After a year there’s only something about linux-firmware requiring manual intervention.

I thought I wasn’t reading the news in correct place. Manjaro had update snapshot discussion threads, and usually there were things to fix manually. Usually just minor things.

NO fish pics

Are you referring to fishing or phishing?

I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly

Someone’s probably trying to stop that already, in a way. Low(er) sentences for rape and abortion bans. Maybe will be followed by something else, like decreasing age of consent. Or banning things like hysterectomy, salpingectomy, vasectomy.
All the good solutions /s

Germans skip to ich_iel.

I had luck with VNC, although it’s still worse than RDP. There’s also some RDP implementations on Linux that are apparently better, but VNC works well enough for me.
But there’s no sound, I don’t know if RDP has that. I’ve used VLC for sound forwarding. I also tried PulseAudio TCP module, but that didn’t quite work. With VLC I can do lossy compression.

What I wish would work better is X11 forwarding. That could be so awesome, just having the remote windows local-like. But from what I can find, in the past, programs used X11’s drawing features which would save a lot of bandwidth, while now they just draw pixel by pixel.

To give you some idea, I’ve tried it on LAN with gigabit ethernet, ping below 1ms. It would saturate the port and still be kinda slow.

I also found it OK-ish, at least after my usual disabling of BITS and SuperFetch (SysMain now, I think), and disabling auto-updates, I think in gpedit.msc, and using the provided BypassNRO.cmd to create local account.

Alright, maybe not that OK, but after the initial setup it ran fine even on officially unsupported computer made in 2007. Just had to modify the installer by merging W11 image into W10 installer.

Anyway, the Windows store or whatever isn’t that used, and I got tired of updating every random program coming from .exe files. But similarly I don’t like the large hops in versions like Windows 10 -> 11, or similarly with Linux Mint, so I went with Arch.

Anyway, I’ll be a smaller minority. I most liked Windows 8.1. It was really well optimized.

I like them. It spins, it makes a sound when being used, it looks cool, I have to be a bit more gentle with it.

Holy hell, the Ubuntu ISO is 6.3GB now. Soon it may not even fit onto a DL DVD.

price for a domain name

Or host your own VPN on home network. Or use Tailscale VPN, that also works behind CG-NAT, and can usually get direct connection.

Advanced versions can even instruct your phone to change important settings under the hood and expose you to significant vulnerabilities.

The scariest thing for me.

At one point I got something along the lines of “Your carrier has changed some settings, tap to review.”, once again showing me that my phone isn’t mine.
In this case it was emergency alerts, but I don’t know what all they can change. It wasn’t a carrier phone, by the way.
I also found apps related to (I think) multiple carriers, just disabled by default on Moto G52 5G. Orange was definitely one of them.

My closest attempt at pronouncing that:

echo 'šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm' | aplay -c 1 -f u8 -r 2000 -t raw -

Mull is also discontinued.

Unfortunately, when buying a phone I always have to make some compromise. If I aim for hardware or very specific feature, there’s going to be a compromise in software.

If I was looking for software, Google Pixel with GrapheneOS looks quite nice.

To be specific with the key features/functionality of my phone:

Software: Surviving high DPI without the software falling apart (I hate how large everything is on phones by default, plus >=600dp the tablet mode is awesome), OMAPI (needed for external eUICC), manual band mode selection (indoors and in vehicles this can sometimes make a huge difference, like from 35Mbps to 150Mbps based on my tests), manual cell tower selection (I haven’t yet made much use of this apart from figuring out that towers in city seem to have 1km limit), and a lot of other stuff in Engineer Mode that I don’t yet understand so I won’t touch (some settings can persist factory reset).

Hardware: 85.14Wh battery (22,000mAh for the more marketable way to write it, and for comparison, my ThinkPad has a 45Wh battery), Dual SIM + SD card (not hybrid), IR blaster, headphone jack, custom button (short, long, double click), 1,000lm light that sucks up 6W (I don’t have a way to measure that though), night vision camera (IR), FM radio that works without earphones (still works better with them).

I honestly just fear updates at this point. They always seem to break more stuff than fix, the only exception to that for me has been PixelExperience custom ROM (discontinued).

Edit: Android is simply missing proper backups. Bad update on my laptop? Timeshift. Bad update on stock Android? It is what it is.

First Moto G5s Plus which got high battery drain, sluggishness and crashes after Android 8.1 update. This was bad enough I had to fix it with custom ROM. Then Poco X3 Pro which reportedly had issues with performance after MIUI 13 update, so I stayed on older software. Now my Ulefone Armor 24, which only has one update primarily to fix Google pay, but also brings a newer security patch, reportedly causing many crashes that make the phone unreliable and a bad experience.
Also many Samsung phones had an update that removed access to manual band mode selection, and if I recall correctly, that update didn’t even revert them to default.

It’s not the best for security, but I basically now just fear any updates. If everything works, then it can only be broken.

Maybe I should at least somehow start checking known vulnerabilities. As of recently, I should probably stop using applock on my outdated Ulefone

Exposed ”com.pri.applock.LockUI“ activity allows any other malicious application, with no granted Android system permissions, to inject an arbitrary intent with system-level privileges to a protected application. One must know the protecting PIN number (it might be revealed by exploiting CVE-2024-13916)

https://cert.pl/en/posts/2025/05/CVE-2024-13915/

Though my device has AppLock v14, so I am not sure.

This makes me worried about the ultra cheap Chinese manufacturers. I mean the likes of Unihertz, Umidigi, Ulefone, Doogee, Oukitel, etc

Usually these don’t get updates at all.
Even weirder, for example I have Ulefone Armor 24. They used to ship with Android 13. They still advertised it with Android 13 when I bought it. Mine like a few others have said arrived with Android 14, but the earlier ones aren’t offered A14 update.
Someone on Reddit contacted support about this and they replied that they don’t provide cross-level upgrades because Google doesn’t allow them to release those to end users.

Anyway, point is, they save on everything possible, starting with software updates. And I have doubts about them changing this, unless EU is a large market for them.

1. Second cellphone.
2. You don’t need a SIM card to call emergency numbers.

2nd is also important in that your phone is always connected (unless in airplane mode) to some cellular network, and can still be tracked the same way (unique IMEI).

For weeks I’ve been trying to figure out if and how I can manually configure the NetworkManager connectivity check. I’ve probably spent a few hours browsing around the internet.

The answer is in NetworkManager.conf man page, as I found yesterday. Surprising, I know.

It also let’s you spoof some devices to download “incompatible” apps.

Hey, hey, it’s average.