• Browsers

Mull is my go to browser, based on Firefox with proprietary blobs removed and since its Firefox uBlock Origin can be installed

Mulch is chromium based for when websites ~ break ~ with Mull. Both are by the same Dev that makes DivestOS

• Utilities

I’m not really sure what is meant by utilities but these are some apps that I utilise pretty much every day

URLCheck for easily removing tracking from URLs either manually or automatically

Bitwarden is my go to password manager, you can add their repo to your fdroid client to get auto updates

Aegis for 2FA with easy backup and restore to and from files and supports importing files from so many other 2FA clients

Insular utilises the work profile to separate out apps. Some people in my life still use WhatsApp so I have a whole profile just for it, I can’t wait for the DMA to fully kick in so I can get rid of WhatsApp

Librera opens all of my documents for me and I can choose between scroller mode for PDF type stuff or reader mode for ebooks. It also has amoled black which I love.

QbitController to easily manage all of my qbittorrent instances. It also automatically opens magnet links I tap on so I can add them to one of my instances easily

RHVoice TTS that integrates with OSMand, I find I have better voice results with this compared to espeak

Syncthing Fork to auto sync folders on my phone, PC and NAS

Termux terminal emulator I use for SSH, it also runs Zotify and YT-DLP

KDE Connect for controlling my cursor on my PC, quickly sharing files to and from my PC and for seamlessly sharing clipboards between them

• Forgotten Apps

Showly OSS Integrates with trakt(.)tv to keep track of shows and also has a discover tab for TV and movies

Unexpected Keyboard I missed the keyboard discussion so I’m going to mention it here. It supports function keys! So I can use htop in SSH to kill processes on my PC when I break something and my screen freezes

https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps

It is compiled from source and proprietary blobs are removed using scripts by Relan from here.

I’m not very familiar with pipewire, I’ve always just been able to plug and play with any headphones but you can try runnning

Journalctl -r

After your next reboot to see the most recent system logs and check for any errors with pipewire

I think you can also run

Sudo systemctl status pipewire.service

After you reboot to make sure that it is enabled by default, if its not you should be able to run

Sudo systemctl enable --now pipewire.service

This Reddit thread might be helpful Teddit alternative link

EndeavorOS also have a forum that might be helpful

I haven’t heard of it, I got mine from the FAQ section on ziperto, linked in the rentry mega thread that’s stickied here.

It loads googles consent page for me. I got a blank page at first but I had to temporarily allow google connections in ublock origin to get it to load

Telegram uses Google services like Signal for notifications - https://telegra.ph/Notifications-FIX its the first point under the Android section

https://core.telegram.org/api/push-updates these are the docs for building your own Telegram app, specifically the push notifications section and again it mentions using APNS for iOS or FCM for Android but they also offer Simple push which would work with Unifiedpush and would be one way to bypass FCM but I don’t know if they offer that in their official app or if there are any other Telegram apps that have implemented it

I’m pretty sure Element stays active in the background, it may have asked you to turn off battery optimisation and have a silent notification always active. This decreases battery life which is why most apps don’t do this but it allows the app to constantly ping the server to check for new messages and is one way around using FCM.

Fair email uses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE instead of FCM, I’m no expert and this is just my guess but it seems to also need the app to run in the background for this to work.

Silence is SMS and MMS only and so doesn’t use internet and so has no need for FCM or any alternative anyway

For android, Google uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, basically a server that pings the phone when a notification for an app is available, which wakes the app up to receive the notification. There are alternatives but they need to be adopted by app devs for them to work.

For people running a degoogled android, they’ll notice most apps won’t receive any notifications until they open the apps since most apps rely on Google Play Services to receive a ping from FCM.

I don’t have any google play services so most of my apps don’t give me push notifications but I do have WhatsApp installed and that still receives notifications, they’re sometimes delayed by a few minutes which makes me think Meta have their own implementation/alternative to FCM but I’m not sure.

For Signal, their servers tell Googles FCM servers that you have notifications waiting on Signals servers and to wake up your Signal app so it can communicate with Signals servers to receive your messages.

WhatsApp and Signal claim/have end-end encryption on their messages but that shouldn’t matter when specifically looking at Googles FCM servers so, at most it would be meta data that could be obtained from the FCM servers.

https://jami.net/unifiedpush/ has a pretty basic explanation of push notifications on android and also showcases an alternative to FCM https://unifiedpush.org/ which has a nice little diagram about push notifications on android. Unfortunately, Unifiedpush is not widely adopted by many applications.

So there are ways to avoid Googles FCM servers on android using Unifiedpush or always having the application on in the background but for the most part FCM is used.

Weirdly in this case I think I agree. You can look at my previous comments about how much I hate Apple but it seems to me that OP isn’t too technical and installing a custom ROM might not be what they’re after. iPhones don’t have any of those annoying games and stuff preinstalled, as long as the carrier doesn’t install stuff. I’d suggest a refurbished unlocked iPhone though, to save some money. Make sure the previous owners account is removed from the device or else it’ll probably just be a paper weight.

If OP is open to custom ROMs then GrapheneOS is a great choice but LineageOS and DivestOS are also great options for someone that wants to get started with privacy and they support a lot more devices, that can be got for cheaper than an iPhone/Pixel. Again, I’d recommended a refurbished, carrier unlocked phone that is supported by one of these projects

Pretty sure its the same with Syria too

The service could not appeal because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because “legal tools for serious crimes” were used.

Yep under Swiss law he was a criminal, we may not agree with the law but unfortunately that’s the case here

For jc141 and LinuxRulez it really is just 2 clicks once you have the dependencies installed. Your distro will already have most stuff installed but if you follow along with the jc141 setup they basically cover nearly every option that someone might need to get their repacks to just work.

I just checked and it took 16 clicks within Lutris to install a Fitgirl repack, not counting the Fitgirl install setup part.

I’d personally much prefer to do that than to have to deal with Windows and Microsoft but thats just because I care more about online privacy and can’t stand monopolies more than the average person.

To make it even easier, instead of using Lutris you could just install them as non Steam games in Steam, again I probably would just use Steam to install them if I didn’t care about privacy and stuff.

I don’t see these things as a linux issue but more so as a monopoly issue. Microsoft has gone decades doing everything they can to ensure Windows is what people think of when they think of computers and its worked.

I think I remember one of them saying its because some games can be decompressed “on the fly” with DwarFS. So their mindset is the user doesn’t have 2 copies of the game, compressed and decompressed, which saves space but also increases the chance that the user will continue to seed the files. Instead of someone downloading the archive, decompressing it and deleting the archive and just keeping the game files which can’t be seeded.

Jc141 on 1337x and LinuxRulez on torrminatorr have repacks specifically meant to work on linux. You just have to run their bash scripts and it auto decompresses the files and sets everything up for you. Make sure to follow jc141 setup guide on github to make sure you have all the dependencies installed. https://github.com/jc141x/jc141-bash/blob/master/setup/readme.md

For Fitgirl and Dodi repacks, Lutris is probably the easiest. I usually setup my folders similar to jc141. GameName with 2 subfolders called game and prefix. The game folder is my working directory and my prefix folder is my prefix directory. This allows me to have different wine prefixes for each game in case some games have extra dependencies that mess with other games. I point Lutris to the installer exe and run the install then afterwards I switch it to the game exe. I usually use WineGE instead of the default Lutris option for the prefixes.

For KaOsKrew, I use a windows VM with QEMU to unpack and use sftp to transfer the files because I haven’t had any luck with getting their installer to work. I do the same with Fitgirl and Dodi repacks that have unarc errors during decompression. Then its just setting up with Lutris as normal.

You can also add non Steam games to Steam and make them use proton, I’ve only had to do this once with RE0, I couldn’t get it to run any other way.

r/linuxcracksupport might be helpful and I think they have a matrix chat too.

https://friendlylinuxplayers.org/ is a group that you might be interested in

Lemuroid https://github.com/Swordfish90/Lemuroid is by far my favourite console emulator on android and its free and open source. Its got quick saves and fast forwarding which is great for Pokemon. It also supports zipped ROMs so no need to unzip anything and it has worked with any ROM hack I’ve tried.

I mainly use it for GB, NDS and 3DS since I usually only play on my phone when I have some time to kill when I’m travelling, but it supports so many other consoles too.

- Atari 2600 (A26)
- Atari 7800 (A78)
- Atari Lynx (Lynx)
- Nintendo (NES)
- Super Nintendo (SNES)
- Game Boy (GB)
- Game Boy Color (GBC)
- Game Boy Advance (GBA)
- Sega Genesis (aka Megadrive)
- Sega CD (aka Mega CD)
- Sega Master System (SMS)
- Sega Game Gear (GG)
- Nintendo 64 (N64)
- PlayStation (PSX)
- PlayStation Portable (PSP)
- FinalBurn Neo (Arcade)
- Nintendo DS (NDS)
- NEC PC Engine (PCE)
- Neo Geo Pocket (NGP)
- Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGC)
- WonderSwan (WS)
- WonderSwan Color (WSC)
- Nintendo 3DS (3DS)

https://github.com/zotify-dev/zotify its python not bash but may be helpful, also it downloads the files from Spotify instead of YouTube.

I know it checks the playlist folder to see if its already downloaded each song but I’m not sure if it checks other folders too, but it should be easy enough to edit yourself to make it do that.

You can use hotkeys in OBS, e.g spacebar to start/stop recording

Looks good! I can’t see any height or compatibility issues.

I would suggest updating the BIOS of your motherboard to at least version 1.21, there is an issue with Over Current Protection on AM5 motherboards when EXPO is enabled that can cause the CPU (especially X3D) to die.

GamersNexus has a few videos on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTngvvD5dI&t=0

Invidious alternative yewtu.be/watch?v=kiTngvvD5dI&t=0

From their website for version 1.21 “Recommend for upgrade BIOS if 7000X3D processor is installed.”

Happy building!

Libretorrent https://gitlab.com/proninyaroslav/libretorrent is free and open source and isn’t anywhere near as shady as uTorrent.

Material Files https://github.com/zhanghai/MaterialFiles is a free and open source file manager that allows decompression, archive viewing and compression of files and folders using 7zip, tar or zip. If you prefer the command line, p7zip CLI can also be installed on Termux, https://github.com/termux/termux-app both free and open source.

I don’t edit photos or play many games on android so I don’t have any alternatives there but Lemuroid https://github.com/Swordfish90/Lemuroid is a free and open source console emulator with a whole bunch of consoles built in and Dolphin https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin emulates the GameCube and Wii