Agreed completely!

I think there are two main schools of thought - one is to buy linux-first mobile devices, and the other is to make linux work on android devices people already have.

At the moment, linux on android devices is in a better state. From what I read, calls, battery, suspend etc. generally works well on the OnePlus 6/6T and Pocophone F1.

For the linux-first approach, I'm very fortunate to have both a PinePhone Pro and Librem 5. They are both improving, and I've been daily driving one or the other for a couple of years, but they do still involve some sacrifice. I'm not sure they're ready for "regular people" yet, but they keep getting better.

Personally, apart from buying the devices themselves, I prefer to contribute directly to the projects focusing on the software. I feel you can't go wrong supporting PostmarketOS and Mobian. They are doing heroic jobs and have come a huge way in a few short years. Because they work upstream-first, any benefits one achieves are shared with everyone else in the ecosystem. And any benefits apply just as well to the linux-first phones as to the ones that originally ran android.

It's a long mountain to climb, but we've seen with Linux on the desktop that, over a period of years, things do get better. You used to have to pick your hardware carefully to get Linux installed. Now, you can install it pretty much anywhere, and most likely everything will work.

I feel eventually, the hardest problem in getting people to switch will be that proprietary apps won't work well. I think all we can do is to improve our free software alternatives to the existing ones, especially those with network effects like chat apps, as much as we can.

Every small step we can take is an important one. It's easier to get people to switch to Linux if they already use free software, as free software often does a better job targeting Linux than proprietary software does. Meanwhile, it's easier to get people to switch to free software if they run Linux, as that's the path of least resistance on that OS.

My fear is that they will start off by applying this to Messenger, WhatsApp etc. Then, in a few years, when criminals and tech-savvy people move to XMPP etc, they will say "the laws aren't working, we need to apply it at the OS level instead", and since iOS and Android have a big market share it's very easy for them to do it. At that point, trying to communicate with friends becomes very hard. It's one thing to get them to switch apps, but asking them to switch phone or OS is a whole other hurdle.

I'm trying to contribute both code and money to make XMPP, and mobile linux as good as possible before that can happen. I feel we need to buy time, by delaying and delaying chat control as much as possible, to make the free software, federated systems better and appealing to regular people. And then we can use that technology to buy time to push for political changes. I feel the only long-term solution here will be a political, rather than technical one.

It all feels like an impossible task, but I feel all we can do is try as hard as we can to make the world more like the one we want.

I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.

Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.

Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!

• Android: Conversations
• iOS: Siskin
• Windows & Linux: Dino
• Mac OS: Beagle IM
• Web: Converse JS

As a note of caution, I used Oracle's free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven't had any issues for 2+ years now.

Along similar lines, I'd say Snikket. I feel XMPP often has quite a bad reputation based on the user experience from 10 years ago, but it's come such a long way and projects like Snikket make it very easy to get started.

I've had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we're all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.

Thank you! This is going to send me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea these phone cooling fans were a thing!

This looks awesome! How would one go about making one of these themselves? Asking for a friend of course :)

My favourites are:

• Endless Sky (2D space sim, singleplayer)
• FlightGear (3D flight sim, singleplayer and multiplayer)
• OpenTTD (transport management game, singleplayer and multiplayer)
• Torcs (racing game, singleplayer)

Each of these are quite polished (especially for open source games!), widely packaged, not too complicated to start playing (except perhaps FlightGear) and have been around for a long time. Endless Sky, FlightGear and OpenTTD have quite active development, while Torcs is much quieter nowadays (although there is an actively developed fork called Speed Dreams which is awesome, just not widely packaged yet).

I've been meaning to try out FreeOrion and Minetest for a while now, looking forward to seeing what else pops up on the thread!

That was fun to watch! I liked how you pretty much recreated the old Mika Häkkinen move on the Kemmel Straight

I am addicted to OpenTTD at the moment! One of those games where I mean to play for 30 minutes, and then look up 5 hours later and realise what I've just done. Thankfully, it's fun enough that I don't even feel guilty about it!

Has anyone here chosen to make a significant / sudden change to their savings rate at some point in their life? If so, what was the story behind it?

Any tips for preparing?

I found getting teammates to sit in the server with me and analyse my driving / give me live feedback was really helpful! We would rotate and give feedback to each other. Often it wasn't just what they were telling me, but the fact I knew someone was watching made me more focused on what to improve.

This is probably too specific to be helpful, but because the VEC had 3 divisions at the time, in the few days before a race the practice server would have 70-80 cars on at peak times, which was absolute chaos. That was pretty useful for practicing traffic, for sure! But any way to practice with real drivers definitely helps.

It’s one of the things I love about ACC with having to deal with rain and so on which can really mix things up

Definitely, I love how dynamic the sims are getting and hopefully this will keep getting better across the sims! It makes it much more interesting when there's a bit of rain in the mix :)

Very nice setup! That's quite a collection of wheels you have - how do you find the build quality compares? Do you have any preferences between them?

Also - how do you find your PC for iRacing? I've heard iRacing is much more optimised than rF2 - I had a similar spec of PC but would still get the occasional stutter sometimes. I'm guessing with those specs in iRacing it would be buttery smooth? :)

I played rFactor 2 for a couple of years and raced GTEs and GT3s in the Virtual Endurance Championship and GT3 Endurance Series.

I really enjoyed the team aspect of the races and built some great friendships that have lasted even now I've taken an extended break from sim racing. The highlight every year was the 24 Hours of Le Mans - I have really fond memories of doing the night shift at 4am with the one or two other people online, knowing we had to carry the car to the morning.

I really enjoyed the multi-class racing. There was always someone in my mirrors and the first couple of times the prototypes would come to lap us each race would always be so hectic. I can vividly remember the feeling of dread being in a very intense battle at Spa, having the leaders stream past us leading up to Eau Rouge.

Another thing I loved was just racing as part of a team and the pressure of not letting me teammates down. In a weird way I enjoyed the underlying feeling of dread in the couple of days leading up to each race, the peaking in the laps before I took over the car, and then in longer races, the way the fact it didn't go away after my stint as I knew I had to get in the car again later on! Then when we'd cross the line, there was always such great relief knowing that I wouldn't have to get in again.

started with a program called Italy Made Easy

Thanks for the suggestion! That's another one for me to look into :)

What are your thoughts on the courses you mentioned?

I've found them both excellent for learning speaking, especially for sentence structure and constructing more elaborate sentences. Just from using these courses I was able to express myself and have basic conversations while I was in Italy.

They haven't really helped with listening comprehension though, so that's one thing I'll want to focus on when I finish these. When trying to have conversations, even if we were on a topic I could talk about, by the time I'd understood the previous sentence the moment to speak would've passed. I think this is normal, but definitely something I want to practice.

Just because the value you provide to society isn’t captured by capitalism in the form of renumeration doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable

I couldn't agree more. I think equating the value you provide to society entirely to remuneration is sure to backfire.

So much of our salaries are purely dependent on the industry we're in. My job doesn't demand anything particularly special from me - the field as a whole just has a lot of money sloshing around and can afford to let more of it trickle down to me. I could do the same job in another industry, or another location, and get paid 1/3 of my salary.

You could argue that my field has this money because they are providing so much value to society, but I don't think that always holds, at least in the short term. We live in a world of corruption, regulatory capture, investor bubbles etc. - while a market should find an optimal balance in the long run, in the short term I think there's a lot of room to make an outsized salary considering the contribution you actually make, just by being in the right place at the right time.

Is this fair? I don't really think so. But it's all too easy to overthink things and tie yourself up in knots. I just try and live life, have fun and do what I think is right at the time.

Those rain screenshots look so nice. It's so cool to see how much progress the devs are making at the moment, especially compared to other sims.

Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.