FOSS or otherwise
Windows 11, Stable Diffusion, Twitter, Google Chrome, Facebook Messenger, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, official Reddit app, YouTube Music
My penis
Termux on Android.
I’ve got some videos on my phone I might want to watch on random computers, so I serve them up with NGINX. I’ve got wget-created mirrors of some old websites on my phone, so I serve them up with NGINX. Other files I may want to move out from my phone to untrusted computers on the network can too be served up simply by NGINX.
I’ve got the full Wikipedia zim file from Kiwix on my Micro SD card, so I run kiwix-serve (behind NGINX).
I’ve got all the music on my phone, naturally the phone is then running my Navidrome server (behind NGINX).
Of course, I may want to manage this from a computer, so it’s running SSH server.
My phone is always connected to VPN and uses NextDNS, naturally I may want to use this with other computers, but I can’t install software to computers I don’t own (I mean, I can, but … it would be disliked), naturally it is then running Tiniproxy HTTP proxy server.
Some desktop GUI apps can be useful on a phone too. noaa-apt, Kid3, Audacity, desktop Firefox, Handbrake because I am too dumb for ffmpeg, so I run XFCE DE on it. Naturally, I can access it from a computer (I know) too, after all it’s accessed via a VNC server.
Am I stupid enough to expose something using HTTP protocol running on my phone to the internet? Of course I am! I can use cloudflared.
Do I want to encrypt a file? I can use GPG.
Do I want to create a compressed archive? I’ve got TAr and GZip.
Do I want to browse Gopher? I’ve got Lynx.
SSH or telnet somewhere? The clients are there.
You ssh into your phone? Or you use Termux on your phone to ssh into another machine?
I code from an android tablet, by ssh’ing into a linux server running arch linux for development. I used vim+plugins for years, but now helix as it supports rust and typescript well.
Why on earth do you run this all on your phone as opposed to on a home server?
I feel like NGINX is simplest to configure. And it’s in the repos already, so I don’t see the advantage here.
Easy to do redirects, directory listings, serving a static website, setting mime types of specific files, basic user authentication, using HTTPS, using it as reverse proxy, limiting request types, limiting bandwidth, and making the directory listings far nicer with fancyindex module. That’s all I need and it’s pretty simple to do with NGINX. I don’t know what the Python HTTP server does, nor how to use.
if you said Caddy, I’d believe you more – but nginx requires a lot of configuration.
python http server simply does a directory listing in the folder it is invoked in, and if there is an index.html file present it will serve it by default. Easy for hosting files/images from your phone
photoshop. i’ve used it pretty much daily for 30+ years.
it’s my magic wand, and there’s just nothing quite like it.
Android. As bad as it is, if I had to use iOS or Linux phones it would be even worse, at least with the current state of Linux phones.
But actually, maybe if Android didn’t exist, the FOSS community would focus more on Linux phones and they would be an actually good option. Maybe Android shouldn’t exist?
For me it’s iOS, funnily enough. I use Windows for all of our video game machines and Linux for everything else, but I don’t use any Google products or services. After messing around on my computers all the time, I don’t want to even have to THINK about doing things to my phone to make it go. My current phone is six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this year is to get a 120hz screen, USB-C, and for better low light pictures of cats. And a terabyte would be nice.
Google is a bad company, and Apple isn’t any better. Probably the best option for you would be GrapheneOS on one of the latest pixels, they have intuitive software, 120hz screens, have had USB-C for years, a good camera, lots of storage, and most importantly GrapheneOS doesn’t use Google or Apple, it’s FOSS.
GrapheneOS is awesome, but like I said, no google products and I don’t want to fuck with my phone at all. Apple isn’t perfect, but it’s leagues better than stock Google with app permissions and overall privacy. My six year old phone is still fully supported for at least another year, and I enjoy the OS for the very few things I do on my phone. This is definitely the best option for me.
My biggest concern with graphene is that I don’t really trust that my apps will work on it.
I haven’t looked into it for years, but I do need to use apps like Microsoftone drive, WeChat, banks, etc.
Even if they work I’m concerned that they will see I’m on some modified OS and block my account.
