gfle

I have an original PinePhone. The phone itself is horribly outdated and slow, but the software itself (Phosh+Gnome) is suprisingly okay. Given a good enough phone (as in hardware) I can see myself actually using it and not being annoyed more than I was with early Androids.

Unfortunately what I understand is that FSFE doesn’t intend to do hardware, only software platform, so I wonder whether they’ll come up with anything interesting.

Unfortunately it’s still made by a big company.

Linux phones made quite some progress in recent years. They still aren’t what I’d call consumer ready, but it’s getting there.

In Poland we have “Hunger is the best condiment”, I guess it might be something similar

• Ring roads that go around the city to take as much traffic out of it as possible,
• many public transport lines that were designed some time ago and were never updated to more efficiently cover whatever was added after them
• smaller, detached villages / small cities away from the main city that sometimes grow full of skyscrapers for some reason

I think most people can believe that he knows something about manufacturing, but almost everyone doubts that he “knows more than anyone currently alive on this planet”. Those are quite different things.

I always go with the following strategy:

• Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn’t have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.
  • Buses or trams (if I want to be fancy) for shorter routes, metro for longer distances.
  • Passenger trains for inter-city and longest local transport.
  • Cargo trains in industrial hubs, but careful with those, as they tend to generate a lot of traffic when trucks come and go. I usually do some sort of a traffic sponge (one-way road that leads only to the cargo train station) for trucks to wait without blocking other traffic.
• I use highways sparingly and only for longer distances, like connections between cities. I try to build them outside of the city, so it would also act as a bypass - the cars which are not going into my city but through it won’t generate traffic in the city itself this way.

I personally switched from NextCloud to Syncthing.

Syncthing:

• is easier for me to maintain,
• allows for the “server” to be behind NAT,
• lets me have multiple “servers” at the same time (eg. something at home and a VPS)
• lets me have certain “servers” set as untrusted, so all data on them is encrypted, while others can have it unencrypted for easier access I put “server” in quotes, as Syncthing doesn’t really have a server, all clients are equal peers.

On the other hand, NextCloud:

• gives me a way to share files by link with others,
• lets me browse files via a web interface,
• mobile app lets me access files as I need them instead of having to synchronize everything.

It’s mandated by the EU: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52021XC1229(06) (see point 6a).

Matrix works, but it’s way harder and more expensive to selfhost than for example XMPP, which can be hosted even on cheapest VPS or first RPi. I would definitely take the cost and “how hard is it to maintain in the long run” into consideration.

Mattermost also works and is pretty easy to selfhost, but it doesn’t have federation.

Another option is always an email with delta.chat - I don’t think it offers voice calling, but email is one of the most basic services one can host, and many automated solutions to help with that exist.