not cheap - but otherwise what you are looking for - https://volla.online/en/volla-tablet/

the thing is the “devil they know” is still likely more reliable towards so called “US interests,” even with them moving towards more ties with China, than what they could end up with via the fallout after another US supported coup (which would likely trigger mass protests and conflicts for power)

they won’t as long as El-Sisi is in power - him and the Muslim Brotherhood (who are sympathetic/likely allied towards Hamas) have an obvious and long standing beef, given the 2013 coup against Morsi’s gov that put El-Sisi into power.

Windscribe is a good one in my experience - https://windscribe.com/

May I suggest https://mojeek.com as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.

That’s what the FUTO Circles project was supposed to be about, but sadly the project got ditched by the original devs for it only a year after it started. Info on that here - https://youtu.be/OKTOhxeKrK0?si=NKvI6Esp3c33DG96

This is amazing! Portnoy is having so much fun here, and it truly incredible he was able to go through life without having heard this song before. Thanks for sharing this!

I had the honor of mastering this song and two albums for these fine folks, along with seeing an excellent performance by them at SXSW in 2018 - truly a great band and great people too. https://totalsonic.net

Good to know. Also a point of info: RFK Jr. is against “big pharma vaccines”.

Except within the USA, declining population growth could be reversed immediately simply by returning to our pre-1924 immigration laws (i.e. the Ellis Island era) that between 1890 - 1924 allowed the USA to have some of the largest economic growth it ever has done. Yet “conservatives” (better termed “regressives” or “reactionaries”) these days want to do the exact opposite, out of xenophobia.

I like Librewolf a lot, and do use it sometimes on desktop, but they do not offer a mobile version, and there have been a few web pages I have found it was not compatible with.

This is what I get on a degoogled Android 13 custom ROM. What OS/device are you using? Did you opt out of sending stats to Brave when you installed?

This article is FUD for the most part:

• replacing ads - nope, by default you don’t see any replacement ads, rather you see the least amount of ads on any chromium based option out there (e.g. Brave is the only browser I’ve found that still blocks the vast majority of ads on YouTube videos). You need to opt in to see replacement ads
• affilate links - yeah, that was some bs that happened 4 years ago, they were called out on it, and they promptly removed them, and these things have never appeared again.

Regarding the crypto stuff - that is by default off, again you need to opt in to it. Now, there is basic usage stats that are sent back to Brave that are on by default, but these can be turned off easily in the settings.

If there is any real objection that can be made to Brave it’s that the CEO has contributed cash to anti-gay-marriage campaigns in the past (which is why he has fired from Mozilla) and that he has expressed some reactionary political views in social media. I can understand people boycotting Brave for that.

Meanwhile, Brave is the only browser I’ve found that completely passes the EFF’s test at coveryoutracks.eff.org - and in other pricacy and security audits it performs always at “best in class” levels.

Show me another browser that can fully pass the EFF’s and other privacy tests, and I will switch.

Obviously floating point is of huge benefit for many audio dsp calculations, from my observations (non-programmer, just long time DAW user, from back in the day when fixed point with relatively low accumulators was often what we had to work with, versus now when 64bit floating point for processing happens more as the rule) - e.g. fixed point equalizers can potentially lead to dc offset in the results. I don’t think peeps would be getting as close to modeling non-linear behavior of analog processors with just fixed point math either.

Yes, while you can still do 3g/2g phone calling in most of Europe, the only hold out in the US for this is that T-mobile still has 2g calling in some areas, but they have announced that this will be shut down sometime in the soonish future (it was scheduled to be all shutdown of April this year, but they announced this was delayed to a time tbd, likely in order to continue to serve all the ATM’s and iot devices that are still running “legacy” systems being used beyond supposed eol). Which is why I reverted to using de-googled AOSP for my daily driver - I like to be able to use my phone as a phone after all.

Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.

I am talking about VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which is the protocol just for making phone calls over 4g networks - NOT 4g/LTE mobile data! Ubuntu Touch has worked well with 4g/LTE mobile data for 10 years now.

Android devices run deprecated Linux kernels that have a bunch of proprietary binary blobs plopped onto them, so technically “Linux”, but not an easily updateable mainline kernel like most people are referring to when talking about “Linux.”

Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don’t do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).

The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android (“vanilla” Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.

Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I’ve got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.