I'm sympathetic to remove Apple and Google from my life, but this list looks so sad. You know the experience, integration and headache of all this is going to be horrible.

Depends what you're looking to do - if you really value your privacy, yes, you're going to have to give up some convenience, but I can assure you, it's really not that bad if you put in a little work on an occasional basis, it's not the constant maintenance nightmare that some people seem to expect.

I fired up Syncthing on my phone and NAS and restic to perform encrypted backups nightly to B2, sure, you're not going to get some magical cloud image recognition stuff, but do you really need or even want it?

Everything can integrate quite nicely, but plan to do the connecting work yourself as a one-off with some occasional maintenance a few times a year.

I used to think that privacy arguments are ok in principle but we aren’t really loosing much by sharing some personal data with Apple or Google’s algorithms. In return we got so much convenience, software and products that worked well with each other and even shopping recommendations that were great.

But with this move, they have just crossed a huge threshold. Now it’s clear that we are hurtling into a truly dystopian future where our personal thoughts and experiences are simply not our own. America at least seems to be heading towards some form of corporate fascism that may not be dominated by an individual or a group, but will eventually lead to social ossification and societal decay by outlawing dissent.

To introduce this tech under the disguise of fighting child abuse is just amazing. This will eventually lead to identification of individuals who for example may hold sympathetic views for political views that are currently out of favour.

At some point you have to swallow the inconveniences outside the garden and recognise what this is leading to.

If you had the option of buying this hardware stack through an integrated third-party brand/storefront that offered support for the products and their integration would that make you feel differently?

That's an interesting idea. The amount of work even for a techie to maintain all this, is considerable. Could it be set up for a "user". Tech support, would be; Interesting.

I made an example storefront a few months ago and jotted down a plan in a bout of procrastination. I have a few thoughts on a pragmatic lazy (in the cs sense) approach.

If you or anyone one else is interested email me: [email protected]

This has the potential to be a great laptop, if execution is good:

https://frame.work/

Laptop: Dell XPS 13 and very happy. Maxed out specs and clearly higher price range.

Or: Lenovo Yoga Convertible. My second device. I just don't do games. Or bigger data stuff on this machine. Some design work. Some photo and smaller video stuff. I love the flexibility of the convertible when working with PDF and doing annotations by hand.

The battery on my xps seems to be swelling and messing up the trackpad. Apparently it’s a pretty common issue

Edit: seems to be the precision line too

> The same problem is happening with the Precision 1510 line with the same batteries. I purchased 10 of these laptops for my department around the same time you did. We've had four of these failures so far in three laptops.

reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/6bzhtw/dell_xps_15_9550_battery_swelling_causing/

Good to know. Will watch for it. Currently not an issue.

Another phone: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

Laptop: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14

I have their laptop and do not recommend them. Honestly, I sort of regret the purchase.

- They lie about specifications like battery life (and other things). I get about 1 hour on my ~5 hour battery life when web browsing.

- My laptop had a race condition at boot that would prevent boot 50% of the time. There was a workaround.

- Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).

I am sure there new laptop is better however I do not really trust them after my interactions. Especially for something more novel like a linux phone.

On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack. All their products are running a very similar hardware unlike Purism. They are moving way more product then Purism and are better liked. Hence they have a stronger community. They are also much cheaper phone-wise for a similar feature set. And you can actually buy and receive the phone.

In terms of alternatives I think System76 is pretty good desktop wise right now. Laptop are alright. Waiting for their upcoming in-house laptop.

This is quite interesting. I'm writing this on their Librem 15 and can't recommend it enough. No problems with booting or anything. Battery life got short with time (but I never cared about it).

> Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).

Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.

> On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack.

And the software is provided by Purism (Phosh, for most Pinephone users). Pinephone is great, I'm using it, too. But Librem 5 is much more performant. Many videos show it's working fine, except of the non-finished software (same as for Pinephone).

> Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.

Not the wifi card, the surround material like the chassis are attenuating the signal (the librem 14 should have fixed this issue). I swapped mine out for a well supported and performant Intel card and only got marginal improvements to the signal.

My "ten feet" was using it at coffee shops. I was traveling with the laptop. It was hard. The card switch did get it over the hump for this use case. Not an issue most of the time but still will have get a spot closer the router for video calls (like standup).

So the constraints for work were getting a seat close the router AND a power plug. I ended up USB tethering with my phone alot.

I do appreciate their contributions to the ecosystem but was wronged as a consumer. They need to be truthful.

I take it you have the v3 with the standard boot drive?

> I take it you have the v3 with the standard boot drive?

Yes, v3. What do you mean by "standard boot drive"? Using SSD if that's what you mean.

The v4 updated the screen which burned more power. I remember telling them my real life results and them proceeding to not update their product marketing page while admitting it was based on the v3. I feel like they were already stretching it to begin with with v3 but you would know.

I also got the fastest SSD they had in checkout. Which I think contributed to the booting race condition. I never got a link to an upstream ticket so I do not know if it is fixed.

When I emailed them they said they do not have a laptop in that configuration to test, haha.

Sad the high DPI displays didn't go well. My eyes can't take the 1080 vertical pixel displays that are still so common on open laptops nowadays. But I really want to like the Librems; there aren't many trustworthy laptops with kill switches out there.

I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 with a high DPI 16:10 display, 32GB RAM, and anywhere from 4 to 12 hours of battery depending on workload. It's worth a look for people who can tolerate Lenovo's history (BIOS rootkits targeting Windows in the non-ThinkPad lines).

This looks like a similar problem to yours. They fixed that, even though it affected SSDs that they did not themselves sell: https://forums.puri.sm/t/support-with-booting-from-nvme-ssd/....

I think it's about time to say: "Thank you, Apple!" Finally these awesome projects will get the funding and the support they deserve.

Also, has anyone tried the FXtec phones? https://www.fxtec.com I am thinking about getting the FXtec pro1 version, which promises to get a decent UbuntuTouch support as well as lineageOS.

I feel that with the comeback of Vim, there might be a sufficient user base for devices that use the keyboard for most tasks. I miss the days, when I could send a text message without taking the phone out of my pocket.

Edit: Just found a relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659150

I just ordered the pinephone! Looking forward to trying it, hope it can keep up with most things I use my 6S for.

Guess, I'll dig out the old digital camera again, since that is a weak point for the pinephone. :-D

Is there a Linux Laptop at 2560 x 1600 resolution like Macbooks ? System 76 still runs at 1920x1080. It really makes a difference wrt crisp font rendering and less eye strain.

Most of them I believe should allow you to get HiDPI (aka Retina) displays.

I've been looking at replacing my now 9y-old Macbook Pro (primarily running Manjaro Gnome as my daily driver) with a dedicated Linux laptop, and I've narrowed my selection down to the Lenovo ThinkPad P series or the Framework laptop. For the ThinkPad's, the 4k display (3840 x 2160) is recommended I believe (over the WQHD ones). The Framework laptop comes with a standard 2256 x 1504 display.

- https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/c/t...

- https://frame.work/products/laptop

I hadn't come across that Omnia router before - it looks great! Bit of a shame it doesn't support 802.11ax, and it is more expensive than I'd like, but still...

Might be a good idea to wait. It's coming soonish I think:

- https://github.com/openwrt/luci/pull/4994

- https://forum.turris.cz/t/wifi-6-ax-adapter/10390/77

I think the router might be my favorite open hardware piece:

- It was easier to setup then my old Asus router

- Schematics and source are easy to access.

- It has never not worked.

- It is made by a company that is a domain registrar with a good track record on open source projects (click the more button it the top right and you might recognize a few projects): https://www.nic.cz/

- And if you need to do something advance with it, you can. Mine is has Bird runing BGP.

The Omnia was quite expensive, but I've gotten frequent updates for the last four years. It's a nice mix of hackable and "just works".

I've turned off the WiFi at this point, and just use it as a router now. The UniFi access point that I installed provides better coverage in my house since it's easier to place in a central location.

Overall, I'd rate it as a good value.

The dell and lenovo laptops are nowhere the quality of the apple machines, sadly.

I have a maxed out xps and it is a downgrade in all respects but privacy. :/

Yeah, I figured. When waiting for lsp autocompletes in emacs, my entry level M1 MacBook with no gccjit is orders of magnitudes faster than my almost maxed out Lenovo with emacs and GCCjit.

The difference is so stark that I cannot bear to autocomplete on type on the Lenovo machine, it lags too much and frequently locks up.

My thinkbook g2 14 are is almost the same speed as m1 macbook and runs linux without any issue. It has "only" 9 hours of battery in my usecase, but that's completely fine by me.

I can't complain. But can't compare it to the M1. I had a 2020 MBPro and am currently using a XPS 13 with maxed out specs.

The camera on the XPS is some leagues below. The microphone had driver issues from the start and it cost me two days for a software workaround.

Other than that I am in every way more happy. Keyboard, track pad and resolution. Performance even with crappy corporate spy-and crapware is definitely way better.

I thought I would miss the Mac more. Not looking back once the mic was fixed.

Speakers. Apple finally fixed laptop speakers. Nobody else has figured out how to copy it yet. :/

OK. Not my use case. I have never really listened that intensely.

But totally understand when the milage varies.

I saw your blogpost [1] mentioning how the iPhone 12 is likely your last. Have you given any thought since then to what your next smartphone would be? Or if you still use smartphone at all?

[1]https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

I already don't put a SIM in my phone; I use a dumbphone for GSM.

I will likely begin using Lineage OS or Graphene. I'll begin testing soon and will probably post what I end up doing, either on my blog or the bbs.

Have you considered Purism and Fairphone or are their specs too underwhelming to consider?

With regards to your laptop, does not being able to use Mac-specific development tools (XCode, etc.) interfere with your work in any way or do you just limit the work you take to ones that are friendlier to Linux?

I run macOS on some of my laptops, connected to the internet only via a VPN router on which I have root and can filter traffic.

Rarely do I need to do macOS-specific stuff though.

Laptops with an "s"? How many do you have and how many do you carry on your person? When you say you run MacOS on your laptops, do you mean as a VM or on Apple hardware? Did you keep the M1 laptop you blogger about or did you send it back?

Nothing quite like apple. The step down is short enough not to stumble though :)