Signal is really simple and has a sizable userbase now. I’ve worked with people in non-tech companies and they’ll have signal installed because theres someone in management that cares for security to a degree and does official nonofficial team communication with signal

Element/Matrix I think has a chance. The newest Element X app looks a lot better on the phone and on desktop. It’s progressing to good user experience

I remember how much games media was hyped on the activision acquisition. It’s probably because Kotick and Blizzard execs are a bunch of bastards but that doesn’t make MS execs great. Just less shitty. Also had the feeling like games media at the time saw it as strengthening western games studio employment stability. Things have not gone as hoped for in the last few years

I thought I posted a non pay walled article. Here’s a different one that’s pretty detailed

https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-industry/2025/10/02/NVKI2BXB6FBXZD2V7WSBT5BD2U/

F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been validated to work for the user’s interests, rather than for the interests of the app’s distributors. The way F-Droid works is simple: when a developer creates an app and hosts the source code publicly somewhere, the F-Droid team reviews it, inspecting it to ensure that it is completely open source and contains no undocumented anti-features such as advertisements or trackers. Once it passes inspection, the F-Droid build service compiles and packages the app to make it ready for distribution. The package is then signed either with F-Droid’s cryptographic key, or, if the build is reproducible, enables distribution using the original developer’s private key. In this way, users can trust that any app distributed through F-Droid is the one that was built from the specified source code and has not been tampered with.

…

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all.

I have an old laptop running it since a year ago. It’s getting there. If you use it long enough, you will still regularly stumble on little things that are nicer to use on gnome or kde but it’s getting there. I plan on switching my primary desktop to it for the 26.04 release

I prefer smaller scale remakes rather than like FFVII. The art here works for me. It’s not standout. It doesn’t have the same amount of charm to it. Maybe all too clean. The one in Romancing Saga 2 looked pretty generic but at least it wasn’t a game that required a huge amount of sales to break even. Still charming

it’s been asked a lot and I’ve seen others respond about how the passcode and account username that were added in the last few years are steps in the process to make accounts not dependent on phone numbers. I’ve just given them the benefit of the doubt that someday we won’t be tied to a phone number anymore

Whatever the cost is for high speed internet service specifically for a car is, it will never be worth it. Like GeForce Now uses like 100mbps for their highest quality stream, data caps and cost for uncapped or like a terabyte a month or something specifically for my car, not worth. A Steam Deck is cheap mini-pc/laptop territory.

If gaming in a car actually mattered, there’d be an option to put a small 720p-1080p display in the middle of the car facing the backseats and it’d just have a Ryzen HX-370 or better tucked somewhere and then people can play pretty much everything a Steam Deck can but with better performance

I have comaps installed but overall I don’t think it matters a great deal which open street maps app you use, they’re all really similar. I try to contribute business info when I remember to do so but there doesn’t seem to be any yelp/google business equivalent. Need something that hosts user reviews and pictures and some way to moderate that in a decentralized enough community way. Can’t beat Google maps without the business pages and crowd sourced data

This is easier to set and forget. I’m cool with subscribing and occasionally doing a one time donation when I’m feeling spirited

The free is enough for me but I’m willing to pay that sub to support them

Fossify launcher is buggy but at least it’s always been open source to my knowledge. Actively developed. All the fossify application. I use them

One of the reasons I prefer Matrix even though anyone I know in real life uses Signal so I use Signal practically everyday but Matrix sparingly. Federated matrix servers. I worry how resilient Signal can be if enough countries ban it, not really confident in the US or EU countries or any countries long term for encrypted chat for the Signal Foundation, and also signing up with phone numbers. Phone number providers being another point of regulation

I think Proton mail is worth it just to diversify off Google but I don’t lend much faith in how effective privacy will be with email. The free service is enough for that. If I wanted more faith in encrypted communications, encrypted chat applications. I sub to proton for drive and VPN. ProtonPass has all the email aliases for throwaway websites

The US just pulls headline. I remember a long time ago seeing the CCTV setup in the UK and being pretty WTF is going on here. Then I remember Czech Republic talking about internment camps citing US Japanese internment camps as a good example of justification. Then I remember Italian court cases over seismologist not warning people enough/not being predictive enough to prevent deaths in a major earthquake. Or the groping of a girl and being let off because it didn’t last enough time for it to be considered bad by the judge. For all the headlines the US has. Then of course I feel like it’s been at least 15 years of trying to pass anti-encryption/anti-privacy laws. US makes headlines, but something about European conservatism/traditionalism/paternalism makes the whole continent feel like a powder keg to me. Also the neo-Nazis

Their only chance there was the late 90s to early 2000s. MS is one company compared to the totality of mega corporations using Linux and MS also uses a lot of Linux. More money at play in the server market than the general desktop OS market. Linux is the server OS

The US government increasingly uses Linux. Other countries pick up Linux at a faster rate than the US. A higher percentage of people use MacOS today than 20 years ago

Valves the only one with a major digital store. Everyone else is making money off hardware margin and frequent hardware releases. I want a smaller one though. Pretty much a Switch 2 sized handheld. Maybe even smaller. Different levels of portability. Like I don’t need to be on a device that can run at 15-30w like current Steam Deck competitors when I’m just trying to play Persona 5 on an airplane. You can play that set at lowest TDP on a Steam Deck and hit 30fps

I saw occasional news about progress on a big update someday. Any indie multiplayer has to make it easy from day one for user created content. Maps, server hosting files that’s has some easy to configure parameters for fun casual servers like servers that enable model swap outs, skins, etc.

Just looked, still 8000 people playing original counter strike

I hope Battlebit Remastered gets popular again. I suppose it’s tough to make it as an indie multiplayer video game dev. Everyone expects regular frequent updates

Your numbered list, yes that’s the steps

With the other person’s answer, you have a choice when interacting with a block chain.

You run a node that directly sends commands to the blockchain, this one uses up more storage as it downloads the blockchain but it’s the one that requires least amount of layers of trust

Or you use a wallet that uses a trusted 3rd party full node. That’s why open source is important for these wallets. This is really easy and convenient and in most cases uses open source software and is built on years of community vendors operating in good faith. These lite wallets, they run on practically anything. You manage the keys to your wallet; it’s the keys to authorize transactions.

The “heavy lifting” is delegated to another computer. Heavy lifting in quotes because the idea of blockchains is to be decentralized so one pillar idea is that it should be pretty cheap to run a node

Even having a full node, unless you want to mine, it’s really just storage and download. If you want to support the network a bit, some upload so others can download block chain history from you too.

It’s like how in Linux most users now just trust that the package maintainers for the distributions package manager is delivering legit software when you apt/dnf/etc software from the default sources

If you’re not going to run a node yourself, you’ll have to accept some level of trust. Also with an open source wallet, you can with certainty point your lite wallet to whatever full node you want, your own or one you trust