we do not know if rohit is already present here or not, for all i know, it could be you!

ideally do not send a hard drive, as shipping might corrupt data. if you do, please package it with good care - hard disk inside sponges inside softer thermocol insider harder thermocol inside cardboad. it is overkill, but hard drives really do not like to be shaken, and stuff in courier is often shook violently.

is it possible that he can use something like puppy linux like distros (essentially live usbs, where you can make a persistent partition and make changes)? that way you can prepare a usb, and maybe teach them how to plug the usb in, and change the boot order to include usb? it would be slow (for boot times, if you use some faster usb, that would help), but does not require any fancy operation requiring him to open his computer.

Or if opening the computer/laptop and installing ssd/hdd is within scope, then maybe you can prepare a ssd with complette install, and just ship that. give him additional video/text instructions on how to open a computer, and install it. (In case their system supports ssds, then I highly recommend ssds over hdd, as they do not require special packaging, would be much faster, and ssd installations are also easier(detachhing and reattaching sata ribbon is hard imo, where as with something like nvme ssd, it is very close to like plugging in usb, and then just screwing or something similar.)) If their system is old, and does not have nvme/u.2 connectors, i would still recommend ssd over hdd, then you would also have to procure (and ship) an extra enclosure (i think they are called caddys) to fit a ssd in a husk, which after closing looks like a harddisk and connects via sata. these steps are tad bit hard, but if it is within scope, then I do not think their is a better option.

on my laptop (specs wise - consider steam deck non oled, but worse graphics performance, 1080p screen (IPS)) - 5.3-6 Wh for 2x speed playback. for full hd playback 6-7 Wh. Idle power is much higher though 4.5 Wh, on my old laptop, video power consumption consumed similar power, but idle power was close to 2.5-3 Wh (in terms of specs, it had halve the number of cores, and a tn panel)

i would presume yes. you could run cinnamon wayland since early 2024 (iirc), but it was only experimental, so i would presume it might have become more stable since then.

I would have to get playstore back probably (that would mean i would have to make a google account now). I need whatsapp and banking apps. maybe whatsapp can work with direct download from their website (it used to work in obtanium too, but stopped), but banking apps are notorious. they want to be installed by playstore, so i have to keep playstore installed but disable it, and that can “sometimes” (i have to keep enabling/disabling play services and play store until it sometimes works) trick the apps that they were installed by playstore.

yeah, they even worked on that this time (90+% of packages are now reproducible)

I’m not aware of a solid centralized place to find high quality, multi-app color schemes like these.

maybe, we should make a lemmy community, with all color themes, and something like 1 post for 1 color theme. in the comments, we can add various places (or ways) you can use/install them, and maybe a weekly/monthly post, to rank the best themes of the months (rnaking all existing posts by activity in last x amount of time).

He seems overly dramatic about it. and some of the things are factually incorrect. for example, he says we functionally do the same things, but we do not, we essentially now run much more complex software in browsers. the best way that i can put it, is, browsers are practically virtual machines, which run softwate like word processors and meetings. I am not encouraging anything here, I myself am the kind of guy who refuses to use web applications, but I understand why people use them. in the broll, there was some example of a few tabs open, and only 2 gigs of memory usage. not sure exactly how old that clip is, but things have changed, many for better. for example, your browsers ususally limit memory usage to half of total available (be it 4 gig, or 8 gig or 16 gig (tthere are now some better/finer things related to exact limit, but lets not go there)), and if you have larger amount of ram available, your browser caches more (save future cpu/gpu cycles). Also, we now have better sandboxing and better isolation of tabs, which results in duplication of assets, but better security. you can still do some manual tweaking (i do, for example, disable js by default, or instead of per tab isolation, i have per site instace, which is less secure, but more efficient, plenty more), nobody stops you from doing that.

I do get the hatred for cloud shift. I dislike it too, and maintain offline stuff. but that has nothing to do with hardware performance decreasing. if anything, it would lead to less memory/storage required, as most of compute will be done in server. you would have lighter machines, with just display and inputs. and this was the exact model of computing 40yrs ago, servers/mainframes and weaker terminals.

if you want to complain about stuff, you can complain about excess use of js, or writing desktop stuff in js (this while is worse than using some compiled languages, it is not that bad), or about the amount of things that now want your attention. you can rant about bad tech practices, but not, about comparing a modern web + video editing, as opposed to older static sites

I am not sure, but was not there a work profile app in fdroid (possibly by the name of shelter, have not used it for a long time though, so not sure). If is/was on fdroid, it is likely to be foss, and not have these things.

Also, unless the app has internet permisions, I would not worry much about it. Apps can send data even without internet permissions (by means of using a 3rd party, like gms (google play service) or something else), but if your app relies on some 3rd party app, i would not consider it safe to begin with.

edit: yes the app is called shelter - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

the app has not been updated for 1.5 years, but readme suggests that it is in a functional state, and just requires maintainance on newer sdks, which they suggest that they still provide. - https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/Shelter. There issues do seem to be active (https://lists.sr.ht/~petercxy/shelter), so I would not worry about that either.

gemini here is a protocol (gemini is modern gopher, which was an alternate to http)

I recently did that and my account was banned. It was not expensive (~$1), but still felt bad

what exactly are you looking for? there are many guides for switching to linux, for example, arch wiki; has enough details for anybody. similarly, there are other distro wikis (fedora/debian/mint/…). But none of them are specifically for switching from windows (10). Most of them do mention that backup your stuff, or mount windows partitions for moving stuff.

If you need something to switch specifically from windows, that is hard. because the way people use windows changes a lot with people. My personal recommendation would be to just search “switch to linux” on youtube, find suitable videos (in prefered languages or target audiences, which are also suitabbly licensed(most linux youtubers release their stuff under some variation of cc, and youtube by default has also some cc license for all videos. you can check about licenses in youtube description.)). Video demos for people today or more approachable, and can also help navigate any issues that might occur during the move. Once they have some distro installed, they can look up distro wikis to build upon.

no (ish), what I meant there was i can manually click through all links in yacy’s index (a bit of a hyperbole). But as I had hinted, I have offline backup for a lot of pages (so it is not a index really, but it is searchable and i can just open pages). I have nearly 0.5 million articles. 90+% is wiki, then arch and programming books/docs, and hopefully more to come. And all of this requires less than 60 GiBs, and searching is really fast (my typing speed is the limiting factor)

I also did use yacy for some time, but problem is - index is too small. I could within weeks visit each and every page indexed by yacy, and that is not a good thing

Thanks for sharing. I have heard pretty crazy stuff, and this seems more believable.

off the shelf Wireguard or OpenVPN are immediately detected and blocked with no chance to get through at all

Is it possible for you guys to buy vps outside and somehow pay them (that would probably be the hard part) or maybe find some friends or diaspora outside, and have them pay for vps to set your personal vpns. You can make it somewhat obfuscated, and mostly hide it as some work related stuff.

Do you guys use tor or i2p? I would presume you are “allowed” but still have to hide it.

On average I have to spend 10% of my working time every just trying to get a good connection online.

that is really sad, sorry to hear about that.

Thanks for sharing. I have heard pretty crazy stuff, and this seems more believable.

off the shelf Wireguard or OpenVPN are immediately detected and blocked with no chance to get through at all

Is it possible for you guys to buy vps outside and somehow pay them (that would probably be the hard part) or maybe find some friends or diaspora outside, and have them pay for vps to set your personal vpns. You can make it somewhat obfuscated, and mostly hide it as some work related stuff.

Do you guys use tor or i2p? I would presume you are “allowed” but still have to hide it.

On average I have to spend 10% of my working time every just trying to get a good connection online.

that is really sad, sorry to hear about that.

In this particular case, have you tried checking out uncensored models, maybe trained primarily for west locally, maybe some mistral model. I am not saying western models would give you correct or better or unbiased answers, but if you use multiple sources, you can probably form some results yourself. you can possibly keep a combo of smaller quant of small models (8b should run reasonably if you have 16 gib memory, even 12-14 B models can work, and you can download 2-3 models from different providers)

Side questions: Are you allowed to use huggingface in china? similarly, is all your lemmy life through vpns, or is lemmy small enough not large enough to yet be censored. Also, if you do not mind answering, how is the infamous firewall implemented? is it a blacklist banning certain stuff, or whitelist allowing only selected stuff, or some combinations (like for example, (and I am not accusing china of censoring wiki here, I just do not know enough, and just trying to form a hypothetical example) ban whole wikipedia, but whitelist only certain articles, or whitelist all of wiki, and ban only certain articles, or something like ban english wiki, then whitelist some stuff, but keep all chineese wiki whitelisted and then possibly block some? Also, how is vpn usage treated by government? is it discouraged, or encouraged, or if you use it a lot, and possibly mix some irl activity and vpn activity, is it pursued in some ways?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but I was just curious. In any case, if you feel uncomfortable, do not answer any question. Thank you

This is one part of what I wanted to convey, but for example - bing has some results - they uprank sites they are paid by - then send to ddg - ddg again adds ads - sends to you. /you are effectively using bing with better privacy (I don’t mind ads, I can recognise/avoid them). And other problem with ddg is the thing that I brought up - bing is planning/already underway (depending on source of information) to scratch its search api, and mostly replace with a “ai powered api”. Most users of bing api would have to find alternatives.

Same with searx, you are more private (assuming you use a public instance), but it is not great for open web. the up/downranking done at source by bing/google can not be avoided (it can be done, afaik there are some scripts/extensions to hide results from certain sites, but you still can not uprank (can not uprank something that was not even sent to you)), and it hurts smaller websites, like articles or forums that are not big platforms or doing heavy seo.

One should most definitely use more than 1 search engine. You can even find interest specific engines.

I am not gaoing to say anything on ecosia here, since i do not know much about them. All I can say is, most of the ad revenue is going towards bing api pricing, then their servers and other costs of doing a business (for example, rent, electricity, regulations, etc), then their employees, then if they have some amoun of oney remaining, they would possibly use it to plant it. Most people doing business do not immediately want to use their profits, and generally invests parts of profits back to build some runway (ad revenue is not consistent), invest in employees (insurances or incentives), or payback any loans. Even if they have some vc funding or recieving grants, they would have to profitable by themselves, and then only can they plant tress. And keeping this in mind, my guess would be that they are not planting that much