You don’t have to share your personal situation and I’m sorry to read that you are struggling. My point isn’t to argue that you must do like everyone else or that consumerism is good, rather than in the typical case (not a lot of time, hardware getting cheaper of the year, game assets being compressed already) switching to newer hardware is a much much more convenient solution. That’s why I warned about it.

running games on old storage devices that hold less than 32 GB and have terrible read and write speeds.

I’m confused. How about copying that to newer storage devices?

Also typically game assets are VERY well compressed so I would suggest doing a comparison with/without compression before a full on migration. Compression tools help but aren’t magical. If your assets are e.g. .jpg or .mp4 or .mp3 or a combination of that (as typically game assets are, including 3D models with their textures) then you can test yourself to .zip them (or bzip2 or whatever you prefer) and you will seem some gains but they’ll be nearly negligible, e.g. < 10% reduction.

related https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/10397-digital-minimalism-on-graphene-os-deleting-browser-disable-installing-apps/29

It’s a pragmatic compromise. The assumption is that Google is not literally evil, solely a very large advertisement company which subsidize very cool hardware in order to sell more ads. It’s the same principle as using a rooted Meta Quest when one doesn’t even have a Facebook or WhatsApp account.

I imagine than everybody who is into that situation will move to Motorola or Valve Frame when those will become available. Until then the bet is that the hardware does not have hardware backdoors because so far nobody disclosed any.

If you really are into trusting hardware I recommend checking https://precursor.dev/ and similar initiatives.

I did mention Linux phones too but again that’s not for everyone.

IMHO it’s much better to use a GrapheneOS deGoogle Android device today, knowing the limitation, than using a Googled Android device today, Pixel or not, and complaining about all the limitations about it while waiting for a theoretical better solution that is simply not yet available.

Right, you actually can’t AFAIK but you can disable it.

It’s indeed not the point. GrapheneOS focus is on security. If you want to have complete control you’d better go with a Linux proper phone but AFAICT, unless you are fine with ~4hrs battery and/or can spend 1000€ on a device that very people have, it’s not for most.

Yes, I have a PinePhone and PinePhone Pro both with PostMarketOS so doing this is as easy as few sudo apk add packagename or sudo apk del firefox.

Now… if you want a daily driver then as few others hinted at, it’s much harder. I would instead get a 2nd hand Pixel 8 or above, install GrapheneOS on it, remove the browser and that’s pretty much it already since it doesn’t come with an app store or equivalent. Well, there’s the GrapheneOS equivalent but there are ~10 apps on it at most last time I checked.

I don’t think it actually is. It’s only like that the very first time when you haven’t you this specific distribution itself. Once you know how the few extra step and understand the core principle, it’s trivial.

PS: I did tinker with NixOS, SteamOS and ROCKNIX.

I’m not sure.

I’m a professional tinkerer and I run Debian stable. OK ok it’s not an immutable distro but my point is that I do tinker, just NOT with my main OS.

I’ll tinker in containers, in VMs, in my ~/bin etc but NOT in what hosts all that.

So I would argue that what’s important for tinkerers is to establish clear boundaries on what they want to tinker on and what they do NOT want to tinker on, what can change vs what should never.

I’m aware (unfortunately) of the marketing claims and even if they might be true, as you say it is “for now”. So if it’s only temporary for that arm race, especially if held by a company who leaked its own code just days ago, then I have a hard time understanding why ‘zero-days are numbered’ because this title claims the dynamic itself is gone. That’s now my understanding, especially if other models are just marginally (which is hard to prove with models, finding proper metrics) worst than it.

See comment that shared https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/21/unauthorized-group-has-gained-access-to-anthropics-exclusive-cyber-tool-mythos-report-claims just few hours ago, and that’s not even sophisticated.

Anthropic and OpenAI have multiple times used this arm race rhetoric before and it worked. Their models are supposedly “too dangerous” to be released thus consequently they have to control access.

It might be true but so far what we have witnessed is that roughly equivalent models get released by others merely weeks or maybe months after, sometimes open, but the “moat” never lasted long so I’m questioning why it would be different this time.

That doesn’t make sense. Don’t the attackers have the same tools?

AI tools can find bugs faster than they can be patched

Not a security expert but wasn’t that the case already? It feels like before AI there were already a lot more bugs, security related or not, on backlogs. That’s precisely why there are metrics like severity.

🍾

I think the “trap” is to believe “we” can “win” once and for all.

Under capitalism (and I’m not suggesting there are better systems, only highlight a core mechanism) there will always be competition to capture value, both customers and lawmakers who (should) protect them.

There are countless examples but one of the most obvious on that topic if Microsoft itself with it’s sadly now classic EEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish of which we can admire the comtemporary version with Github. Initially Github was acquired and no changed, nowadays a lot of basic functionalities, e.g. search within a repository are locked behind a login, there are more and more advertisements for Microsoft other products, e.g. CoPilot. That last product itself is questioning the foundation of free software and open source with its license washing process making unclear who did what, breaking provenance, etc.

The same happened with Google acquiring Android but not locking it down more and more.

The list could grow longer and longer, overall the point is to showcase a pattern : nothing is just “let” alone to grow on its own. It’s gradually captured and enshittified until there is nothing left but the name of a project because corporations exist only to extract more money. There is no moral, only an imperative for profit or their death.

So… unfortunately we WILL have to keep on both building AND protecting what’s been built so far with newer and more powerful threats. Microsoft, Google, and all large corporations who advertise themselves as allies of free software and open source MUST be judge on what they actually do, not on what they claim.

We have to push back and we will always have to. This year and the next.

I don’t think so. I think it takes 1 kid in the playground to find out about https://distrosea.com/ without understand what a container or VM even is, only discovering that somehow it works, to make us of it.

Then the school admin will block it once there is a peak of traffic through the website, kids will discover proxies, someone will realize there is a business for it, make a free version with ads, etc. It’s going to be an arm race and the most dedicated kids, not necessarily the smartest or wisest, will figure it out. Eventually they’ll get the concepts behind the tools they mindlessly use until then, eventually find much better tools allowing them to bypass a lot more restrictions.

I don’t see how a browser will be able to prevent this kind of usage. They might pass age related information to each page requesting it but it takes a single page to provide the capability without using the information to be enough. If a kid has a computer at home they can setup such a service themselves.

You read my mind. So straightforward.

I suggest to replace RTFM by WHYTSF : What Have You Tried So Far.

The goal isn’t to blame or guilt trip anyone, rather it’s to genuinely help and for that others need to know… WHYTSF?!

Most distributions include Wine AFAICT yet I’d argue you shouldn’t use Wine because typically it means using proprietary software.

If you are using Wine for games then it’s also reconsider that there are plenty of open source game you can still pay for to support their author.

If you still want to play proprietary Windows games without native support then I would recommend to use a wrapper, e.g. Bottles (because of Proton, not because of the GUI) or even Steam (since you want to play proprietary Windows games anyway) as they’ll remove a layer of tinkering to find the right version, path, etc (basically prefix management).

… but yeah, even though Wine is amazing I would argue every time one uses it, if they are using Linux because they want more agency, they probably should reconsider and search for a free software alternative instead. It will be awkward at first, other UI, other UX, new community, but it’s an investment in the future.

I haven’t tested this myself but I assume one could benchmark both and see if there is noticeable performance loss.

FWIW the SteamDeck running official SteamOS does have a full desktop environment, it’s just hidden by starting Steam in Big Picture mode.

So… you could benchmark the “gain” but I doubt it’s significant, if any.

Also if you do like to play with hardware for gaming across networks checking Selkies or Moonlight to stream from your machine to your machine, no intermediary, little latency or overhead.

This makes me genuinely curious, who thought that would be a good idea?

It feels like a lot of “contribution” to open source suddenly is fueled by AI hype. Is it a LinkedIn/TikTok “trick” that is being amplified that somehow one will get a very well paid job at a BigTech company if they somehow have a lot of contributions on popular projects?

Where does that this trend actually come from?

Did anybody doing so ever bother checking contribution guidelines to see which tasks should actually be prioritized and if so with which tools?

This seems like a recurring pattern so it’s not a random idea someone had.