefore be taxed at the new basic rate of 23% rather than the current rate of 10%.

And even just regular file transfers. I got used to passing files over KDE Connect because fucking WiFi is faster than the USB 2.0 on my phone.

Unfortunately, only works with the “Share” or “Send to” rather than file browser which for some reason caps out at 5MB/s.

The humble 50GB /var/cache/pacman/pkg on my 256GB drive.

I tried IPv6-only a few days ago, aside from Google and Cloudflare proxied websites, I couldn’t load anything.