Install waydroid or something or use the browser. The more you put off switching the worse it’s going to get for everyone. You can also just keep another phone in your car on airplane mode and connect it to your hotspot when you need to check your account. There are ways I guess.

On Nvidia it doesn’t support game mode, so it just boots into the desktop, and also you can download a version that boots directly into the desktop or just tweak the files to make it the default.

No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it’s based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use “sudo rpm-ostree install” to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.

Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.

Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.

Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it’s available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it’s buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn’t need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I’m not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It’s possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.

I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn’t constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won’t work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won’t work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it’s pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.

The learning curve for Linux isn’t quite a cliff now, it’s still steep, but with bazzite it’s much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn’t really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.

Don’t use the open Nvidia drivers they are not as good. Most people’s problems with Nvidia probably come from this. I recommend bazzite for a Linux newbie, because it installs the best driver automatically and is very easy to use. Just get the distro that’s made for Nvidia with KDE.

Never had this issue. I just use Firefox.

Fuck those people we will just keep our own stuff and use it. This is one reason I have been hanging on to old hardware. I can still play games 20 years from now on my old PCs.

Please don’t post this trash propaganda on lemmy.

I think it supports most of the common bands.

I haven’t received it yet but apparently not good. It’s a $200 phone. I mostly want it because it runs Linux natively, has a regular unlocked bootloader that isn’t designed to be frustrating like android phones, and can send display over USB-C so it’s like a regular computer. You can run anything like emulating windows apps, you could install steam on it technically by putting it in an emulation container, but the chipset is very old at this point, and so you aren’t going to be emulating anything remotely modern on it. It is just a PC in your pocket though. You have a package manager, you can install many different Linux distros on it. You can get a LoRa radio mesh case for it, a physical keyboard/battery case, which I will probably get eventually. I think it’s worth the 200 dollars. I really want to get away from android. It’s hard because everything from Arm CPUs to the modems are completely proprietary. The only reason this device exists is because the design docs got leaked.

It does have phone, sms, and your standard phone stuff. You can get several different desktop environments like plasma mobile or gnome mobile and several others. It has 3 GBs of ram, and the OS usually takes up around 500 MB. It has dip switches to disable the hardware like the camera, cell modem, wifi, bt, etc. It would be a great device for taking to defcon.

I just ordered a pinephone, haven’t received it yet. The pinephone is the best native option in the U.S right now but you can get some unlocked smartphones with better hardware and install Linux it’s just a bit of a headache.

The general consensus is that it’s pretty low power, being one of the only chipsets that has publicly available design docs for it. It’s a mid tier 2015 era chipset. It a bit slow but works as a phone. You can probably emulate android apps in it.

I use mojeek, and startpage sometimes. Ddg is too influenced now, they do the same stuff Google does. Brave is run by people who hate LGBT people so I can’t support them in good conscience.

No, they don’t have to. The corporations are the ones who want to control everyone. The U.S government is just a tool for them. The politicians are basically just actors at this point.

I mean, let’s not get crazy now.

That’s not really company imposed spyware though. If I thought in any way that my boss was trying to make me install spyware I wouldn’t the very least install it in shelter, something that has been disappeared during the Google play store purges. You can still find the apk online atleast until Google kills android soon with their ban on user installable software outside of the play store.

Cool, I have some ideas as well, like maybe write a script that hashes configuration files that needs a secret password to put into edit mode, if the config changes without being out into edit mode first, disconnect the server. Maybe use a raspberry pi that’s hidden from the network to do this. I know that wouldn’t work for large websites maybe because they can’t afford to go down for hours at a time, but it would give you an additional layer of security for sensitive stuff. I’m more into game programming but I know how exploits work and stuff. I’m pretty sure many types of things like this already exist in the market. One idea I had was pretty neat. Basically in your eula you reserve the right to hack back people that try to hack you, and you have an automated system that uses some known exploits to get a ping or maybe install a rootkit on anyone who is trying to mess around in your system. Later you can just get on and deanonymize them. This requires you actually spend time researching your own zero days. People in defcon hacking competitions do this. They are sort of masters with decompilers and hex editors.

Yes i never saw this feature until I discovered shelter which uses this to protect your personal info.

Still worth it. The amount of time you will save by not having junk on your phone slowing it down will make up for it.

You should just get a cheap phone to use for work. No reason to have their software on your own device. That will undoubtedly be used for creepy purposes.

It helps, honestly one of the best defensive strategies is defence in depth.

Also doing basic things like running your webserver in a VM, and you can write some script or something to just block any IP that is port scanning I’m pretty sure. I would do that if I was hosting. Also remember to block port scanning in Firefox. It’s not enabled by default. This helps to keep you safe when you land on a scanning webpage.