recently I got me a pair of Soundpeats Air4 Pro; initially wanted to repurchase a pair of Air3 HS Pro that I had and was very satisfied with the sound but lost one earpiece and found out that replacing it is nigh impossible. so, Air4 was like $5 more and I wanted to try the ANC part of it. none of those models are in-ear headphones, I’m done with shoving things in my ear canals.

so the sound is OK to me (I have tinnitus and don’t hear that well to begin with, so I’m not an expert on judging these things) but the ANC is not what I expected it to be. to me, what it does is just flood my ears with bass. the music i listen to and the occasional podcast sound OK to me but I don’t perceive any noises to be “cancelled”, i still hear all irritants (buses passing me by, dogs barking, people talking, etc.) but they’re somewhat droned out by the bassy sound.

the way I understand ANC, it uses multiple mics to generate an inverse sound that cancels out the ones reaching the microphones. so this should work without music, i just turn ANC on and I “hear” silence. nothing close to that is happening.

anyhow, both of those have some app that you need to get from google play and I haven’t done so for either of them. judgging by the screenshots the app doesn’t do anything of value, so you’re safe to run it without.

edit: I just checked and it appears I was the victim of wanting things to be true; the website lists the feature as “Hybrid ANC” (emphasis mine). I’m not even gonna bother with reading up what their definition of it is, so I guess it was a con job from the start.

if they run hardware that’s not cutting edge, by all means, that’s the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that’s on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what’s what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I’d caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it’s still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that’s most likely to “just work” for most people. it’ll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they’ve crossed over, they’re more likely to wander further.

a combination; some have swap as a btrfs subvolume, some as a swapfile in root and those are encrypted, when the system boots it requests the encryption passphrase, regardless if it coldboots or restores. restores from swap are way faster than coldboot plus all your stuff is how you left it.

on some systems I have a separate swap partition outside of luks2/btrfs and that one’s unencrypted. when it restores from there, it doesn’t request the passphrase and the boot is even faster. that’s obviously less secure but my threat model is a lost/stolen laptop, I seriously doubt someone’s gonna forensic the shit out of my swap, it’s more likeky it’s gonna get wiped and sold.

to fully utilise this tech, it’s essential to set up suspend-then-hibernate, another awesome feature that’s way too cumbersome to set up. the laptop suspends for like 60 minutes and if it’s not woken up, it hibernates to disk.

I’ve made it work on arch, debian and fedora, on a T420s, T480s, T14 AMD, MBPr 2012, each on luks2 + btrfs with systemd-boot, and it works flawlessly on all of them. the setup is super-involved and cumbersome though but it’s easily accomplished once you get the hang of it.

the links posted here along with the arch wiki is what I used. it helps if it’s not your primary and only device, so you have time to retry until you get it right.

well yeah, just a simple private/public key solution for encrypting chat and cloud. transfer your private key to a forked desktop app and access your encrypted chat history from there as well.

just basic stuff, not something for people running from nation-state actors, but to prevent LLM ingestion and mass surveilance. but OP says that’s against Telegram’s ToS, so no dice here.

because Telegram’s UI/UX is second to none; possibly iMessage or whatever it’s called is close, albeit with way limited functionality. Signal and friends look like a PoC from 2015 in comparison. also the apps, on mobile and on desktop, have a low memory footprint with no bloated electron crap, the cross-device sync is phenomenal and there’s the virtually unlimited cloud storage. if an addon could piggyback off of that, that would be spectacular.

however, OP’s insight as to this being against ToS is obviously a deal breaker. seeing as how they’re adamant about leaving all your shit unencrypted in the cloud I’m looking for other havens, begrudgingly; I’ve been a user from the early days.

do any of these forks support E2EE? I don’t mean the OG “private chat” thingy that Telegram supports.

I mean like an add-on, the way pidgin had an OTR plugin that enabled private comms over Google’s unencrypted XMPP servers.

as a consequence, that would also encrypt everything in the cloud and prevent your chat history being ingested for LLM training and whatnot.

I feel the 50 years support claims, whether in hardware or software, should be of little concern; you’ll grow tired of it, no one is going to rock the same phone for 10 years, replacing components as they fail and whatever Fairphone’s delusion is.

as to concrete recommendations, take a look at Xiaomi phones (Mi/Redmi/Poco/etc.). they ship with a bloated spyware called MIUI which is such a horrific mess on so many levels I can’t begin to count the ways it sucks. even moderately competent phones have trouble keeping up with the bloat, they glitch out, drop frames, freeze, etc. so people just get rid of them and upgrade to something snappier. as a consequence, they can be had for cheap on the used market.

the good news is, they have snapdragon models with super competent hardware and a good portion of them have lineageOS support (and by extension, many other derivative OS) - Poco F1 is one of the rare semi-modern phones that also has postmarketOS support.

the bad news is, the bootloader unlock process takes a week, just because; do yourself a favor and don’t connect this monstrosity to your LAN while you wait for the timer to expire. also, they’re chaotic (to say the least) with their model naming, with zero consistency what each suffix means (T, Pro, etc.) and it’s not rare that they do a model “refresh” where they replace snapdragon with mediatek in the “updated” version.

I don’t think any Thinkpads have AMI firmware, which is the source of this fuckup.

that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.

for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.

the whole apple-bad thing aside, you’re getting a non-expandable 8 GB laptop, of which a significant portion goes to graphics. that’s pretty low today, and it’s gonna be worse down the road. speaking of graphics, although Asahi has basic functionality, the driver isn’t 100% yet.

I hope you don’t plan on torrenting a buncha stuff, as the SSD is small and non-replaceable and after years of use has an insane TBW number.

the battery longevity is a solid argument but you are buying a 4 year old battery that will show signs of aging.

I am all for repurpose/reuse/recycle, but unless you get it for free, or close to it, this thing s a bad idea. get a similarly aged business-class laptop (thinkpad, yoga, latitude, elitebook, etc.) that you can cram full of RAM and storage and replace practically every component if it fails.

CZ and dd and other “it’s 1998” tools copy the entire disk. like, you clone a 500 GB SSD with 50 GB used to another disk, guess how much data gets copied? correctomundo, the entire 500 gigs. that’s not super-healthy for the new drive and it recreates the same volume UUIDs on the target disk as the source drive, so you’re left with a mess if you keep both drives in a system.

you have a modern tool at your disposal, the mentioned btrfs send subvol | btrfs receive subvol that copies only what’s used. GRUB (you can use this opportunity to switch to systemd-boot) won’t pick up shit, you need to install it to the new drive (and remove it from the old one).

eons ago, macOS had the SuperDuper! tool, a free utility that clones the entire disk, resizing the partition in the process and copies only the data and it does that from within the OS, no booting off USB installers and such. sad to say, nothing close exists over here, you’ll just have to get good at doing things manually.

look up btrfs send and receive. you’ll be copying data from the old disk to the new. prior to that you create the same layout on the new disk (efi, boot, btrfs with LUKS, subvolumes root and home). sadly, there aren’t any readymade solutions that do this for you. big time NO on clonezilla and friends.

Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then… Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.

you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?

wish they would say what the “old intel CPU” refers to and which ate the modern ones that don’t need the hack.

I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it’s some cringe when I read “challenge” also that pic is… what?), but you don’t run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.

if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it’s a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won’t have issues with old packages and you’ll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.

deleted by creator

coupla blogs and lemmy subscribed ordered by top day; once I’m done with it, that’s it, no doomscrolling no more. all news and sports are filtered out, along with memes and similar stupid shit.

if im really craving something, read a book (thanks Anna!), reinstall one of the cheap laptops I got, go for a run/walk/bike ride etc. works most of the time.

weeell you kinda misrepresented the stated point, creating what’s commonly referred to as a strawman.

the subject isn’t a random sandwich that might or might not have contaminates in it; the subject is a shit sandwich. therefore it’s pointless to argue exactly how much shit is in a shit sandwich, as its essence and genesis preclude it from being considered nourishment.

now there’s copious propaganda out there convincing you it isn’t that bad, lotsa people do it, memba the sandwich from decades ago you loved… but we’re in the wrong community for that.