The kernel update issue on Android is going to be exactly the same for PostmarketOS and for the exact same reason: proprietary firmwares and/or drivers.

That is not the case, as PostmarketOS uses community made open-source drivers, even for the GPU, and all devices that it supports uses the mainline kernel, as all of the drivers they develop are upstreamed to mainline, instead of it being a proprietary driver that is locked to a specific kernel.

The open-source drivers aren’t currently as polished as the proprietary ones, but as we’ve seen the open-source AMD driver for desktop, it can become the best option with community effort and funding.

and now you need to maintain both a GNU/systemd/Linux AND a compatibility layer with Android

The point of adopting Postmarket is that they could then rely on the open-source community to help with maintaining most of of the components, much like how Linux desktop or Linux Server works currently. Waydroid is developed by its own team, so they wouldn’t need to fork that and maintain it to have access to Android apps (though they could help contribute to it if they wanted to).

From a security and privacy standpoint, Linux was never designed to handle hostile apps designed to aquire as much data as possible. Android has a sandboxing system

Android is Linux at the core, yet it was able to be hardened, which shows that PostmarketOS could be similarly hardened if such features were adequately funded and developed by the EU. Linux already has Wayland, which is a huge step forward for security, and Flatpak packages already have Android-like permissions built in (though they would need to modify how those work by default to increase security).

I’m not entirely sure if that would be better than just adopting PostmarketOS, since forking AOSP would mean maintaining a fork of that entire ecosystem, and I’m unsure how they would deal with all the phone manufacturers dropping support for phones rather quickly, or using outdated kernels to access GPU and hardware drivers for said phones after the manufacturer drops support.

Investing in PostmarketOS instead would bring with it much less stuff to fork, along with access to the mainline linux kernel (instead of outdated Android ones) that use open-source GPU drivers that can be effectively maintained, and it can support Android compatibility with a compatibility layer, Waydroid.

A polished PostmarketOS ecosystem only seems to offer advantages compared to a forked AOSP, so if they’re choosing which to invest in, Postmarket seems like the clear winner.

Graphene is good, though it’s still pretty reliant upon Google not making life even harder for them, which it has been doing consistently.

A safer long-term option that is detached from Google’s whims entirely is PostmarketOS, which isn’t based on Android at all, but is instead a project based on Linux directly.

90% of youtube thumbnails have a face in them, usually of an exaggerated emotion, and that goes for both male and female youtubers. Many youtubers have confirmed time and time again that the algorithm favors faces by a pretty wide margin, and thus most play that game.

I’m not a fan of it, I wish they didn’t or the algorithm was changed to not favor it, but I understand why they do it. Though I don’t think it’s particularly gendered as your image claims.

I believe MX Linux shares a lot of devs with Antix, but offers full DE’s.

MX Linux (Debian based) has a KDE version, and lets you choose a non-systemd init during the install.

it’s very clear we have to escape Android and Google entirely, there is no other option.

Please donate to PostmarketOS if you have the means, it gives us a true alternative that is completely community owned, it just needs our support to become polished and to add support for more phones.

We have to support software that’s still made for us. While we still can.

You could use the GPU to help host a peertube instance.

For XMPP, the Movim client is currently the best option as a discord alternative.

It has group voice and video calls, screensharing w/audio (need a chromium browser to share the audio for now), and just added discord-like channels with rooms (though it’s not as smooth as Discord). The Dev plans to implement drop-in voice rooms at some point as well.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.

The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative, at least not for Discord as it is used today. As a smaller self-hosted option that is just for use between a friend group, it’d probably be fine. It just won’t be able to replace the exact use-case of Discord, such as allowing for easily bringing new randos you meet into a call without them having to sign up to your specific server.

The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP, IMHO. Or Fluxer, if they eventually can enable federation.

I think it’d be better if we stuck with Movim instead, which is already built on a proven scalable and most importantly federated back-end (XMPP), and also already offers text, group audio and video calls, screensharing w/ audio (have to use chromium based browser for now to stream the audio), and even some pretty decent encryption.

It’s our most promising Discord alternative out of many.

The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.

We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.

Donate to PostmarketOS so they can support more phones and polish it up. It’s based on upstream Linux, and once polished would give us a true and permanent alternative.

Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

Glad to hear you’re all set up ^^

If you’re interested in Solarpunk, my instance’s sysadmin hosts solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net on XMPP, and there’s a cool little DIY project community at craftmanship@muc.loqi.im :)

I never used em dashes before, but I use the shit out of bullet points, it’s too good at distinguishing stuff from the rest of a comment. I’d hate to have to give those up…

I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…

Nothin’ to be ashamed of, we’re all newbies to this at first. I had to learn it too :p

Part 1: How XMPP servers differ from XMPP Clients

Okay, so: Movim and Conversations are both clients that can be used to login to any XMPP account. Those two clients in particular are a little bit more confusing than normal, because they also offer free XMPP accounts on their own XMPP servers (which are independent of the client software).

To try to liken it to something familiar, it’d be like if the Thunderbird email client (which you can login to any email account with) also happened to offer a separate email hosting service too, so you could login to your SomeReallyCoolUsername@thunderbird[.]com from the Thunderbird app.

Or to liken it to how lemmy works, if you’re familiar with the Photon front-end, it can access any lemmy account, even your blahaj account, as it’s just an independent front-end, it’s not actually hosting the lemmy server itself.

Part 2: How it works in practice

So in practice, if you create an XMPP account on Movim’s server, you can login into that same account right from your Conversations App too. The same would apply if you’d created an XMPP account on the Conversations server; you could login to it right from the Movim client.

One client can also communicate with any other. Let’s say you had a friend using the Conversations client, and you were on the Movim client; you could talk to each other no problem through text, or even call each other 1 on 1 with audio or video.

Part 3: The complication :(

But, bit of extra complication; the Conversations client hasn’t yet implemented some of the features Movim is capable of. Specifically, it cannot yet do group audio/video calls or screenshare. So if you’re in a chat room with your friends, and everyone is on Movim except for one friend (who’s using the conversations client on their phone), if you started a group call, that one friend won’t be able to join it.

However (‘But’ part 2); that limitation would only crop up if someone is using the Conversations client/mobile app itself.

If that same friend happened to have a Conversations XMPP account, they could still open Movim in a browser tab on their PC or phone and login to the Movim client with their Conversations account, and then would be able to join the call no problem.

And that’s it! :D

Sorry if I didn’t do the best job explaining that. I’m very much looking forward to the day when Conversations gets those missing features and I only need to explain the first part about how clients and XMPP accounts are separate 😅

and now my life has been reduced from being perhaps the best engineer in the world

Yeah… I think we dodged a bullet when Linus didn’t let his filesystem in.

Yep :D

It has full searchable room history, can upload memes (gifs from either links like giphy or directly uploaded), images, video files (playable within the chat), and audio messages.

There’s also a built in paint-like thing that lets you draw directly into the chat, or annotate documents, pictures, or memes.

I feel like this article was written for you, based on your last paragraph (the author definitely relates).