I mention software freedom whenever I can.

Profile avatar is “kiwi fruit” by Marius Schnabel. CC BY-SA 4.0 | I am not affiliated with OpenMoji.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I came from a ~10 year old phone so FF5 was a big upgrade. Battery lasts the work day (may go from 80% to ~50% or ~30% mostly playing bluetooth audio for like 4 hours on and off). Fairphone uses some industrial chip instead of a mobile one - so it uses more power but they say it can get much longer updates than other phones. I usually have the screen set to 60Hz to save power, but a cheeky 120Hz session feels great. One bug is I can’t charge it in power save mode.

    I got standard Android but replaced the proprietary store/apps (updates still requires Google Pain Store). I planned to try out an Android fork later but that’s was not as easy as I had naively thought. [Requires an SDK binary that come with non-free license and 3rd party guides to build it myself were rather dead].

    I not aware it could run non-android OS - do you have exp installing a Linux phone OS? How did you find that? I’ll have to look into FF5 compatibility.














  • The responsiveness between a hard drive and an SSD is night and day. NVMe is even faster but not noticeable unless you move a hell of a lot of data around. A motherboard having at least 1 M.2 NVMe slot is common, so installing the OS on it is an option. Hard drives have more storage per price, but unless space is significant factor I suggest using SSDs (also quieter than a spinning disk!). More info on storage formats in this video

    Recent generations of motherboards use DDR5 RAM, which were very expensive on release. I think the price has come down but I am not up to date this generation. You may be able to save money making a DDR4 system but you’ll be stuck on a less supported platform.

    AMD had like ~10 years of bad/power hungry processors and Intel stagnated, re-releasing 4-core processors over and over. AMD made a big comeback with their Ryzen series becoming best bang for buck, then even over taking Intel. I think it’s pretty even now.

    If you don’t intend to game or do certain compute workloads then you can avoid buying a GPU. Integrated CPUs have come quite far (still low end compared to a dedicated GPU). Crypto mining, Covid and now AI has made the GPUs market expensive and boring. Nvidia has more higher-end cards, mid range is way more expensive for both and low end sucks ass. On Linux AMD GPUs drivers come with the OS, but Nvidia you have to get their proprietary drivers (Linux gaming has come a long way).