cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/50283327

This November, it's important to remind ourselves men have the right to feel what they feel, and be accepted with their traumas and worries.

Let's foster a healthy community where men are free to express their feelings in a supportive and safe environment, where male victims are free to talk about their trauma without being dismissed, where people care about how men - and all other people - feel.

Doing that means creating a better, happier and safer world for all of us.

Thanks @ShadowOfMiisha@lemmy.blahaj.zone for bringing this up!

Not so long ago, I made a post here about joining Mobile Linux club with my Pixel 3a XL. Back then, some people (shoutout to @Shatur@discuss.tchncs.de) asked me to share my experience after a while of use.

A lot of it will apply to all mobile Linux, while some points are rather device-specific.

There we go!

Quick recap of the setup

• Phone: Google Pixel 3a XL (google-bonito)
• OS: Nura (formerly known as postmarketOS) v26.06 - stable
• DE: Plasma Mobile

The Good

• All phone features do work. Calls, SMS, Mobile data are all operational. Calls do wake up the phone, as intended.
• Wireless connectivity works great. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are fully functional, and my Bluetooth headphones connect just fine (and there's even a Linux-native app for them made by a cool person!).
• Battery life, particularly idle, is incredible. On idle, the Pixel battery lasts almost a week, and it does survive a day of moderate use.
• The collection of mobile-friendly Linux apps is larger than I expected. Many other apps can also work with simple workarounds, like putting the phone in landscape mode. Support of common open-source media software (Navidrome, Jellyfin...) is very good.
• The controls are mostly intuitive to any Android user. Plasma didn't reinvent the wheel here: for the most part, the controls are instantly familiar. There are some annoying exceptions, though, like using swipe up to close apps, but somehow not the app drawer.
• The design is consistent and customizable. You can have all the same icons and menus as in desktop Plasma, and yet somehow they sit just right in the mobile phone design. You can customize the look with third-party styles, colors and icons, many of which are available both for desktop and for mobile. This way, I can get uniform design between both my PC and my phone, which is mind-blowing at first.
• Waydroid support is built in. You can run Android apps out of the box. There are limitations - not every app will work right, and running Waydroid in the background drains a lot of battery - but most Android apps run well and even send notifications to the main notifications menu.
• It is Linux, just the way you know it. If something works in desktop Linux, it should work here too. For example, I recently switched the mirrors (more on that later) through CLI and it reflected in Discover app store. I can type "sudo reboot" - and it does indeed reboot. All those little things work here. It's Linux, you already know it.
• SSH support. You can easily SSH to your phone and do whatever you want. Awesome if you run a mobile server, very useful when you just want to manage your phone from your computer. Works very well.

The Neutral

• Linux phone is boring - but intentional. It is there to do exactly what you tell it to. Answer emails? Done. Check messages? Alright. Make a call? No problem. Launch a game? Will do. Much in the spirit of Linux philosophy, the phone will do exactly what you tell it to - and not a tiny bit more. Combine that with the same philosophy on the side of apps, as well as limited entertainment options - and you get a very, very boring phone. For many, it will be a huge advantage - but if you're used to randomly binge on your phone for a bit of entertainment - this ain't it. You'll only address this phone with a clear intent of doing something.
• There are things about design philosophy that do differ from Android - and not everyone will like it. For example, when you invoke one app from the other on Android, you have to go back to the source app, while on Plasma it opens as a "new window" and you can select the source in the active app menu. There is also no system-wide way to go "back", and the respective gestures don't exist. Overall, I like Android way more, but there are neat features here, too.

The Bad

• The phone feels sluggish. I don't know whether it's specific to Nura, Plasma, or if it's just Pixel 3a being old, but the system often doesn't feel snappy at all. It doesn't freeze, but something doesn't feel right.
• Some software is very limited. Nura in particular is based on Alpine, which is already not the first pick for a mobile/desktop distro. Add ARM to the mix, and you have a very poor selection of certain applications. For example, I could not find VPN software that would work on this phone in my heavily controlled jurisdiction. And it's just my personal pain point - there's plenty of software that simply isn't available.
• Notifications are hit or miss. Often times, notifications didn't come from inactive apps until I opened them. This made me miss important messages, and it is unacceptable for such a device.
• Some features need fiddling. For example, mobile data didn't work out of the box or with the GUI settings, so I had to dive into setting the modem via CLI. It worked at the end, though.
• Browser options are generally quite bad. Browsing on mobile Linux is generally less than enjoyable. Angelfish is almost good enough, and the rest falls short very quickly.
• Official mirrors can be geographically restricted. As postmarketOS changed name and domain to Nura (nura.eco), their new domain effectively blocked me out. Combine that with lack of VPNs - and it made me change to alternative mirrors to restore update functionality. Given that these are official mirrors, this is not great.

Overall, it was a blast the first week I played around with it, but after the novelty had subsided, all the unpolished and raw parts of the system have hit me quite hard. Now, I'd rather quickly pop my Android phone to do what I actually want to do, and keep Linux phone for experimenting and helping some development. The system feels like it's still far from prime time, but I'm happy I tried nonetheless. The enthusiast part of me is satisfied.

We'll see how it goes from then on.

What is your experience daily driving Linux on a phone? Is there anyone with mightier devices running the system, or Mobian/other Linux enthusiasts? How is Linux working for you?

There's something about Nordic nature that just calls me to come back and see it again. It's like a mighty and strong embrace, like a turbulent river washing the worries away.

The Ice Age stones, some 10 meter high. The spruce and pine trees, rough and sturdy, standing tall through all the hardships. The unmistakable rocky terrain, covered in what needs nothing but some rain and occasional sun. Life finds a way. And so do I.

Oh, and squirrels. Lots of squirrels! Their warm, fast breath as they take nuts straight from the hand, only to bury them in the soil the very next moment. Such little creatures, and yet always busy, running and jumping all around.

It was a lovely breather. Time to get back to work.

I'd love to fill my RSS feed with live, personal pieces of the Internet. What are the best places to do so? I'd love to hear your recommendations!

Don't be shy to suggest your own blogs too! Your voice matters the most :)

Right in the first zone, I faced the most insane fight I probably ever had in PD. Around 25 mobs encircled me, coming in waves and never offering an escape route. I took a bottle of healing potion, pushed my way to the nearby Sungrass and got to work.

And wouldn't you know, they're all slain. You don't mess with me! :D

So, after following the discussions for quite a while, I decided to pull it off.

Having gone though the support list of various distributions, I chose Pixel 3a for my setup. Among the dirt cheap smartphones, it seems to enjoy the support of almost everything.

I decided to install PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile. In the meanwhile, I also tested Mobian (didn't work for me for some reason) and Gnome (I ended up being too much of a KDE fanboy).

The overall experience is, honestly, mixed. It sure is exciting, and I've spent a whole day tinkering here and there (and feeling a bit nostalgic for the day I felt this way about Linux as a whole), the hardware support was a pleasant surprise, up to multipoint Bluetooth TWS headphones, but still, system stability isn't anywhere near a daily driver, and software support lags behind in many ways.

In any case, now I too have a platform to look into the future. Year of Linux mobile, anyone? :)

P.S. Any advice on censorship-resistant (VLESS/Reality/AmneziaWG-based) VPNs for PostmarketOS on ARM devices?

So, I'd love to start my own small Internet blog, and I want to make it without any extra software, just plain HTML+CSS, maybe some PHP for convenience.

I have near-zero experience in programming (yes I know HTML is not programming language, but you get the point), and I just finished a wonderful starting guide, HTML For People. I loved it a lot, but it only covers the absolute basics, and I'd love to have a deeper dive.

Are there any HTML, CSS, PHP guides that are free, text-based (so, not YouTube videos), and give more than the very basics? Would love to hear your recommendations!

Lately in the light of more Internet censorship I've been trying to establish more reserve channels for communication. As part of it, I am exploring some of the .onion services that are available.

Since at least 2023, there was a discussion of using Lemmy on Tor network. Are there any actual instances or mirrors of instances available through it? Also, is it possible to federate between .onion and clearnet Lemmy instances?

As policies all around the Western world are pushed to curtail the Internet freedoms, more emphasis is made on reaching Internet freedom in an era of surveillance and control.

Some people, particularly those living under authoritarian regimes for a while, have developed strong culture and technology of censorship circumvention.

Russians creatively develop state-of-the-art and heavily battle-tested VPN protocols and routing strategies that are near impossible to restrict. Chinese develop creative trafficking to overcome the Great Firewall. Iranians come up with strong proxying tools and offline communication. Indians are catching up as well.

Considering the current political course, and without giving up on political action, people will need this experience to stay informed and free around the Web and elsewhere. Might be worth it to start taking notes, instead of blindly relying on what worked so far.

Alt text: protesters standing under Russian flag; the protester has a sign with words "Save Internet; Save Russia". Another protester holds a sign with an index finger and the word "Resist".

Did anyone manage to find a REFramework version that would successfully run on a...non-legitimate version of Pragmata? I've heard rumors of it existing, and the official REFramework doesn't seem to work.

Would be extremely thankful if anyone got clues to where to search.

According to Rimu, the main developer of PieFed, all PieFed instances come with a 3000-long block list of resources that cannot be linked to. These include all sorts of right-wing outlets. There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.

The flagship PieFed instance also rolled out a feature marking various other sorts of outlets - among them, resources considered AI slop and Marxist outlets. These are specific to piefed.social.

Related discussion: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679

Why YSK: Many users have hard time choosing between Lemmy, PieFed, and Kbin/Mbin. Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives. Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.

Note: The post is only meant to inform users of the potentially important differences between Threadiverse platforms. Any ideologically charged discussions are better left in the respective topic.

I'm currently trying out Bazzite, and everything is smooth, except one thing: I can't get V2Ray-based apps (V2RayN, Nekoray etc.) to tunnel the VPN traffic. As I couldn't find much online, asking here - did anyone successfully run V2Ray on immutable distros generally and Bazzite specifically? What should be done to make it work?

(An obvious solution - installation via rpm-ostree - does not help, and I need V2Ray specifically)