Sorry for a kinda clickbait title but it is what it is. I just watched a video about Android 15 changes and a lot of them are either not important or straight up bad.

I want to specifically mention increased background sensor usage (such as microphone) and the Find My Device network. These are serious privacy issues that just make lives of custom ROM developers and users harder by having to disable more and more stuff (that's turned on by default of course), as well as a contribution to ewaste generation and general decrease of battery life.

I guess we are getting into the era of complete death of digital privacy and absolute surveillance. This is scary but not too unrealistic I guess. I just hope the devs of privacy-focused ROMs will be able to do something about it and purge these changes.

What do you think of this project and cloud gaming in general? I thought it's dead already

I ordered a Fanatec CSL DD bundle which, as everyone probably knows, comes with a plastic quick release system called QR1 Lite. This system was known for being unreliable and breaking back in like 2022 but it looks like there were some revisions and now nobody talks about it. Is it reliable enough now or should I order a QR1 (non-Lite) asap? I don't care about the noise or flex but only about long-term reliability.

P. S. I know it's probably better to ask this question on the Fanatec forum but I don't really want to create an account just for it. I better don't give my data to another company when it's not necessary.

EDIT: QR1 is not available here anymore. RIP my wheel connection pins

I want to get into not very serious sim racing so I need to buy my first setup. Direct drives are not officially available here and import taxes are so high that things like Moza R5 or Fanatec CSL DD cost around $900-1200 (if I buy 3 pedal set too which is necessary) which is not very acceptable. There are quite a few deals on used belt-driven wheels though and it looks like the ones in the title are the best ones I can get (the price is around $500-600 for full base+wheel+pedals bundles). Though I'm not sure if the Fanatec one has table clamps included which is very important for me and can be quite a hassle if they aren't. There's also stuff like T300 RS GT and T248 (even new ones) but they are significantly worse afaik so I don't say much about them. Anyways, what do I choose in this case? I mostly care about balance (e. g. T248 is powerful but slow which doesn't allow drifting) and quality of FFB. I don't need any load cell pedals (physical disability -> not enough strength to use them) or console compatibility (I play only on PC) which makes the choice even harder.

EDIT: I found a way to get a DD for an almost acceptable price. Now I'm mostly looking at Fanatec CSL DD

I am in need of a separate degoogled phone for some things that require high level of privacy (nothing illegal).

I have 2 phones that I can use. One of them is my business phone (it has my business number, apps, data and that sort of stuff) which is now running an OS with all the Google spyware because it's necessary for the apps to work. I can reinstall everything on the second phone and use the first one as the secure device since it supports everything I need. The problem is that it has some issues on vanilla ROMs that I don't really want to deal with and the reinstalling will take a lot of time.

The issue with the second phone is that it is rocking an old MTK chip and rooting instructions are let's say a bit beyond my ability to understand. I still want to use it without Google if possible though. So can I degoogle its stock ROM with ADB or something? And is it worth trying or there will still be some vulnerabilities?

EDIT: to clear some possible misunderstandings, the reason of why I need a separate secure phone is that I am forced to use a very invasive proprietary app that I'd prefer just keeping on a separate device instead of trying to limit its spyware abilities with firewalls and that kind of stuff. I don't trust the last solution much. Also I can't use it in a VM because I need it to always be accessible wherever I am and yk carrying a PC is not an option

When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was "fixed" by just not letting the malware part communicating with the vulnerable ssh related stuff and the actual malware is still there? (I didn't understand 80% of the technical terms and abbreviations in it ok?) Like it still sounds kinda dangerous to me, especially since many experts say that we don't know the other ways this malware can use (except for the ssh supply chain) yet. Is it true? Should I stick with the new distro for now or can I absolutely safely switch back and finally say that I use Arch btw again?

P. S. I do know that nothing is completely safe. Here I'm asking just about xz and libxzlk or whatever the name of that library is

EDIT: 69 upvotes. Nice

I have LineageOS installed on my phone and it has almost weekly updates. Since the device is quite budget, I believe its memory can be damaged by such often updates so I'm not updating it for 2 months already. But there are security fixes and patches in newer versions so I do want to update. My question is: do I have to install every update one by one (there are like 8 of them lol) or can I just install the newest version? All of the updates are minor of course. There are no Android version jumps

EDIT: I installed the latest version as everyone suggested and everything seems to be working fine. Thank you all for help

Recently I tried to clean my PC with an I5 11400F CPU. I removed the GPU and wanted to remove the CPU cooler too but couldn't do it. I tried though and I think I might have damaged the motherboard with a screwdriver in a few places during the process (don't ask how). Can it be the reason for the spikes? Like could I damage some sensors and now they sometimes fail and show 0°C (which is what 100°C to TjMAX means)? There are no other visible issues with the PC though so I guess it can be a just a bug. Btw I can't add screenshots because of some weird Jerboa bug

I updated Jerboa from 0.0.60 (or 0.0.59 I don't remember) to 0.0.61 (all are F-droid versions) and I noticed this issue: the "create post" ("plus") floating action button hides under the navigation panel. Cleaning the cache and disabling-enabling the panel didn't help. The button is still clickable but it doesn't look right. When the panel is disabled it looks fine if course. I'm on Android 13 btw

I'm recovering after quite a bad period of my life. Everything else seems surprisingly ok so far. Absolutely nothing out of ordinary happened yet

EDIT: nvm the good bad repeat cycle is still there so it's all still the same

I've been on the Fediverse for like 2 weeks and the system itself was pretty good and even enjoyable. But I can't stand what's being posted recently. It looks like the humanity is just dead. The negative influence is real on here (and I think it's around the same on other social medias) plus I have some personality development issues now that do cause vulnerabilities to that. I don't want to die with this society so I have to go. I will most likely miss some of the places from here and I will miss my username but hey surviving and being able to help people in the future is much more important. Goodbye Lemmy. It was a nice experience

EDIT: everyone who made me stay here is to be fought. This place has some good things to it but still there's too much for me to handle. And there is bad stuff too which is not that easy to notice but it does intoxicate me over time. FOSS is good but FOSS community sucks.

Introducing the all-new Debian 12 ESDE (Enhanced Security Desktop Edition) Plasma UI pre-alpha v0.2.1: a Debian desktop setup created for a fiction organization's low-end office computers. It features simplified KDE apps, no blur, generally lightweight system settings (some features are disabled or tuned for higher performance and security) and a custom auto-hide floating panel (on the right) with a large clock and a system monitor overview. Security features are planned and are not added yet. For now the main issue is that it's quite difficult to use scroll bars on full-screen windows because the panel opens every time the mouse cursor touches the right edge of the screen. Would love a solution for this. And it often crashes in certain scenarios so yea it's just a pre-alpha now. Oh and the specs:

Distribution: Debian 12 DE/WM: KDE Plasma 5.27 Theme: Breeze Dark Icons: Papirus (it would be more realistic to use the stock icons but I just hate how folders look there so custom icon pack it is) Apps: Konsole, Dolphin (Qt apps) and Firefox (GTK 3 app)

The Debian logo on the top left just opens a slightly tuned KDE's Application Menu so I didn't show that. Everything else isn't really ready yet. Well, could you expect more from a bad setup?

P.S. The actual purposes of this post are to show the flexibility of KDE and deleted