VHS [he/him]

I use archive.is to read news articles. Just put the URL into it, it’s usually already archived

I use HeliBoard too. You have to load a library to enable swipe typing, but it’s still totally offline.

Lubuntu about 10 years ago, then Mint, openSUSE, and I’ve stuck with Debian for the past eight.

Yeah, that ROM doesn’t support MicroG. It’s more focused on being hardened for security

What ROM are you using? MicroG depends on a ROM feature called “signature spoofing” that allows it to impersonate the Play Services apps.

It’s a drop-in replacement so it should provide push notifications and location functionality just fine for every app. Other functionality such as IAPs will probably be unsupported.

From the data I see on Plexus for WhatsApp, the core functionality and notifications work just fine on MicroG, but backing up chats to Google Drive is broken.

There’s a fork of Telegram on F-droid called “Telegram FOSS” that runs a background service for notifications. I’ve used it and the effect on battery drain is pretty minor, like maybe 2% per charge. Not sure if something similar exists for Signal.

I use MicroG on my phone, it’s a basic FOSS replacement for GMS and makes push notifications work for all apps. It gets push notifs from Google’s servers but you don’t need an account. It doesn’t use Google at all for location, which is nice as that’s a highly invasive aspect of Play Services. Not all ROMs are compatible with it, I use it on Lineage

The distros such as Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu make all kinds of DEs available to the user to install. Gnome is not in charge of this, and even if they were, the suggestion that they would make other DEs unavailable is childish. You have plenty of choices

Especially absurd to use this propaganda angle when the West is backing Islamic fundamentalists to overthrow a secular state

Soulseek

Nice! What graphics card do you have? AMD generally works well out-of-the-box, but if you have NVidia you may need to install drivers

I’m not sure if it meets all your requirements, but Dolphin has a dual-panel mode if you press F3 and has lots of other configuration options as well

If the computer boots but you can’t access a GUI, use Ctrl+Alt+F3 to open a console. From there you can use nano to edit the login manager configuration. If you had GNOME installed, your login manager is probably GDM, and its config should be at /etc/gdm/daemon.conf, according to the manual. If that is the case, it looks like you should erase the username under the entry “AutomaticLogin=”.

If I understand correctly, the filesystem driver is contained within the kernel for all linux-native filesystems (Ext4, XFS, BtrFS, F2FS, etc.), just as drivers for computer components and devices are. But drivers to access NTFS (Windows) and HFS+ (Mac OS) drives are programs in userspace

can’t link here due to rule 3

Is it just me or does it seem a bit out-of-touch to brag that last year’s $1100 phone is still usable? You would sure hope it wasn’t made obsolete that quickly

Debian. Huge repository, no bullshit, and basically any software for Linux is packaged/compatible with it.

AFAIK, the port on your router is irrelevant as the VPN bypasses it. I’m not familiar with ProtonVPN, but with PIA you can get a forwarded port in the VPN app and specify that port in your P2P application. I use that method for Soulseek, but my qBittorrent works correctly in both directions without doing anything special.

The market in smartphones should be expected to decline, and that’s a good thing. People keeping old phones for longer = less e-waste, but they have to introduce a new, fragile gimmick for profits

The backend should be the same (Freetype)… only difference I can think of is that GNOME uses Wayland by default while KDE defaults to X11 and offers Wayland as an option. Do you have a HiDPI screen?