SteamDeck, so yes.

On desktop, SBCs, servers, etc Debian.

Step 1 : don’t.

If you didn’t yet might want to play with Precursor

Why even a phone then? I’m not being facetious here it’s actually a follow up on https://lemmy.ml/post/42255169/23589434 namely what do you actually need a phone for?

Maybe you are used to it and it’s convenient for a lot of things you do. But do you actually need one, especially knowing that it’s a legitimate threat to you?

How about no phone but a small laptop or tablet with SIM as USB dongle?

So… I’m kind of in the same situation but mine is actually by mistake. Namely my SIM somehow (OK maybe I tinkered with eSIM a bit much… anyway) works for data and SMS but not for calls. I tried to fix it a bit… then honestly I like it without. Most of the calls I received are not important, nor urgent, and the few that are can leave a message or an SMS.

I stopped relying on my phone for calls entirely and I like it.

When I tell people it doesn’t work they just shrug it off and always find a way to contact me without making a big deal out of it.

I still like having a SIM though if only to

• check where I am on a path the first time I get there
• know if the person I’m meeting might be late
• warn if I’m late on the way to somewhere

but typically my phone works well entirely offline (e.g. I do not stream music, I have actual files on my phone) so I understand.

Honestly in your shoes I’d gauge the person, if they are potentially interesting enough to explore the topic with curiosity, I’d be honest. If I just want to move on because they seem obtuse I’d keep it to the minimum.

turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.

There are warnings so my bet is that there is an edge case where

• one runs apt and receives NO warning
• the system keeps on doing other tasks, e.g. user copies a large file on the same filesystem or log files just increasing
• user runs apt upgrade BUT now apt would warn except it’s not run again

so basically concurrency that makes it unpredictable, except if apt was the only process writing on the filesystem (which it never is).

reinstall curl/apt-transport-https (manually via dpkg if needed)

That’s the trick, local installation via dpkg of the missing package itself (that you got another way) required to let apt get work.

Oof… it actually happened to me and it’s not 1 problem but 2 namely :

• you ran out of disk space while updating
• AND one of the messed up packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can’t recall which it actually is)

so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that’s tricky. Basically you have to

• actually find out what’s taking up space (often old kernels) or “just” give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
• get the actually missing packages via another working system then install locally (typically dpkg on .deb files but NOT apt get because that requires connectivity and thus packages you do not have anymore) the bare minimum you need then finish the update.

For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.

It’s annoying but it’s actually not that bad.

Edit: clarified on the broken state and dpkg vs apt get

You’d have settings for when to stop seeding, e.g. 1:1 ratio minimum, duration of the track xN, etc with a reasonable default. Suggestions welcomed.

I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.

Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would

• include a very small torrent client
• point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
• include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.

Because they literally wrote the book on lock-in https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules and they tried with all their might to stop free software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists so beside the money and power they have been strategically at it for decades. Dependency is deep in the product.

Please feel free to help right now. You can still move to the EU if you want to but if you take for example NLNet they fund open source work for anybody anywhere in the World, you “just” have to propose something that is new and needed with a focus on the Internet.

Send an email to people you care about with your new email, they reply or not it’s OK you still have their email address anyway, no big deal.

Source : I’ve migrated away from GMail.

It’s a VERY specific tool that needs

• a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
• huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
• energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting

So I think it is fundamental to distinguish

• “AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all

versus

• commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.

When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.

Funny I have the opposite experience.

I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!

I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.

To clarify I listed here behaviors that I believe is common. I’m NOT listing behaviors that somebody privacy conscious is. That same person could around the neighborhood with a hoodie, glasses, hygiene mask just the same way.

What I was trying to highlight wasn’t extreme behavior, one way or another, but rather typical ones.

Yes, I didn’t say this was OK. What I’m saying rather is trying to highlight the lack of novelty.

See my earlier answers. I’m not justifying any of that infrastructure or behavior, only trying to highlight that this information, namely that OP is walking around the neighborhood, where and when, is already available to numerous of the actors including :

• neighbors, just visually seeing him with their eyes
• mobile operator via their 5G/4G towers
• mobile OS via their positioning data
• WiFi hotspots
• ISP via WiFi hotspots
• any app with geolocation tracking and any of their commercial partners purchasing that information
• connected devices via BT scanning potentially sending back data to their manufacturer, assuming most are connected
• governments with abilities to get information from ISP, mobile operators, mobile OS maintainers

So… the question IMHO is : is there are NEW data with or without the camera network? I’d argue marginally more.

Sadly not the only one https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go