This is seriously not me being a jerk. I have been following this project for years. At this point can you actually just buy a phone from them or do you buy one and get stuck on some wait list for an unknown period of time? From the video shared a few things are sort of shocking out of the box for a consumer release. first of all no account creation on login or at a minimum a prompt to change your password on login seems not great. Sure you can just change your password but having 1-6 be the default password that doesn’t get updated on login is so easy to fix I am surprised it’s still like this. Next that keyboard is definitely overly cramped and seems very difficult to use. To me that is a bit of a deal breaker for a phone now a days because typing is so essential. 1300 for a phone that is essentially beta and a project phone still seems unobtainable for most people. Again I don’t want to hate on this as I really want it to work but there is so much working against it at the moment in my estimation.

I’m in reality probably center left. I find that I tend to have nuanced views about a variety of things but I probably wouldn’t hard commit to a particular political stripe. I tend to vote Democrat but I often disagree with them on certain things as well. Sometimes I think they are not doing enough on social and environmental issues and sometimes I think they have gone too far on other issues. There are some republican theories I don’t mind but I don’t generally see this current party actually focused on anything I agree with.

This is largely a philosophical question that everyone must answer for themselves. There are a few arguments that can be made and they have all been made many times in the past. Some people will say they define freedom as the ability to use their hardware to it’s maximum potential and run any application they want and just have that work. One potential weakness of this argument is that if you take that to it’s conclusion the best OS to use would be Windows. Another type of argument could be that freedom means the ability to control, audit, change, and share the software on your machine ( just paraphrasing the four freedoms : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ) if this is your view it means the only software that makes sense is fully free software and free OSes. Still another approach that could be taken is that the ideal is fully Free Software but compromise at times for cases of usability and in certain areas where you disagree things should be free. For instance if your computer doesn’t work at all then you can’t really do much to support the free software movement. In that case you may decide that a OS with some non-free elements is better than nothing. Or maybe you don’t think artistic works like Games need be free. There are black and white approaches there are nuanced approaches. I think as long as you are informed and make a decision from a place of being informed no one can really blame you for the decision you come to.

As to the technical limitations there is really no one saying “You can’t do that” you can install whatever repo you want to download any package. You could recompile and install a different kernel with the binary blobs if you want. What a system like parabola is doing is saying that they understand their users don’t want those things so they are not installed by default. It’s not a “You can’t do that” it’s a “We strongly recommend against you doing this”. If you installed a typical distro you could waste weeks trying to remove all the non-free elements. So a distro like Parabola just makes that part frustration free for the people that want it.

The one major gripe some Free Software advocates will have is with the firmware. However there is a question of diminishing returns with some of this stuff. On some level going ultra staunch is more of a philosophical choice than a technical one.

so AMD is likely going to be one of your best bet because they open source their drivers. However YMMV because I don’t see that specific card listed, that doesn’t mean it won’t work but you might have to do some sleuthing to find out for sure. You can always install third party drivers as a compromise until you replace the hardware down the line. I know that’s not something anyone wants to do but sometimes that is the only thing you can do.

How much less freedom would one have running Arch with an AMD RX 7900-XT using the free drivers compared to Parabola with any AMD card listed on https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en ?

So that is sort of a philosophical question. I don’t think it could be actually quantified with numbers. If you run Arch that will be the standard kernel which has a number of binary blobs by default that are non-free. It also has a repository list that contains non-free packages. These are all things that some advocates frown upon. However if you don’t use any of those non-free hardware the binary blobs just sit there and do nothing. If you don’t install non-free programs you don’t have non-free programs installed. There may be some non-free things installed anyway that your could route out and remove. This is the benefit of a free OS like parabola someone has done all that work for you and they have a linux libre kernel that removes the binary blobs.

There are some people that this just does not work for because of performance, battery life, unsupported hardware etc… Is it better to use a mostly free OS than a proprietary one? Absolutely! is using a completely free OS better than using something like Arch? Likely but you are starting to split hairs at some point. That is just my opinion. Some people are definitely of the attitude that it’s free software or nothing which is a completely fine stance to take but it might not work for everyone. More freedom is always better so getting the best system possible with the most freedom you can is still better than using all proprietary.

The biggest thing you will run into is the graphics chip and wireless card. You can use this page to find hardware compatible with Linux libre: https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en

The tradeoff is just that much of this is older hardware.

Garmin watch with wireless pay. I use the venue sq but many in the Garmin line support wireless payment.

I saw it mentioned somewhere that when you see subscriber counts for a community those counts only reflect the amount of subscribers from your instance. At least that is the way I understood it. I know that’s not related to comments but there seems to be some ways that the federation work that is not great. Could it be that the comments are from an instance that your instance has de-federated from?

It’s crazy that every point in history has its own blend of “suckitude” that don’t want to deal with.

I have been using the freetube client for years to watch videos across multiple platforms. Maybe we could incorporate their method of having youtube be a first choice but allowing the user to pick other providers if they prefer?

I am aware of the other spelling. The “comradery” way agrees with my lazy American attitude a bit more. English is a strange language.

It’s likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.

1. Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
2. people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don’t have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
3. There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.

this is a great idea. They could code it that if someone does post a youtube link that it just fetches the peertube equivalent or gives the person the option of what platform they prefer to watch videos on in their settings.