mat
I’m stuck in Cloudflare loops as well, been a week or two. It works in “Private” windows so I’m guessing it’s an addon. I think it might be either uBO, Privacy Badger, IDCAC (fork), or DecentralEyes.
Good to know! I had it for data saving since I was on a metered connection, but that’s no longer the case. Will get rid of it. Might still be useful on Android though, no? As for Privacy Badger, I mostly use it for getting rid of embedded widgets like those weird third-party comments on articles and such.
I really enjoy it because everything is automatically maximized, but I can always easily put programs next to each other (f.e. my school uses Discord, so I have to have it open next to Matrix). The window rules are also very useful, as I can make Firefox always be on the first workspace, or my terminal always on the third. You can also make certain apps always float so password managers and such still work the same way.
Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.
I’ve really enjoyed using PINE64 products. I use the excellent Pinecil soldering iron which is fully open source. I used a PineTime smartwatch until I got it water damaged (rip) which was a ton of fun to use. I have a pair of PineBuds wireless earbuds (default firmware is not open because of proprietary ANC, but last time I checked this is being worked on). I can’t speak for their laptops or phones, but I can definitely recommend the devices I do use if you’re willing to get involved in the community to work through and fix some of the existing issues.
I’m seeing others recommend the G14 2022 all-AMD one. I have owned this model since it released and use it nearly every day. Despite the performance being pretty okay, it does have its share of deal-breakers which, if I knew them at the time, I would not have bought it:
- random freezing, this affects some units most zen3 amd laptops and it seems I got unlucky. ASUS has been ignoring the issue for a year despite the crashes being reproducible on Windows (Windows recovers from it while Linux just freezes)
- short stutters due to fTPM. Hopefully once Arch updates the kernel to include the recent patch that blacklists all AMD fTPMs fixes this, for now you have to email ASUS to get a secret BIOS that allows disabling it
- nonfunctional vfio (code 43) without patching BIOS variables with a sketchy script (have to disable rebar), rebinding after shutting down the vm still does not work at all for me
- overheating while gaming, even with fans forced to max
- wifi constantly disconnects. I mostly fixed it by buying a AX210 card from Intel
- bottom shell is super brittle and cracked when unscrewing it
The laptop itself would be the best Linux experience I’ve had if not for these issues. The trackpad is excellent and great for Wayland 1:1 gestures, the display and speakers are great, and the battery lasts a good 2-3h with light web browsing.
I can highly recommend the nc-photos client for Nextcloud. It’s so much better than the official client, and faster. It has support for the face recognition plugins. It’s missing the file picker intent though, which is a shame. To share a photo, I have to find it in nc-photos then share to the app, rather than from.
I use Bitwarden and, though all the features are very nice (self hosted Vaultwarden), the clients are really bad. The autofill is super inconsistent on Android. The app takes 20s+ to load on my Pixel 3a. You can’t trigger a sync from the quick autofill menu, you have to open the full app. The “desktop app” is just an embedded browser. I really want to like it, but it doesn’t make it easy.
