people are missing the mark; the “not hiding” is an imposed narrative, a straw man argument and a false dichotomy, all in one.

the issue is not whether you have or don’t something to hide, as this “hide” part implies something inherently sinister. the issue is you being forced to share stuff you haven’t decided to do so.

when I’m not sharing the quality of my morning’s stool across all my social media outlets, it’s not something I’m hiding, it’s something I haven’t decided on sharing with the public. consequently, I don’t allow my software, hardware, service provider, government, or whoever-the-fuck to do it for me.

so what this false equivalency is doing is moving the onus from the evildoer to me, forcing me to explain why I don’t like what this fucker is doing. fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

I so want to make Kate happen, but everytime I try to replace vscodium with it I get showstoppers. presently it handles my ansible stuff OK and I still get issues with complex javascript and django stuff, but I’m not giving up, keep up the good work!

for what purpose? if it’s just bypassing your ISP, a free VPS + wireguard and you’re golden.

first off chill out, Jason Bourne.

the threat mitigation is handled based on your threat model, not on a “defend all bases against anyone” approach. once you answer what your specific model is, then you can start building your defences. if your threat model is spouse looking through your shit, a password is more than adequate. if it’s the border nazis CBP, you go for encryption at rest. if it’s a toddler walking around the house smashing stuff, none of those will do you any good.

there are people with complex threat models but I doubt they post on lemmy and they def don’t scour the classifieds for used Thinkpads. the idea that there are threat actors out there infecting random devices and then see what they catch is… def possible, but highly unlikely.

you’re perfectly safe using a 2nd hand enterprise-class laptop, like a Thinkpad, Elitebook, or Latitude, wiped clean. those are tough and resilient devices built for road warriors for everyday, heavy use. the good thing is, they get periodically swapped out for new models, so they can be had for cheap, and a huge majority of those haven’t seen a lick of any significant use.

those devices are worlds apart from the laptops you’re advocating buying (I assume you mean the consumer-class models) and definitely way cheaper, like a couple times over, while being infinitely expandable and serviceable with cheap, widely available and cross-generation compatible parts.

the final part is compartmentalisation and fungibility of devices. keep the minimum stuff you need on there, assume they will break, get lost or stolen, so encryption is mandatory, and have a tried and tested backup and restore procedure in place.

I’ve noted the product families specifically and what I wrote applies to them only, not every used device everywhere.

macbook boards are ultra-resilient, if you get continuous fan spin you can almost always get them to a useable state. in this particular case, the machine powered on, spun the fans, turned on the screen, displayed the white loader screen for a second and immediately powered off.

never heard of such a thing, their quirks and failures are pretty well documented (logi.wiki, r/macbookrepair, etc.), so I unplugged everything from the board (battery, keyboard, touchpad, HDD, ODD, wifi, camera, display, etc.) and connected it to power and - continuous fan spin!

then started reattaching one by one until it failed again and it was the keyboard. so, ran it with an external keyboard and checked everything and it’s in excellent working condition. I used the opportunity to change the decade old paste on CPU & GPU and cleaned it from dust, insects, hair and other crap. I’m getting a new keyboard on monday ($13 new, $15 used) and assembling everything. maybe do a write-up.

added, never heard of the term, gracias.

then you got no problem, Jules.

as to wireless, that’s solved with 3rd party drivers getting enabled in Ubuntu-like distros (which Mint is) and installing the driver from the drivers control panel pane. how do you install it without internet? you tether your phone to the laptop via USB and allow it to access the wifi. on Android that’s done via the USB Tethering menu.

on fedora you enable rpmfusion and install broadcom-wl after you’ve done the full system upgrade post install and rebooted; otherwise you won’t be able to boot.

it’s possible you’ll need firmware for the webcam; 2011-2015 models don’t need it, no idea what the deal is for yours. and especially no idea for the abomination that’s the touch bar.

after install, install and enable mbpfan or macfanctld (just one of those, depending on the distro) so your laptop don’t explode.

I don’t have experience with post-2015 models, so don’t know what your issues with that model are. Wireless is easily solved with 3rd party drivers, don’t know the state of more exotic stuff (touch bar?). The base functionality shouldn’t be a problem. Have you tried booting it off the live USB?

Mint isn’t appropriate for relatively new hardware, although you can certainty make it work and your laptop is right on the cusp. A bigger issue is that it’s X11 as opposed to the default Wayland and not very up to date on modern laptop paradigms, like gestures, seamless transitions between states, etc., especially if you have macOS muscle memory.

I’d recommend Ubuntu as a first distro and once you have everything working, look into other options, like Fedora.

If you choose btrfs as your file system, you can install multiple OS with the same home so you can experiment away.

not to rain on your parade, but F5 is a downgrade from 7a in practically every aspect.

I’m aware of the glued shut aspect and there are solutions for that nowadays. getting a SDM870 and better SoC for under $100 with tons of RAM and storage, for me is more than a worthwhile trade off.

on the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable if you don’t want to dick around with all that and/or want to support Fairphone’s mission.

hell yeah! I just bought a Macbook Pro 15 2011, Core i7 for a whopping $10! according to the seller, “it just died”, so I got it to transplant the screen to a MBP 15 2010 i5; way cheaper than the $30-40 ask for a replacement screen.

turns out the fucker is fully functional, the keyboard is shorted somewhere and that’s causing the problem. replacement keyboards are like $10, so I’m presently installing and tweaking Fedora 41 and this old boy (fully kitted out - SSD, 8 GB, Radeon works, 90% battery health) is getting dragged into 2024 kicking and screaming.

edit: is there a lemmy community that’s into repurposing, fixing and upgrading old laptops, phones, etc.?

Connect your phone via USB and share the connection, on Android that’s the USB Tethering setting. That’ll allow you to download balena and the ISO of your choice.

I too repair my phones when they break and I haven’t had any issues replacing batteries, one camera assembly (was supposed to be an upgrade - wasn’t) and twice the screen with assembly on budget phones. in fact, before I buy them (always used) I check youtube for replacement videos for battery and screen. all replacements done with chinese parts, ultra-cheap and locally available.

I don’t know about the fair sourced part, I guess I’m too jaded to consider that an issue so I’ll concede that’s important to some people. I figure I’m doing everyone a service by repurposing a discarded 5 year old phone.

I’ve managed to listen to this doofus for a couple of minutes and then promptly added him to the ignore list (thanks Freetube!). whether he’s a scammer or just deluded, I wouldn’t trust or use anything that had his fingers in or near it.

if his general vibe of snake-oil salesman doesn’t put you off, putting his name on the thing should. hard pass.

I’m curious, what’s your use case that you need that kind of a phone? just visited their site, says $550 for a somewhat mediocre phone. it’s repairable, but with expensive, fairphone-only sold parts. the OS on it needs removing, as stated multiple times ITT.

a 5 year old phone has comparable tech specs, costs like a 10th of that, you can open it and replace battery and parts. you also need to flash an alternative OS, so what justifies a 10-fold price hike?

edit:

I’m running several opensource alternatives for clients (rocketchat, prosody, matrix) and I’ve transitioned privately from telegram and XMPP to matrix. the pushback from users is immense, they find every possible reason and excuse to stick with the messengers they’re used to and use “the new stuff” for the bare minimum.

privately it’s easy easier, that’s the only way you can get ahold of me, so if you need/want me, that’s where I am at. for a short while tried to make it work with signal, but a) the phone number thing is a deal breaker (usernames get me only halfway there) and b) I switch and use multiple devices often and that thing is downright hostile towards people who own/use > 2 devices.

bear in mind, I’m in a dictatorial position. they have to do what I say and even with that, it’s an uphill battle. it doesn’t help that the stuff they’re now forced to use has subpar to downright dogshit UX.

the new, shiny, superawesome, superfast element x… is crap. I thought Signal was crap - this is another level. I don’t mean for me, it’s crap from the point of casual users, they are coming from the super polished world of telegram and imessage and twitter and friends and everything about this is off-putting. a lot of them need help setting this up, especially if it’s a multi-device scenario.

the immediate future looks bleak and I don’t see an important development on the horizon that would change any of this. but, that’s how telegram spread, early adopters switching to it and promoting it and dragging normies along. let’s hope for a repeat.

a good point. while I appreciate all the usual parables to explain the issue, to me it’s quite simple. namely, me and the evildoers have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of “whose shit is my shit?” the moment their actions indicate it’s theirs, I am in active resistance mode.

I have a ton of the bottom three laptops, wanna trade for the shitty one up top?

My thinkpad is also light in the connectivity area and I absolutely adore the $30 dock I got for it. Click the laptop in place and LAN, displays, audio, power, keyboard, mouse, external storage are connected instantly; if I had to connect each one separately, multiple times per day, I’d go insane.

anyone dunking on the article, this is pretty far away from a how-to-lilst; it’s more of a “think about these things if you haven’t up until now” and as such a net positive. wrong community for it, though.

this is like month+ old info, at least mention that when posting. otherwise people assume it’s an update.

to me the Ian Holm abomination was terrible, without any redeeming qualities. same thing as rogue one, exact same shittyness, zero technological progress, crude and unnecessarily distracting.

first off, I have serious doubts that any one dude - or even a group of those for that matter - can ascertain the security of such a complex system; a browser is essentially an operating system, with all the layers and complexities that entails.

even if you’re somewhat successful in such an endeavor, I don’t really care if it potentially is. chromium comes from those shitmakers and I’m not willingly using anything they had their nasty fingers in. they threw one shovel of shit too many on the heap and they are now forever on my ignore list. if that means that I don’t get to access certain domains, sites, and/or apps - so be it, I’ll make do without.