Are you sure you aren’t either applying nixpkgs overlays, or following master instead of nixos-unstable? I’ve not really experienced anything like you’ve described.

Anyways - I’ve additionally built my own cache server, which builds every output of my flake every time I push to main. System updates are ONLY downloads now. Also allowed all of my low-powered VMs to auto-update, since they’ll never need to build anything at all.

Worse than just taxing them properly.

Not really… At least not generally. The privacy increase from switching from Android to proper Linux is, to me at least, more important than loosing a locked bootloader.

That’s just my threat model. I know that Google & Co are extracting as much info about me as humanly possible, and I have no reason to believe that I am being targeted by someone with the capability to exploit the unlocked bootloader.

Same for my PC btw - secure boot is disabled because it’s not worth the hassle. Again. In my threat model.

(But I would wager that this goes for a lot of users.)

Quick! Get this person a series A, B and C funding!

Pretty sure the Bootloader in unlockable (at least they were in the past?) and support(ed) mainline Linux kernel for an actual Linux mobile OS.

Idk, to me that sounds way better than staying on a google device.

• Insulin
• Sourdough Starter
• An SSH private key that might come in handy later

Ohhh that makes sense… Somehow… about Jeff Geerling. He always felt off to me in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. Guess now I have a proper reason not to watch him.

Also yes Alec is fantastic.

You killed him! NOW IT’S JUST “Lake”!

Lmao this is fantastic, thank you.

• MuseScore 4 is a (the!) free music notation software. It is genuinely fantastic. It’s also a lot of fun, if you know some notation basics and want to play around.
• Darktable is a Raw photo editor in the vein of Lightroom. Except where lightroom is sleek, polished, user friendly and Adobe (🤮), Darktable is FOSS, and clearly so both in the design and functionality: it could easily make a UX designer cry, but if you’re willing to give it a try, there does not exist a more potent raw editor on this earth. Lightroom is a toy in comparison. (Now whether you need that is another question… But I’ve been using it for more than 10 years, and am still finding new, incredibly useful sub-menus, drop-down contexts on hidden sliders,…)
• rmpc is a really cool TUI music player

Yeah Librewolf is amazing. I dialed some if the ootb settings back for usability, but all the “new” stuff Mozilla adds is filtered right back out upstream, so I never even see it.

1. Signal
2. XMPP
3. Matrix

In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

So why Signal above XMPP?

Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.

I’ll second Pocket-ID.

I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)

But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!

Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.

I feel like one could legitimately run on this platform at this point.

They saved lifes.

Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

This, I assume? https://github.com/frida/frida That is indeed a bit eyebrow-raising. Though they do offer pre-built binaries.

ALso for stuff like this, I can highly recommend the Nix package manager, even if you are not on NixOS. There it would, for example, just be nix run nixpkgs#frida-tools, from any distro.

But I know you’re not OP. Would actually be interesting what exactly they tried to install.

pip and cargo are not intended as (system) package managers. Your target package may of course have dependencies on them, but from the way you described it it sounds like that’s what you attempted?