As someone from a developing country, windows 11 contributes to higher digital inequality because of its unnecessary high hardware requirements. If they don’t support windows 10 for a long time, we will suffer a great toll.

And unfortunately, people around here barely use linux and developed quite a repulsion for it, which only makes things worse for ourselves…

It’s hard not to hate microsoft when we live on the ugly side of capitalism.

Have you ever tried abiword? It’s really lightweight.

Nice article! Are you the author? If so, I’d like to give you a suggestion: the part about the deepin Linux story and technical background is interesting enough to be its own article. That way, it would be more findable on web searchers and probably help a lot of people who look for information on it, which is a bit scarce in english.

Depends on the device. Some allow the bootloader to be unlocked officially. Root is usually needed when you unlock the bootloader unofficially, using some hack.

Also, /e/os supports an official gsi, which can be installed without root.

That said, these phones aren’t suited for people that need absolute security and privacy. They’re more experimental and aimed at enthusiasts of the project who want to support it.

I can see why eos raises some concerns, but i find it to be an interesting alternative with moderate potential. We definitely need more alternatives to standard android.

Could you elaborate about the privacy part?

In addition, pirated physical media used to be an easy way for non techy people to acquire media in developing countries.

5 years already? Shit, I’m old.

Even places like lemmy or mastodon aren’t safe anymore. Everything that is public can be, and is, data mined by some corporation. There will be bot accounts or paid people pushing their agenda. And several other things.

It’s not a technical problem. We can have places that are better than the average, but the corporations will still put their tentacles in.

Gnu can be used to describe the gnu project, the gnu license or the gnu coreutils. In this context, they mean that Linux by itself isn’t enough to be the a free desktop, and needs the gnu software to be the system they care about. (There can be controversies on whether gnu is needed or not, since it’s possible to create a distro without the coreutils, but let’s not get you confused right now)

The weird thing for me is that by paying to use, you will need to be uniquely identified, and that opens doors for losing privacy in several ways. How is that addressed by kagi?

The incredible thing about these articles is that they don’t make the slight mention of lemmy.

That one linked is a well written summary of what happened, but it’s partial if they don’t include the migration that happened, even if it wasn’t that big.

Lost it on “Windows with literally 0 issues” lol

I understand your bad experience with GSIs, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. The way custom roms have been made through the years isn’t sustainable for the long run. It’s too much work for the few people involved, that goes obsolete so fast. But with GSis, the projects will one day be able to maintain just a few images, and the porting community will just have to focus on unlocking the devices.

GSIs aren’t working 100% today, but it’s something still new in the perspective of manufacturers, and the tendency is to have better support with time.

Just to put things into perspective, my experience, as someone poor from a third word country, is just the opposite. In the past, only the more expensive phones had custom rom support, and the cheaper ones I got access to, wouldn’t even get results if I searched for the model on xda. Nowadays, even cheap chinese phones or the ones locally manufactured in here allow me to put a GSI and have a customized experience, up to date with security patches.

With all the respect, to deny the progress we had in the last decade seems a bit stubbornish and counterproductive.

In the 2000s, uo to early 2010s, not even a basic non techy user could properly use linux without assistance, and nowadays, they can use it normally. Most of them just need a working browser and a good UI.

I don’t say that out of nowhere. I’ve been doing some work in initiatives for digital inclusion in my country, and we’re having great results with linux nowadays, while it was impossible some years ago.

There’s still a lot that needs improvement, but we’re nowhere near the state we were just one decade ago.

But still good reasons, anyway.

Bring back the smaller phones!

That’s amazing.

Here in Brazil, we had the government encouraging free software in the 2000s, but the projects and policies were all abandoned.

And to think we could have a similar adoption to yours today… sigh…

Back then, people didn’t understand how such projects give benefits in a long timeframe, and wanted immediate results, something impossible.

Even more important is to see the windows downtrend. We need competition, keep it going!

I feel the same. I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore.

But a lot of things changed in these years. Installing software, for example, became so easy using the gnome store, that it lowered a lot the entry barrier.

The few times I find myself using windows, I realize it’s not easy to use, as many claim. I believe it’s mostly a matter of a computer culture that created around it, and changing cultural traits is really hard