At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)

If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you're into that kind of thing.

Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn't want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn't work very well - either one side can't hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It's probably possible to fix if you know what you're doing, but I don't know what I'm doing :)

I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you're happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

Good luck!

I'd like to second Snikket - it's designed for this use case and is very simple to set up.

If you'd rather not use Snikket, check out these recommendations for clients and servers.

Hope it works for you! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Now: terrorists are terrorists, right wing rioters are terrorists, climate protestors are terrorists and misogynistic people are terrorists.

Soon: asylum seekers are terrorists, people who go on strike are terrorists, members of the opposition party are terrorists.

I support reducing violence against women, but prevent is the wrong tool for this problem. If the government actually want to address this instead of just looking like they are, I feel they should take an approach that actually works. We need:

• More consistent and holistic sex education, from a younger age
• Explicitly teaching about sexual violence, the services available and the punishments for doing it
• Investing in local policing, so that there is bandwidth to look into these cases
• Giving more funding to charities who support domestic abuse survivors
• Training for police, so they actually listen to women when they raise concerns at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until it's too late
• Tougher sentencing for any form of sexual violence

Prevent is both ineffective and discriminatory. It increases government surveillance, and raises the burden on GPs and teachers. The National Union of Teachers want to get rid of it, the Communities and Local Government Committee found a multitude of problems that haven't been fixed, and human rights orgs like Liberty and Amnesty International want to get rid of it too. It doesn't work and in many cases has made things worse.

Agreed, it's licensed under the MPL, a "weak copyleft" license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.

While I definitely think it's better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don't feel it's strong enough to stop it being co-opted.

I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.

How I Got a Truly Anonymous XMPP Account:

• Open my client (e.g. Conversations, Monal, Dino)
• Pick a random server, username and password
• Click register

Sorry, it's a cheap joke, but it still baffles me that Signal requires a phone number, so I felt I had to post it :)

Of course, this is not XMPP-specific either, just my protocol of choice, there are many other open alternatives that also offer such functionality.

I've had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we're all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.

My favourites are:

• Endless Sky (2D space sim, singleplayer)
• FlightGear (3D flight sim, singleplayer and multiplayer)
• OpenTTD (transport management game, singleplayer and multiplayer)
• Torcs (racing game, singleplayer)

Each of these are quite polished (especially for open source games!), widely packaged, not too complicated to start playing (except perhaps FlightGear) and have been around for a long time. Endless Sky, FlightGear and OpenTTD have quite active development, while Torcs is much quieter nowadays (although there is an actively developed fork called Speed Dreams which is awesome, just not widely packaged yet).

I've been meaning to try out FreeOrion and Minetest for a while now, looking forward to seeing what else pops up on the thread!

For any fans of open-source software out there, I use beancount which I've found to be perfect for my needs. I didn't know much about double-entry bookkeeping when I started using it, but the documentation was very extensive and I learned a lot in the process of picking it up.

There are a whole collection of plugins and other resources which fit into the tool which help too, like fava which can generate webpages like this based off your data. Beancount is not the only plain text accounting tool, you can find lots of examples here.