Ricoh GRiii

Sooo, Ricoh GRiii is actually amazing. I barely use my phone for photos anymore.

I hope no one tries to push GPO-like stuff on Linux. I get where you are coming from, but for example Puppet will give you a lot more power and and flexibility. There is no registry. ”Everything is a file” is actually true, you just manage a bunch of config files instead.

As for AD, you have FreeIPA as the major contender. It works. You can also just join your Linux clients to your AD. Kerberos works just as expected.

(RedHat actually tried pushing management of Gnome via FreeIPA á la GPO. It sucks, because the desktop environment is just a tiny part of what you might want to manage, so suddenly you need to have both that bullshit and your normal configuration management tool.)

It’s getting there, slowly.

• Clevis can do network and TPM pinned disk decryption.
• With Linux UKIs you can do self signed secure boot, we still need the mechanisms for central signing. This would actually be better that windows, you control your own PKI and Microsoft can’t sign garbage your machines boot.
• Logs is a somewhat bogus argument - log falsification on Windows has been done too. But linux is rather unprotected in comparison.

But the biggest issue is the mentality of ”I own my computer”. Sure, you own your private machine, but your company owns the computer you use for work and the data on it and has an interest in protecting that data from you. That particular threat model is hard to communicate, as Linux users normally don’t think of themselves as a threat vector.

This is the one thing holding open source back, and the thing Linux users keep pissing on without understanding it.

The CTOs inept nephew can manage your fleet of windows machines and you get all the checkbox security you need for compliance (and some real security):

• Centrally managed
• Logs that are fairly hard to manipulate
• SecureBoot + Bitlocker

That same feature set on Linux will cost you a ton of money in skilled staff if you want to check the same compliance checkboxes. (As for real security, who cares, no one is doing that anyway)

Kind regards: someone who has managed Linux fleets.

Sailfish is real linux. It runs wayland and systemd with a user interface in Qt. I can enable developer mode and ssh into my phone and just sudo as much as I want, or just install a compiler and do whatever I want.

Linux was always intended to be used like this, commercially, straight from Linus’s mouth. Development requires time, which requires money, as developers need to eat.

I doubt there are that many people working for free on the kernel, most are paid by hardware vendors and support contracts. The balance between open source and funded development is what makes it work. Having everything be fully open, all the way through the stack, would require a fundamentally different funding model globally, basically overthrowing capitalism. I’m not saying a change of scenery wouldn’t be nice, but we can progress out from under big tech without trying to get everyone to be like Stallman.

Now, what you are really looking for is a Hurd based phone.

Old sailfish user here, currently on an iPhone. The following things are why I switched.

• No support for Bluetooth LE, either natively or in the Android emulation. (So no smart watches, bike computers, etc.)
• Bluetooth headphones worked fine. Mostly. And not with any good codecs.
• The native app ecosystem was small. You will need to fallback to android emulation for a lot of things. In particular, good luck getting any commercial apps natively (trains, banks, and so on).
• The native apps that existed were clearly hobby projects, mostly written by one person for the use of that person. Which is fine, but none of the apps I used left enough of an impression for me to remember them.
• The web browser was fine to use, but absolutely not up to standard w.r.t. security (at that time). Plenty of known issues in the underlaying engine.
• No decent native app for maps. I never tried a native app that managed over 15fps when scrolling around. I think I also had issues with position data in android apps…
• Finally, I was constantly switching between two very different user experienced - emulated android and native sailfish.

Native sailfish was absolutely wonderful. It worked flawlessly when I stayed within the fearures that were available natively. But in modern society you simply can’t get away without all the android/ios stuff. At least not unless you have a lot of time and energy to fight the system, and I currently don’t have that.

This was a few years ago, so things may have changed for the better. I’ve been busy and haven’t kept track.

But if you want something to do - write an amazing maps app for native sailfish or get the Bluetooth LE-stuff working.

The wind energy used would eventually dissipate into heat anyway, this just puts AI in the middle.

In general: all computers turn electricity into heat. After that you get to deal with the heat, which will ironically generate even more heat (fans, pumps, etc.). This is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). A shitty datacenter might spend over 30% of the energy on cooling. Of course, any compute will end up heating up things, so moving the heat away efficiently is a huge deal.

I think dunkin a datacenter in water and powering it with wind is probably about as energy efficient as you can possibly get without moving into heat reuse (which we should):

• Sea water is cold, so the temperature differential is large. This means efficient and cheap heat transfer.
• Sea water moves, so you don’t need to actively pump it away or rely on convection to move the heat away.

Now, the more efficient way to deal with this is that modern liquid cooled hardware can go rather hot. Hot enough to do something with the waste heat. We can heat a campus, contribute to district cooling, etc. This is of course mostly relevant in cold climates, and often only during winter.

This design is probably a reasonably good idea from an energy efficiency standpoint. From an ecological standpoint, probably not, but I’m not qualified to answer that question.

We should do something better with our limited resources than generating AI-slop, but there are plenty of other more legitimate compute uses (like climate research) that could benefit from similar setups.

Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.

For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)

If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.