But isn’t pdfs with code a potential security risk?

Might sound a bit unrelated, but have you been noticing an apparent rise on ageism too? The social media seem to be fueling it for some reason.

That’s simple. They use an LLM to find the right people for the job /s

Fun fact: people in Brazil used to cook black beans with an iron nail inside the pot to treat anemia and iron deficiency. They removed the nail before eating, in case someone is wondering. Some people might still do it.

Another fun fact: I remember a research concluding that it’s actually effective.

My head literally exploded with that meme!

Exactly. If there were perfectly interchangeable alternatives, there would have been a true competition and those companies wouldn’t be holding the amount of power they do today in the first place.

Moving to alternatives requires some degree of effort and giving up on some microconforts. There’s no other way. There’s no fight without any pain. If we want to fight those companies, we must sacrifice those micro conforts, even if that means reducing tech use as a whole and doing a few things the “old fashioned” way.

That would be reuse, not recycle ;)

But that’s a nice suggestion

Oh, I get it now, it makes sense too

Slowly, they will do. Every new one that does and gets media attention pulls others to do the same

I would really love something like that, or like the phones made by hisense. I love e-inks and they fit very well my phone usage pattern. Too bad I was born in the poor side of the world and will never have the cool stuff

I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. The greatest aspect of e-ink screens is not giving strain to the eyes. Looking at a greyscale phone will just have the downsides of both worlds.

I assumed a x64. Debian (the distro mx linux is based on) offers multiarch support, so i just had to enable it by running:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
sudo apt update

Then, to install 32-bit firefox, I first uninstalled it and then installed the 32-bit version:

sudo apt remove firefox-esr  
sudo apt install firefox-esr:i386

With the standard 64 bit version, the browser would struggle with just 2 or 3 tabs, and with the 32 bit version, she can use like 10 tabs without problems

Or I could recycle it

Could you really? E-waste recycling is a great lie made so that people don’t get remorse over throwing away their devices. Electronics are too complex, diverse and full of toxic stiff to be property recycled.

If anyone wants to dive more into this, there has been some projects where people from higher income countries put tracking devices inside e-waste before sending to “recycling”, to find out where they end up. Spoiler: in poorer countries, to either be scattered around, thrown into a landfill, or be scavenged by underpaid people without any protection equipment.

Uber has a pwa available. Would it help you? At least it would minimize privacy invasion.

disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.

Do you have some tips for that?

There are plenty of distros for very low end pcs, but they tend to require more tech skills to use. I have experience with a friend in a similar situation. I installed with mx linux for her and she is liking it. The performance is pretty reasonable and it comes with various tools that make it easier for people with less tech skills. The only extra thing I did was install the 32 bit version of firefox, because it makes a huge difference in low ram devices.

That’s exactly why statistics are needed, because our personal perception is flawed. People like to say sensationalist phrases like “the desktop platform is dying”, but data from sites like statista shows the desktop marketshare around a bit more than 1/3, and that’s a lot of devices, very far from being a dead or irrelevant platform. It’s logical that smartphones, that are personal devices turned on all the time will have more traffic and marketshare, but that doesn’t mean the desktop is dying. Actually, the pc sales keep growing, although at a slower rate (that can be due to several factors, like older pcs lasting longer), and that means that the mobile platform has grown in a faster rate, not necessarily that people are stopping using pcs, but that specific data we don’t have available, unfortunately.

Another thing I keep seeing people say on the internet without any proof (that’s one interesting thing abut those sensationalist statements: they never provide any proof, just a personal perception, but we need proof to counterargument) is that younger people are stopping using pcs and that desktops are becoming an “habit of older people”. I don’t know of any gobal research on that, but at least here in Brazil, we have an annual survey from cetic.br that shows that desktop usage doesn’t have significant differences among age groups. I don’t know if the same stands for the entire world, but I’ve seen a lot of people saying that phrase around here too. Also, that’s not only a sensationalist thing people say, but seems to me to have some degree of ageism.

It’s not like both worlds are antagonists. Free software is more of an ecosystem, and every part that grows helps each other. People who run foss on a device are more likely to run foss in others.

Linux on mobile struggles not because of a lack of interested developers, but because most phones are locked to prevent us from running modified oses, and the apps available for all the services needed require an android os.

Besides, to discredit the desktop platform as fi not important is an exaggeration.

And uwuntu!

That means they support Hannah Montana Linux