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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2025

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  • Most Lemmy apps support switching quickly between instances.

    In theory, this could ease the transition when an instance closes, I guess.

    In reality, the Internet is for pornography.

    It presumably makes it easier to quickly switch between porn-free and porn-full subscription sets.

    I say “Presumably”, because I’m above all that… here on my non-porn account.

    Plus…there’s probably someone here who carefully separates their Linux Lemmys into one account and their railway and mass transit news Lemmys into another.



  • pinball_wizard@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs F-droid insecure?
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    1 day ago

    To answer your top level question:

    If it’s not Linux from Scratch, then we don’t know exactly what is running, and we need to consider that.

    We made rocks think. There’s some trust decisions involved.

    Should I blindly trust every app I find on F-Droid? No. The article correctly lays out reasons why.

    Most of them also apply to Google Play and to Aurora.

    Your decision which to trust depends which threat protections you need the most:

    • Google Play provides stronger protections against people who are trying to run up your credit card through Google Play purchases. Many of the protections cited in the article were developed for this reason. Google Play store apps can fraudulently charge your credit card. But Google works hard to prevent this, with mixed results.

    • Aurora serves the same apps as Google Play and effectively benefits from the same protections.

    • In addition, Aurora adds additional context about malicious corporate behavior. Google has slowly added some, but not all, of these to Google Play. But at the end of the day, Google is being payed to look the other way by some corporations.

    • Like Aurora, F-Droid includes details meant to protect you from abuses by corporations. I would argue that F-Droid’s protections are stronger than even Auroras.

    • F-Droid does not include a method to charge your credit card. This makes a number of security differences in the article much less important, to most people. Of course, there’s more harm that an app can do than credit card charges.

    Because I am aware of many harms caused by individual bad actors and corporations, my preference order goes:

    • F-Droid - Preferred. I find the arguments in the article weak, and a bit out of date. I also feel that F-Droid had dramatically less need for the protections discussed, because there’s no mechanism available to F-Droid apps to run up my debit card.
    • Aurora Store - Acceptable. Some useful apps aren’t of F-Droid.
    • Google Play Store - Unacceptable to me. Aurora provides the same apps, but gives me better insights into the privacy impact of each app. Google Play is getting better over time, but the Google team has financial incentives to present trading my privacy for convenience as a good idea.



  • Also, I don’t think I can trust android,

    Yes. Google’s framework service seems to be spyware.

    so I would have to install Graphene OS or the like.

    GrapheneOS does seem to be the best way to address the privacy concerns with Android. There’s also LineageOS and others.

    In the case, app support would be lacking, though.

    Uh…Android is the single most popular operating system in the history of operating systems. The app support is quite good.

    If you mean because many apps require Google Farmwork Services, and GrapheneOS replaces it - I find that to be a largely solved problem. The GrapheneOS neutered rebuild of Google Framework Services now fools most apps into working.

    It’s been years since I encountered an app that actually couldn’t run on GrapheneOS, unless the app was aggressively trying to spy on me.

    The remaining issue tends to be bank and credit union apps, which aggressively spy on their users “for security”. I work around this by using my credit union’s mobile website, instead. It has all of the same features without the spying, anyway.






  • They should go for it.

    The Commodore 64 was the highest selling computer model of all time, until around 2020, because of it’s game library.

    SteamOS probably has the best easily accessible game library of all time.

    The Commodore 64 taught us that games will carry a personal computer to massive popularity and sales, even if the computer has trade-offs.

    I agree with others who have commented that there’s better versions of Linux for the average user.

    But I don’t think it matters.

    A Steam machine with a cheap keyboard and mouse would be hugely popular this Fall, and would make it’s users fall in love with Linux, in spite of issues - because we all love video games.