ambitiousslab

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

To be honest, I think the above clients and services like Snikket fit that description.

Now, I wouldn't say they're all on the same level UX-wise as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. But I do think they are 90%-95% of the way there, and in my experience that's enough to convince friends and family to switch over.

In my experience, when people haven't wanted to switch, it's normally not been because of the clients, but because they don't want to install yet another app to talk to someone.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

Any new open source software is always a net positive.

But, there are a few small caveats to the way they've done it (depending on how cynical/cautious you are):

  • Because Proton are not accepting contributions, they own all the copyright, so can make the code closed source again if they want to (that wouldn't affect the already released versions, but future versions)
  • They could likely take down any derivative on iOS, since Apple will always take instruction from the copyright holder, for GPL'd code
  • Since the builds are not reproducible, there's no guarantee that the binaries they distribute are built from the source code
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:

[–] [email protected] 75 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Perfect, now you just have to wrap your program inside a debugger in production!

[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago

Yep, that's the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they'd need the permission of all of the copyright holders who've contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you've done on the mobile stack as well. It's made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I'll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

It was just from cycling. Perhaps he just got unlucky though? From the sounds of things his experience seems like an outlier. Or he was just so fast that the vibration frequency matched that of a motorbike 😁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I have a PinePhone Pro, and it runs nheko very well. Fractal is a little slower, but still usable. Not sure about Simplex I'm afraid.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I'm running postmarketOS v24.06. I could easily have messed something up though!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

One thing to be aware of is that riding around a lot with the phone attached can cause the stabilisation sensor in the camera to go wrong. When this happens your camera feed starts wobbling around all the time. This happened to a friend of mine and let's just say his snapchat stories had a very distinctive look :)

I'm not sure whether more expensive mounts do a better job with this (I think his was quite cheap) but make sure to do your research if you're planning on using it a lot, and you care about your phone's camera.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (9 children)

If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you're into that kind of thing.

Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn't want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn't work very well - either one side can't hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It's probably possible to fix if you know what you're doing, but I don't know what I'm doing :)

I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you're happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

Good luck!

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