Author Topic: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.  (Read 38463 times)

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #50 on: December 23, 2020, 08:51:56 AM »
I'm fine with all of that sentiment, but I'm pretty sure that ARM never said in their marketing material that userspace code could snoop TrustZone, which is what ARMageddon is.

No, but it's a different category of attack.  It's basic cache disturbance observation, which has been used on x86 to observe cross process and into SMM for decades.  It's not a speculation based attack.  Different categories.  Still annoying, but much easier to mitigate and harder to get really fine details out of.  I'm not picking on Intel for their entire history of issues, just the recent speculation based ones, and, in particular, the ones that crack open SGX with their pipeline misbehaviors.

The question was why I want to get off Intel, and I answered.  If you don't care about that stuff, fine.  Intel's speculation based trainwreck has been a thorn in my side for quite a while, so I'm moving away from them, and I finally have options to do so without dropping back to utter gutless wonders as the previous ARM based options for desktop/laptop use were.

Isn't it billions of Arm chips per year - couple of orders of magnitude more than Intel? Would be interesting to know whether black hats are more likely to try attacking Apple phones, or Apple laptops.

It's far harder to get the sort of totally arbitrary execution across a range of modes you need to do this sort of work on the phones.  Not impossible, but far, far harder than on a desktop type platform where you can write kernel modules and go poking around.  I expect some papers in a year or so, but have no real guess as what's going to be in them.

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The TOP500 list currently shows the Arm based Fugaku supercomputer at the top, with a performance 2-3x faster than the 2nd place (Power-based) IBM supercomputer at Oak Ridge. I don't think we'll be getting a few hundred petaflops in a desktop any time soon though.

... and a supercomputer isn't exactly in the same category as what I was referring to.  First, don't confuse throughput and single threaded speed.  It's easy to get good throughput by going wide, but it doesn't help with typical end user tasks that are single threaded.  And I've no particular use for the sort of "drive a huge vector engine" chip designs that make up most modern supercomputers.

There have been no "really fast" desktop/laptop ARM chips available to typical end users, and while things like the Rpi4 are fast enough to be usable for basic light to moderate desktop use, they're not particularly quick compared to the x86 offerings.  The M1 is - it runs even with the top available x86 chips in single threaded performance, and because of their memory model toggle, can emulate (technically translation, as it pre-compiles an ARM binary out of the x86 binary) x86 at an awfully good percentage of native speed (around 80% or so - you can absolutely play mid-range x86 games on the M1).  You were limited to either the small chips like the Rpi4, or the ODroid N2+, or you were looking at some of the ARM development workstations - the eMag or similar were options, but they're priced like workstations and not exactly power sippers.

Anyway, I feel I've answered the question in some detail, and don't particularly care to make this whole thread a rehashing of the last 20 years of chip architecture security either.

Just Joe

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #51 on: December 26, 2020, 06:30:07 PM »
Thanks - learning lots from everyone here.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2021, 05:57:04 PM by Just Joe »

Chris Pascale

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #52 on: December 30, 2020, 09:08:28 AM »
Meh, if you want the computer, buy it.

Happy New Year.

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #53 on: January 01, 2021, 11:26:37 AM »
Meh, if you want the computer, buy it.

That approach, applied to life in general, leads to lots of bad outcomes. :p  Hence this forum.

Zikoris

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #54 on: January 01, 2021, 05:18:15 PM »
Actual facepunch incoming, rather than the "rah rah buy whatever you want" consumerist spiel.

Electronics are horrible for the environment, and produced in terrible conditions, including child labour and all kinds of other ridiculous crap, and will leach toxic shit into the earth long after you, me, and everyone else on these forums is dead. You should seriously consider weaning yourself off of your consumerist tech addiction, because you're literally killing us all, including people who haven't even been born yet.

I fully acknowledge that a certain amount of tech is basically a necessity to live in the modern world, but I think we should all try to buy it as minimally as we can manage, and a big part of that is not replacing perfectly functionally stuff solely because you want something shiny and new. The ethical option here is to buy minimally, secondhand if possible, use stuff until it no longer functions, and then try to dispose of it in the most eco-friendly way possible.

Apple specifically just got busted again for using child labour, FYI. Is that really something you want to support?

Just Joe

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #55 on: January 01, 2021, 05:59:08 PM »
Learn to repair your stuff a little. Definitely get off the upgrade treadmill as advertised on the tech websites. ;)

The 2020 ACME computer is not noticeably better for the average person than the 2019 ACME computer...
« Last Edit: January 01, 2021, 06:11:06 PM by Just Joe »

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #56 on: January 01, 2021, 06:09:19 PM »
Actual facepunch incoming, rather than the "rah rah buy whatever you want" consumerist spiel.

Much appreciated!  Quite missed recently on this forum.

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Electronics are horrible for the environment, and produced in terrible conditions, including child labour and all kinds of other ridiculous crap, and will leach toxic shit into the earth long after you, me, and everyone else on these forums is dead. You should seriously consider weaning yourself off of your consumerist tech addiction, because you're literally killing us all, including people who haven't even been born yet.

Certainly, which is why I try to both keep old hardware running (I go on rather extensively about repair and repairability on my blog), and try to make use of lower power/lower cost hardware that's minimal in terms of production emissions (small form factor ARM boxes, I've got a nice little ARM laptop, etc).  I've done things like replace capacitors on some older boards before sending them to people who have vintage gaming habits, instead of throwing them away.  It's rare for a piece of electronics to leave in the trash from our place, and that's the generally unfixable stuff like "broken screens."  Which are rare, but have happened.  Replace the screen, keep the phone, go on your way.

I would attempt to argue that I don't have a consumerist tech addiction, though by some standards on the forum I certainly do - I've got, as personal computing hardware, a 2012 netbook, a 2015 MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini in my office, a RasPi4 for desktop use, a homeserver that provides media and VM hosting, and a couple older machines that exist to blow off surplus solar energy from my office doing faintly useful things (Folding@Home and World Community Grid, mostly, though I was doing some Rosetta@Home work earlier this year on the heaters).  Plus an older (but still supported) iPhone 6S, older (but still supported... there's a theme here) iPad that is mostly a PDF reader for work, an old eink Kobo (purchased used), and plenty of hardware for work because I do low level tech stuff for a living.  Far from one computer. :/  However, it's mostly older, repaired, and I try to keep it as long as feasible.  I just won't run devices past the end of OS support, for a long set of reasons I've probably covered elsewhere in this thread.  I'm aware of the Android open source alternatives, have done so in the past, but generally find the process to be a mix of "broken" and "... really?  Ugh.  Fine, I'll install this random binary from a .ru site..." - not something I'm a fan of in any form.

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I fully acknowledge that a certain amount of tech is basically a necessity to live in the modern world, but I think we should all try to buy it as minimally as we can manage, and a big part of that is not replacing perfectly functionally stuff solely because you want something shiny and new. The ethical option here is to buy minimally, secondhand if possible, use stuff until it no longer functions, and then try to dispose of it in the most eco-friendly way possible.

I try to generally live by that, though the past year or so has been a bit of an anomaly as I've been trying to put my "de-Intel my life" goals into action.  I replaced an Intel Mac Mini with the M1 version, and have replaced some couple-year-old homeserver guts with AMD bits and pieces.  However, in terms of disposal, nothing I've rotated out has been disposed of - they've been repurposed for other use.  Both the server pieces and the Intel Mac Mini are being used by my church now, and the old church server guts (which were... honestly, less than reliable and utterly ancient - Athlon64 X2) went to a friend who does vintage gaming.

Mostly, this has been a set of transitions to get myself away from Intel, who, IMO, has been shitting their bed consistently, towards hardware and companies that are more trustworthy.  Again, I play in the deep weeds of this stuff, so I've got somewhat strong opinions on the matter.  One of the very large issues with ARM has been the software ecosystem (ARMv6, ARMv7, and AArch32 are handwavingly fine due to the Rpi, AArch64 is a hot mess), and I'm working to improve that as I can.  The M1 is a step in that direction, being hardware that I've been... mostly lusting after for about 3 years - a NUC-type ARM box that isn't glacial.  The Rpi4 is sane for light use, but isn't a full desktop replacement for anything beyond reasonably light use (though it can handle a couple dozen tabs).  I've tried, and have documented the process fairly well.  Enable zswap, use a USB3 SSD, and... you're mostly there, really.

Electron can go die in a fire, though.  "Desktop" apps that are just horrid web abominations that burn a full core to be useful are no progress for anything of value.

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Apple specifically just got busted again for using child labour, FYI. Is that really something you want to support?

Not specifically, though I doubt any of the other tech companies are much better.  Apple is, however, pretty well opposed to this sort of thing and goes out of their way to ensure that things that they find out about, that weren't supposed to happen, don't happen again.  I'm less convinced most other tech companies care about any of it, unless they're caught.  Apple's high profile means they're subject to more intense scrutiny, meaning issues are almost certainly discovered before they would be for other tech companies.

My relationship with modern tech is certainly "It's complicated..."  I make a living with it (currently doing work on ARMv7 emulation), I rely on it for publishing content (moving off Blogger to something self hosted, though still on Google Cloud), and... I really don't like the directions it's going.  However, within that, I'm interested in supporting the directions I find more reasonable - ARM and AMD, to be specific.  I still own some Intel hardware, probably will for a while (replacing a perfectly functional 5 year old laptop with a M1 version isn't something I'm inclined to do soon), but... the less I rely on their modern stuff, the better.

In any case, I very much do appreciate the discussion/criticism.


Just Joe

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #58 on: January 01, 2021, 06:13:13 PM »
Oh I know you repair tech stuff. More than I do. I'm sitting here tonight watching a YT video about repairing electronics.

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #59 on: January 01, 2021, 06:55:40 PM »
Oh I know you repair tech stuff. More than I do. I'm sitting here tonight watching a YT video about repairing electronics.

I mean, I feel utterly fucking defective in that I'm not using 1990s tech on the modern internet, but I've tried, and it simply doesn't work.  Period.  Even 2010 tech fails to keep up (for the most part).

We've (the software industry) has taken advantage of modern CPUs to say, "Sure, yeah, this will burn a billion times the CPU as what we used to use, but, hey, look, it's Javascript, so suuuuuuper easy to write!" - and it works.  Sort of.  If you have a modern machine with gobs of RAM.

I mostly use modern computers to do the same thing I used an overclocked 486 for back in the late 90s (talk to people, publish content, read email, chat on IRC), and... it requires an awful lot more than a 486/66MHz with 28MB RAM.  To do the same damned things.

I should be able to do that which I do on an Arduino, but I've not gotten around to writing modern software stacks for 2kB of SRAM. :(  Which means I'm a horrible, environmentally disastrous person who ought not be on the internet.

We had a dead cloudy day (6kWh off they gigantic solar array) the other day and pulled 70kWh from the grid for heat/transportation. :(  And I'm pretty sure I lit my office generator too, which is one of the least efficient power sources known to man (5kWh/gallon gasoline, maaaybe?).  So I'm an environmental shitshow, I just don't have the ability to easily change that.  The solar arrays, large though they are (we have north of 20kWh on the property between the house and my office), simply cannot pull power out of a heavily clouded sky in heavy fog.  And I've no biomass heaters to work with for the house or office (on the list, just... haven't found a good spot for them, and haven't purchased one yet).

Lay into me.  I deserve it.  I use modern tech, I make a living with the deep weeds of it.  I am utterly embedded into the tech ecosystem, and even if I use older hardware, repair it, etc, I'm deep enough into the stack that all the sins of it are on my shoulders.  I absolutely should not own a modern computer, yet, I've failed to spend the time required to write my own OS/browser/software stack that runs on older stuff that is fully depreciated and i can use with no real impact.  And here the fuck I am, on a 2015 laptop with an Intel Haswell chip, browsing a site about reducing consumption, instead of figuring out how to to it on Lynx, with an Arduino.  Facepunch the fuck away.

NorthernMonkey

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #60 on: January 02, 2021, 11:56:31 AM »
I've been trying to get away with using an RPi as a desktop for the last couple of weeks, but it's not as easy as using a 4 year old Win10pc (i7, 32gb ram). Somethings really stump it, especially when running a youtube video on half my screen, and doing something else on the other half.

Although its an interesting tech challenge, and something I've been using while not at work, I know as soon as Im back to work on Monday, I'll be back to i7 to run teams/outlook/excel/ other wage slave apps;.


Abe

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #61 on: January 02, 2021, 12:52:58 PM »
I recently bought a new mac mini (to some extent based on your discussion about the security risks in older versions, but also because the data analysis I do really grinds the gears on this 2009 edition iMac, even after upgrading the RAM and switching to an SSD). We'll probably keep the old one for general use. If we ultimately decide to sell it, what's a good way to wipe out the disk? I don't want to disassemble it to get the disk out (that was annoying).

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #62 on: January 02, 2021, 02:36:49 PM »
I've been trying to get away with using an RPi as a desktop for the last couple of weeks, but it's not as easy as using a 4 year old Win10pc (i7, 32gb ram). Somethings really stump it, especially when running a youtube video on half my screen, and doing something else on the other half.

Hardware video acceleration, especially in browser, is... yeah, gross is the best I'll say.  Don't watch videos.  That's been my solution.

If we ultimately decide to sell it, what's a good way to wipe out the disk?

You should be able to boot into recovery mode and wipe the disk from there.  Or, perhaps on one that old, you'll need an external USB bootable OS installer, but that should let you do it as well.  A couple passes over the drive and nothing of reasonable recovery value is left.

markbike528CBX

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #63 on: January 02, 2021, 02:48:34 PM »
I recently bought a new mac mini (to some extent based on your discussion about the security risks in older versions, but also because the data analysis I do really grinds the gears on this 2009 edition iMac, even after upgrading the RAM and switching to an SSD). We'll probably keep the old one for general use. If we ultimately decide to sell it, what's a good way to wipe out the disk? I don't want to disassemble it to get the disk out (that was annoying).

SSD's are difficult to erase, as apparently an SSD has super-low level hardware that does "load leveling".
https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac
       "Note: With a solid-state drive (SSD), secure erase options are not available in Disk Utility. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption when you start using your SSD drive."

That being said, using Disk Utility to erase should make it proof against most non-governmental agency data retrieval attempts. 
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/securely-erase-macs-ssd/


Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #64 on: January 02, 2021, 03:26:56 PM »
SSD's are difficult to erase, as apparently an SSD has super-low level hardware that does "load leveling".

That works in your favor as well, though, because short of physically removing the chips from the SSD, you'll never get partial data of a properly erased sector.  If you send the TRIM command down to the SSD saying "I'm done with these sectors, you can wipe them at your leisure for reuse," the disk notes that and will never return the previous data from those sectors (assuming the disk is well behaved).  And even if you cut power to the SSD before it's done, it will resume scrubbing stuff to make space for more writes as soon as power is applied.  They're a forensic pain in the rear - not only for that, but also because a lot of them like to lose data if they're left powered off for a year or two (as often happens in court cases when the machine sits on a shelf for a year before anyone gets around to bothering with it).

If it's simply contained home data of a typical home/office nature, writing zeros a few times and a trim or two (blkdiscard on Linux) does just fine.  If it's more sensitive, and you actually need to guarantee the data is unreadable in any case, then either you should never have let it touch the disk unencrypted in the first place (FileVault on OS X is fine for these purposes), or you need to physically destroy the disk.

It's not hard to be good enough that short of a federal agency, nobody is going to read old data from the SSD.

There are quite a few papers written on the issue, though, if one wants to look into it further.

Abe

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #65 on: January 02, 2021, 08:36:17 PM »
SSD's are difficult to erase, as apparently an SSD has super-low level hardware that does "load leveling".

That works in your favor as well, though, because short of physically removing the chips from the SSD, you'll never get partial data of a properly erased sector.  If you send the TRIM command down to the SSD saying "I'm done with these sectors, you can wipe them at your leisure for reuse," the disk notes that and will never return the previous data from those sectors (assuming the disk is well behaved).  And even if you cut power to the SSD before it's done, it will resume scrubbing stuff to make space for more writes as soon as power is applied.  They're a forensic pain in the rear - not only for that, but also because a lot of them like to lose data if they're left powered off for a year or two (as often happens in court cases when the machine sits on a shelf for a year before anyone gets around to bothering with it).

If it's simply contained home data of a typical home/office nature, writing zeros a few times and a trim or two (blkdiscard on Linux) does just fine.  If it's more sensitive, and you actually need to guarantee the data is unreadable in any case, then either you should never have let it touch the disk unencrypted in the first place (FileVault on OS X is fine for these purposes), or you need to physically destroy the disk.

It's not hard to be good enough that short of a federal agency, nobody is going to read old data from the SSD.

There are quite a few papers written on the issue, though, if one wants to look into it further.

Thanks for the information you all! I have FileVault on. Will do the other methods if we end up selling/donating it.

GuyinTexas

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #66 on: January 10, 2021, 09:49:23 AM »
TLDR : Not a Facepunch but sharing my experiences.
I bought an M1 MacBook Pro 13" 16GB / 1TB model. Replaces a 2019 16" higher end unit which I sold through sellyourmac for $1784. With the educational store discount the new model was $1932 including tax. So only $148 to upgrade to the new architecture before the older model plummets in price. It's much more responsive and the fans barely turn on vs the 16" which always ran hot (CPU around 200° during light usage) and wasn't fully utilizing all its power due to throttling. I quickly regretted buying the bigger model due to its shortcomings. Maybe I'm old school, but one should be able to use a notebook in your lap without burning your lap. Every Mac Intel laptop I've owned since 2015 hasn't been able to do that.

My stepdad still uses the MacBook Pro 17" I used in grad school (2006). It was dropped once causing a dent in the casing. The battery also swelled up, I told him to stop using it. Mac Mini from 2007 still works but mom had to stop using it since it could no longer do basic things like online banking. Now she's running on a 2018 MBP 13" and loves it. You do pay a bit more for Apple products especially new but they hold their value well and tend to last a bit longer. I suppose depending on the level of tech expertise wiping out and running a linux distro could extend its lifespan by a few years. Still a PITA...

I do slightly miss having 4 ports and a slightly bigger screen for media consumption but I'm an Apple Silicon believer. The experience will only get better once more apps get ported over.

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #67 on: August 16, 2021, 04:19:50 PM »
Well.  That was dumb.

Under a year after buying it, it's getting scrapped out and sold off, along with a very nice monitor I traded some stuff for, because I'm not OK with the direction Apple has decided to go, using people's devices against them, with the whole CSAM scanning on device thing.

Long form thoughts here: https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/15/apple-csam-scanning-and-you/

I'm de-Appling pretty much entirely, just keeping one machine archived for the occasional things that require MacOS.  I've gone to a non-smartphone, am scrapping the M1, and will just live in the dysfunctional backwater weeds of the little ARM SBCs.  Pis, ODroid, PineBook Pro, etc.  If I can't do it on them, well... guess it's just not worth doing.  My views on the tech industry have continued towards "I'm going to just opt out more and more."

Electronics are horrible for the environment, and produced in terrible conditions, including child labour and all kinds of other ridiculous crap, and will leach toxic shit into the earth long after you, me, and everyone else on these forums is dead. You should seriously consider weaning yourself off of your consumerist tech addiction, because you're literally killing us all, including people who haven't even been born yet.

Yup.  In the past 6 months, you're far more correct than I preferred to admit before.  The book on Foxconn, Dying for an iPhone, is a read that certainly has an impact on this decision.

Using little ARM boards as daily drivers sucks, so I suppose I'll be spending more time working on improving that, to allow more things to work smoothly on Pis and the like.

Anyway, update, feel free to lay into me for having made this idiotic set of decisions.  I was too damned excited by the M1, which is a legitimately good chip. :(

Debating between selling the stuff and just archiving them deep, deep down in a hole, sealed in concrete.

PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #68 on: August 16, 2021, 04:32:02 PM »
Debating between selling the stuff and just archiving them deep, deep down in a hole, sealed in concrete.

Are the M1 Linux ports just unusable at this point?

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #69 on: August 16, 2021, 04:50:25 PM »
Are the M1 Linux ports just unusable at this point?

I don't know.  Haven't kept up.  It does appear that through some antics, it's at least basically usable as a desktop, though I'm pretty sure GPU acceleration and such isn't a thing, which likely means the 5k output would be poor at best.  That would be a very gross framebuffer to deal with.

I'm unlikely to be contributing to the M1 kernel development, so it seems silly to run something like that, when I could run some little ARM SBC where I'm more likely to actually do the kernel hacking required.  I've got a PineBook Pro I can use, though the external display stuff doesn't work, and a Pi/ODroid/etc would be just fine.  That most of the stuff I care about won't actually run on it (Signal, Spotify, etc) means I should fix those problems, instead of just lazily relying on an x86 platform to run that stuff.

Also, I didn't realize it until I actually had it, but the LG 5k has a built in mic and camera you can't disable.  I can cover the camera with tape as usual, but short of hardware mods, I've not found a way to actually disable the mic.

Anyway, laugh away at the idiot who bought new hardware only to realize a year later that it can't be trusted with Apple's shiny new directions.

scottish

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #70 on: August 16, 2021, 07:36:41 PM »
Apple is being incredibly arrogant with their CSAM thing.    So much for switching to an iphone when my old android gives up.   I wish BlackBerry was still around.

I can't quite tell from your posts:   Are you operating in an environment where you need stuff like SGX to work properly?    Or are you just generally irritated at the way Intel's been dropping the ball on their chip designs?   I understand the c-suite at Intel isn't exactly brimming with the sort of competence Andy Grove brought to the company...   

I do wonder, would it be possible to switch to Linux on your M1?     I can find web sites talking about ports, for example https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/09/linux-m1-mac-june-report/


Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #71 on: August 16, 2021, 08:37:36 PM »
Apple is being incredibly arrogant with their CSAM thing.    So much for switching to an iphone when my old android gives up.   I wish BlackBerry was still around.

They are, I assume there are good reasons, along the lines of "Do this, or else."  From someone who has the power to apply a very large amount of "or else." 

I'm also incredibly disappointed by their bowing to China with regards to iCloud.  Of course, when you've put all your manufacturing in what, increasingly, has become a hostile country... well, that's some nice factories and export pipelines 'ya got there, be a shame if something were to happen to 'em...  And the alternative is cheap Chinese hardware, currently on a PineBook Pro, which is oddly high quality Chinesium for very little money (1080p ARM laptop for about $200, though you can't get one because they can't get parts to build any more).  I don't really know of any alternatives that aren't built in China. :(  Going purely used hardware gains one some, but you're just shifting the evil, and someone bought a new device to have a used one to sell, usually... :/

The world of "dumb" phones is... poor.  Though AT&T is sending me a flip phone for free, because my bananaphone (Nokia 8110 4G, you'll know why it's called that when you see it) isn't on the supported list of post-3G devices.  I'm hoping it will work, though moving to a ~identical OS flip phone is just a style drop, not a function drop.  I'll keep the iPhone for some limited stuff tethered, but... eh.  That may not last.  I've got an iPad for PDF work and ForeFlight, though I'm going to research alternatives there as well.  Writing the drivers for the newly announced Pine Note seems appealing (they've basically said, "We don't expect the first gen to really work, but, hey, have spec sheets!").  I guess eink driver writing might be in my future.

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I can't quite tell from your posts:   Are you operating in an environment where you need stuff like SGX to work properly?    Or are you just generally irritated at the way Intel's been dropping the ball on their chip designs?

I don't need it, though working TSX would have been useful for some projects.  The consensus was, "Well, it might work, but do we actually trust Intel not to yank it on this chip? Not really."  And, six months or so later, Intel yanked it for [reasons].  SGX would be very fun to play with, but I don't strictly need it.

Mostly, I'm just irritated with them.  They were the flagship chip company, and utterly blew it, releasing wave after wave of broken turd that couldn't keep secrets - and they had no clue about it until other people told them.  AMD shows some promise, but if I'm going to go do something totally broken, I may as well try to make the ARM world less painful for people.  AArch64 builds for modern electron/Node piles of crap are simply broken, because there are some common dependencies that go, "Oh!  64-bit!  I know this!  Here, have an x86_64 binary!"  There's been some work to get things like Signal building more reliably, but I'm not aware of any consistent AArch64 binary repos for them.  I'm pretty sure I don't want to run a repo, but if it's helpful... :/  "Want to" and "can/should" are very different values.

Quote
I do wonder, would it be possible to switch to Linux on your M1?

Perhaps, though I don't see the point.  Linux on AArch64 is mostly painful even with supported hardware, and the M1 is a bunch of active reverse engineering without things like working GPU acceleration (far as I can tell), and I may as well pocket the $300 or whatever it's worth now (or, rather, put it to building something useful like a YARH.io Pi handheld I can carry with me for some other mobile computation duties). 

At this point, I should probably just give up on computers for anything other than work, though.  I'm not sure there exists any ethical ways to use them.

Zikoris

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #72 on: August 16, 2021, 09:13:50 PM »
Electronics are horrible for the environment, and produced in terrible conditions, including child labour and all kinds of other ridiculous crap, and will leach toxic shit into the earth long after you, me, and everyone else on these forums is dead. You should seriously consider weaning yourself off of your consumerist tech addiction, because you're literally killing us all, including people who haven't even been born yet.

Yup.  In the past 6 months, you're far more correct than I preferred to admit before.  The book on Foxconn, Dying for an iPhone, is a read that certainly has an impact on this decision.


I remember when I first started learning about stuff like that. It was absolutely horrifying. And of course, the companies all have huge PR teams and marketing budgets that do whatever they can to present only the image they want, try to keep the truth from consumers, or downplay it, etc. And they build suuuuuch strong brand loyalty that it's as if people's brains fight back against them to avoid having to give it up. The stuff I've learned over the years with regards to this stuff - particularly electronics, but also things like fast fashion and most things plastic - has turned me so totally off most forms of consumption. I want nothing to do with most of these evil companies.

Daley

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #73 on: August 16, 2021, 09:45:39 PM »
At this point, I should probably just give up on computers for anything other than work, though.  I'm not sure there exists any ethical ways to use them.

Ignorance is bliss. It does seem to be growing more difficult, don't it?

The wife and I are going through similar conundrums to your Apple purge (for far different reasons), though on the Windows end. I'll spare details, but it's frustrating.

I know you've personally expressed the discomfort of leaving a bootloader unlocked on an Android phone going aftermarket firmware, so you might find GrapheneOS of specific intellectual interest. They only support Pixel devices, the bootloader can be re-secured after install, zero Google back-end (not even microG), and the VoLTE implementation on the Pixels appears to be wholly VoLTE compatible with ATT/TMo/Vz and independent of the OS itself. Shame the only devices they support are the Pixels. Also just going to casually mention Andronix which can run full fledged Linux desktops on unrooted devices, though I don't know how well it might play with Graphene. Just tossing this out there... so you're aware.

I got nothing to say on the desktop/laptop end. Just grunts of sympathetic agreement. It's getting harder and harder to keep old tech running and out of the landfills.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2021, 09:52:25 PM by Daley »

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #74 on: August 16, 2021, 10:14:27 PM »
I remember when I first started learning about stuff like that. It was absolutely horrifying. And of course, the companies all have huge PR teams and marketing budgets that do whatever they can to present only the image they want, try to keep the truth from consumers, or downplay it, etc. And they build suuuuuch strong brand loyalty that it's as if people's brains fight back against them to avoid having to give it up. The stuff I've learned over the years with regards to this stuff - particularly electronics, but also things like fast fashion and most things plastic - has turned me so totally off most forms of consumption. I want nothing to do with most of these evil companies.

Yeah... it's worse than I'd realized.  Though I have no way of reasoning through, "Is it better to buy an Apple product, made in Foxconn, which we know is relatively abusive, or to buy something like a PineBook, made in who knows where, with unknown audits of labor or such?"  I don't know enough to reason through that.  I know the PBP is far cheaper, $200 or so, and is... "adequate" in terms of materials, vs the luxury materials of Apple, but it's also somewhat less recyclable in the process, and perhaps shorter lived due to being a lower power device to start with - it's not exactly quick compared to the M1.

My electronics purchases lately are more along the lines of used small board computers to see what I can make them do, and some inverters/charge controllers for solar power trailers, though we're trying to go with at least US companies for those.  That's an interesting set of challenges because the supply chains are literally changing under us as we design.

Ignorance is bliss. It does seem to be growing more difficult, don't it?

Between everything being made with borderline or literal slave labor in China, and everything being as data/behavior hungry as possible, yeah.  For sport, go read the Roku "privacy" policy - it's quite literally, "We will collect anything we can, and will do anything we want with it, nyah nyah!"

Quote
The wife and I are going through similar conundrums to your Apple purge (for far different reasons), though on the Windows end. I'll spare details, but it's frustrating.

Windows 11? Between the artificial obsoleting of plenty of perfectly good hardware for what appear to be "Buy a new computer, damn it!" reasons, and the aggressive push to online accounts (Win11 Home won't allow offline accounts, Win11 Pro should still, but Win10 has gotten bad enough that you have to literally install it without a network connection to even get the option for an offline account, then it nags you constantly until you find the right checkbox)... I'm looking at removing some Windows machines on the network.  If I can get an ODroid N2 and Kodi to play nice, I might be able to replace the (graphically glitching) TV computer.  Though if the thing suffered some sort of catastrophic failure, with the way supply chains are... I like the evening movies, but even the new TVs are pretty much pure evil, data logging all the things and submitting it upstream.  I've heard claims, without strong verification, that some will eventually start trying random open networks if you've not joined them to a network.

Quote
I know you've personally expressed the discomfort of leaving a bootloader unlocked on an Android phone going aftermarket firmware, so you might find GrapheneOS of specific intellectual interest. They only support Pixel devices, the bootloader can be re-secured after install, zero Google back-end (not even microG), and the VoLTE implementation on the Pixels appears to be wholly VoLTE compatible with ATT/TMo/Vz and independent of the OS itself. Shame the only devices they support are the Pixels.

I looked into it, and the whole "Pixel only" problem was thorny.  Has Google fixed the wave of 2 year hardware failures that have been their last 5-6 years of phones with the newer Pixels?  They had a long wave of "Might last to the end of warranty, if you're lucky..." devices, I got burned with a few of them (the... 5X?  utter pile of crap, wouldn't even reliably save photos), and I've been pretty hesitant about the whole Google/Android ecosystem since then.

Quote
I got nothing to say on the desktop/laptop end. Just grunts of sympathetic agreement. It's getting harder and harder to keep old tech running and out of the landfills.

Because everything has gone to horrid Electron based abominations, or just whatever toolkit Google is using that "runs fine here."  The new Google Chat interface literally burns up almost all of a Pi4's CPU typing away at a decent clip in a browser window.  No idea why, or what it's doing, but apparently Google believes that unless you've got a Xeon workstation, you don't deserve to see your letters show up at the same time you type them.  It's pretty sickening just how much CPU is used to accomplish, near as I can tell, absolutely nothing.  A quad core, 1.8GHz system is quite literally slower than a 66MHz single core 486 at "displaying text."  Progress(TM)!

I make my living in the low level weeds of modern tech, so I've been trying to keep up with it, but the motivation is just lacking lately.  I'll learn the weeds at the deep level I need to implement stuff, and screw the rest of it.  Go play on my tractor or something, at least it doesn't have any firmware OTAs to worry about.

joe189man

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #75 on: August 16, 2021, 10:28:29 PM »
so what's the solution to all this, every tech company is getting more creepy and sneaky. are you going to have a smart phone still? Browse the internet? Not trying to be snarky, just want to know what's your plan forward navigating all the different tech that seems required either for work or plan?

Daley

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #76 on: August 16, 2021, 11:00:48 PM »
Between everything being made with borderline or literal slave labor in China, and everything being as data/behavior hungry as possible, yeah.  For sport, go read the Roku "privacy" policy - it's quite literally, "We will collect anything we can, and will do anything we want with it, nyah nyah!"

Oh, I know.

Windows 11?

Aye. Don't really want to go back to Linux-land myself, honestly, but the current Latitude 6440s are barely seven years old... built like a tank, hardly broken in, and last of the semi-gutsy Haswells that could clock-for-clock dance around the *lakes even with HT disabled up until about three years ago. And yet... TPM 1.2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Four years yet is both a long time and a blink of an eye anymore. A lot can happen.

Has Google fixed the wave of 2 year hardware failures that have been their last 5-6 years of phones with the newer Pixels?
I repeat...
Shame the only devices they support are the Pixels.

Because everything has gone to horrid Electron based abominations, or just whatever toolkit Google is using that "runs fine here."

Yup. A great example is the new "cross platform" todotxt.net application Sleek. Do we really need a 60MB application to add a checkbox interface and time due-date notifier for a task manager that's fundamentally opening and editing TEXT FILES? Especially when nearly every other todotxt.net compatible task manager on every platform that came before it barely weigh in at 500kB?

Wheee!

PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #77 on: August 16, 2021, 11:17:59 PM »
Because everything has gone to horrid Electron based abominations, or just whatever toolkit Google is using that "runs fine here."

I half agree, except Qt is alive and well (Wireshark 2, etc).

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #78 on: August 17, 2021, 11:15:39 AM »
so what's the solution to all this, every tech company is getting more creepy and sneaky. are you going to have a smart phone still? Browse the internet? Not trying to be snarky, just want to know what's your plan forward navigating all the different tech that seems required either for work or plan?

I'm still working out the details.  I've moved my primary device away from a smartphone (it's now a Nokia 8110 4G), to see how this works out in practice.  I've been using aggressive ad blockers on the internet for years, though am using the internet less and less these days.

I half agree, except Qt is alive and well (Wireshark 2, etc).

Literally nobody is writing anything new in it, though.  All the new stuff seems to be electron/Node/etc, and the stuff that I actually care about, for person to person communication, is all super heavy web stuff of that nature.  As noted, a Pi4 can barely keep up with Google Chat now. :(  I don't write the interfaces for that, and I don't really have the time to fully RE all that stuff and write (and maintain) compatible Qt versions of them.  Yet.

PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #79 on: August 17, 2021, 01:01:30 PM »
I half agree, except Qt is alive and well (Wireshark 2, etc).

Literally nobody is writing anything new in it, though.  All the new stuff seems to be electron/Node/etc, and the stuff that I actually care about, for person to person communication, is all super heavy web stuff of that nature.  As noted, a Pi4 can barely keep up with Google Chat now. :(  I don't write the interfaces for that, and I don't really have the time to fully RE all that stuff and write (and maintain) compatible Qt versions of them.  Yet.

Well, maybe not for desktop. It is the industry standard #1 go-to technology in embedded Linux, at least in the shops that I've worked at. Probably for all the reasons that you mention in this thread.

EDITed to add - also, KDE.
« Last Edit: August 17, 2021, 01:05:55 PM by PDXTabs »

scottish

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #80 on: August 18, 2021, 06:16:07 PM »
Because everything has gone to horrid Electron based abominations, or just whatever toolkit Google is using that "runs fine here."

I half agree, except Qt is alive and well (Wireshark 2, etc).

This is the first time I've encountered electron.   I thought node was pretty questionable, but electron seems completely nuts.   This started with HTML based smart phone apps, didn't it.   Now, they say, why not do the same thing for desktop apps?

Well maybe because I want my computer to be able to actually do stuff besides render your crappy GUI?    Maybe because I don't think we should automatically obsolete older less powerful machines just because you want to use Javascript everywhere?

PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #81 on: August 19, 2021, 12:09:56 PM »
This is the first time I've encountered electron.   I thought node was pretty questionable, but electron seems completely nuts.   This started with HTML based smart phone apps, didn't it.   Now, they say, why not do the same thing for desktop apps?

Well maybe because I want my computer to be able to actually do stuff besides render your crappy GUI?    Maybe because I don't think we should automatically obsolete older less powerful machines just because you want to use Javascript everywhere?

I think that it actually started with Google and V8 and Chromium. But I could be wrong. Anyway, Google spent a bunch of time and money on V8 and Chromium to run their web apps faster. Then some "smart" open source people figured out that you could write a whole desktop app with that stack. They aren't wrong, and it is reasonably good for cross platform stuff (VSCode, etc). But boy dose it use a lot more CPU cycles than other technologies.

PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #82 on: March 05, 2022, 02:31:29 PM »
@Syonyk, this made the think of you: CNX Software: Firefly is working on a Rockchip RK3588 Mini-ITX motherboard (ITX3588J)

Firefly ITX3588J mini-ITX motherboard is the third hardware platform we’ve seen with Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor.

The board will be interesting to people wanting an Arm PC or workstation as the mini-ITX form factor will allow the board to be fitted to a standard enclosure, and there’s plenty of resources and I/Os with up to 32GB RAM, four SATA ports, multiple 8K/4K video outputs and inputs, dual Gigabit Ethernet, WiFI 6 and Bluetooth 5.0,  a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and more.

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #83 on: March 27, 2022, 10:53:04 PM »
@Syonyk, this made the think of you: CNX Software: Firefly is working on a Rockchip RK3588 Mini-ITX motherboard (ITX3588J)

I'm quite familiar with that SoC, have been... rather eagerly awaiting getting my hands on a proper technical reference manual for it, and have several 16GB Rock5 boards on preorder (RK3588, NVMe, and micro-HDMI in, which... if supported, could allow for some interesting use cases I've not fully thought through as a little portable KVM system).  They're supposed to ship "Q2 2022," so given the state of supply chains, I'll likely see them sometime in 2025, and expect working kernel support sometime after that, though I hold some slight hope that they'll be similar enough to the RK3399 (which can support NVMe in certain configurations) that the port will be easy for basic functionality.  Full GPU support would be nice, framebuffer support is enough for my immediate needs.  So, facepunch away for that particular bit of stupidity, preordering promising looking new hardware, instead of sticking with the SBCs I have - though I'm also considering selling my 8GB Pi4, as they're regularly tapping $200 on eBay, and I can survive on 4GB - though the difference between 32-bit ARMv7 on 8GB and ARMv8/AArch64 on 4GB is quite noticeable.  The right answer, which I've not built yet, is a Arm64ilp32 build of Ubuntu (AArch64 operating mode, 32-bit pointers/virtual address space, rather better memory density for typical use), and you may also entirely facepunch me for not having set one of those up.  Honestly I'm not even sure how to go about doing it, maybe go Gentoo for testing...  but the reality is that I just don't have the time to maintain an entire port of a Linux distro in a bizarre and mostly unsupported format that's certain to break something or another.

The Mac Mini M1 is shipping out, having... been a rather suboptimal financial, entirely facepunch worthy decision.  Having spent roughly $2100 effectively on the M1 Mini and the LG 5k (in late 2020), plus scattered extra amounts for some SSDs and such (external drives), and whatever residual value the old keyboard/mouse from an iMac that failed (cost of the screen alone was roughly the cost of the system, so I parted out the rest - I don't have the skills to do screen/glass lamination separation and reconnection, should probably have learned that too), and that whole batch sold for about $1250, minus eBay fees and such, which are quite non-trivial on that.  So, roughly, flushing $1000+ down the drain by buying a system I planed to use indefinitely and getting rid of it when it became all to apparent that Apple was heading in a direction I was not OK with, treating users as guilty until their device proved them innocent.  Or, more accurately, not sufficiently guilty, yet.  They've delayed implementation of the on-device CSAM scanning, though their statements about "planning to continue with the previous plan" indicate that they would still like to find some way to deploy it - or, at least, that's how I read it.  Either by stealth or by waiting for a proper incident they can utilize, either way, I've no interest in it.

I remain unconvinced that there is a way to justify the use of modern consumer electronics devices from any reasonable ethical system, starting from first principles.  I've not yet decided if buying used is any different from buying new, as it stimulates demand for more new hardware.  Yet, as seen above, even there I'm inconsistent as I have (new) Rock5 boards on preorder.  My personal server in the colo is also new hardware, built... a year or two ago, now.  Give or take.

Anyway, I think the summary of this thread is, "I work with computers for a living and should not be trusted to own any of them outside work hardware, because I make exceedingly stupid decisions based on available information."

Please, rip into me as I deserve for this idiotic set of decisions.

scottish

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #84 on: March 28, 2022, 04:36:03 PM »
You're buying this stuff because you're a technology hobbyist?   I know it's not a face punch, because everyone needs a hobby...


PDXTabs

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #85 on: March 28, 2022, 07:04:34 PM »
You're buying this stuff because you're a technology hobbyist?   I know it's not a face punch, because everyone needs a hobby...

I agree. Syonyk literally asked to get face-punched and I try to helpfully oblige. But honestly spending money on things that you actually value is a MMM ideal. The fact that we don't always know what will make us happy is just being human. Syonyk couldn't have know that Apple was going to go full big brother, for example.

I have had similar disappointing dev board experiences too. Live and learn, now I'm more careful, and better at packaging an entire ARM Linux FS with custom kernel at my house (but who has time for that)?

FINate

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #86 on: March 29, 2022, 10:02:32 AM »
The stuff you all are talking about is way above my head. I took several Computer Engineering courses in college that barely scratched the surface of some of this... nope, nope, nope, retreated to Computer Science land after that :)

I won't be meting out any facepunches here as I'm guilty of the same sins. That said, for those lurking and interested, the following things helped me get off the tech forced obsolescence treadmill.

About a year ago my perfectly functional 2013 iMac went "Vintage" (in Apple-speak) and I couldn't update the OS, which means it was essentially unsupported and no longer receiving most security updates. Sigh. I refuse to use computers that aren't getting security updates, and I refuse to throw out working hardware. This forum, and Daley in particular, helped me pick a Linux distro to give this machine new life. The most difficult part was removing the adhered screen to replace the HDD with a SSD. Manjaro was easy to install, though finding the right kernel + video + wifi drivers required some trial and error (bespoke Apple hardware issues). And installing the rEFInd boot manager was a big improvement over GRUB. In any case, I'm very very happy with this setup. It just works, and it's FAST and feels lightweight compared to macOS and Windows. I really like Manjaro's rolling release update model. EOL for my LTS kernel is 2027, and I will likely update to newer LTS kernels as needed. I should get another 5-10 years out of this machine, perhaps more. So instead of junking that old device (maybe you recently upgraded?), throw a SSD on it and install Linux. This is a great low-risk way to learn and experiment with Linux as a daily driver.

For those considering a new laptop, a quick plug for Framework. I was in the market last year for a laptop and decided to take a risk on these guys. It's not the cheapest hardware, nor is it the most performant. [Sorry Syonyk, Intel only at this point.] But I love the concept and really hope they succeed long-term. Their initial launch was successful, and the Marketplace is live, so that's all promising. Though the MBA side of me still worries that for-profit hardware companies can't really survive without premature obsolescence... I guess time will tell. I'm dual booting Manjaro/Windows and overall am very happy with it even though the screen is a little more floppy than I'd like (the trade-off for not being glued together) and battery life is mediocre. It's a great feeling to open up the internals and see the elegant design, and how all the components are intentionally serviceable, and are even marked with QR codes that link to tutorials and parts on the Marketplace.  My hope is to keep this for many many years and upgrade and repair as needed. It's certainly not for everyone, but something to consider.

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #87 on: March 29, 2022, 12:27:44 PM »
About a year ago my perfectly functional 2013 iMac went "Vintage" (in Apple-speak) and I couldn't update the OS, which means it was essentially unsupported and no longer receiving most security updates. Sigh. I refuse to use computers that aren't getting security updates, and I refuse to throw out working hardware.

I know it's history now, but did you consider an upgrade patcher to keep your vintage iMac supported? I.e. http://dosdude1.com/catalina/

I'm running Catalina on a 2009 Macbook with no issues thanks to this patch.

FINate

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #88 on: March 29, 2022, 04:04:04 PM »
About a year ago my perfectly functional 2013 iMac went "Vintage" (in Apple-speak) and I couldn't update the OS, which means it was essentially unsupported and no longer receiving most security updates. Sigh. I refuse to use computers that aren't getting security updates, and I refuse to throw out working hardware.

I know it's history now, but did you consider an upgrade patcher to keep your vintage iMac supported? I.e. http://dosdude1.com/catalina/

I'm running Catalina on a 2009 Macbook with no issues thanks to this patch.

Yes. I wasn't excited about the prospect of running proprietary software on officially unsupported hardware via an unsupported hack. Besides, after making the move I now prefer KDE over DW's MacBook. Less clutter, cleaner, faster, simpler. I'm sure it helps that I used Linux professionally almost exclusively for ~10 years.

Daley

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #89 on: March 29, 2022, 08:19:49 PM »
@ChpBstrd Also, unsupported operating systems running on unsupported hardware isn't likely to have microcode updates, firmware updates, current drivers and patched kernels for older Intel CPU specific flaws, either. Older Intel CPUs are dodgy enough on their own without running a hacked OS that disables core security features and no longer mitigates hardware specific vulnerabilities on any level, on top of already locking you out of the UEFI keeping you from disabling features like HyperThreading. Effort is at least made to keep older Intel CPUs as secure as possible under the circumstances under the Linux kernel. That is an expectation sorely missing from running bodged Darwin/OSX. Some people don't care about keeping their computer secure, and more power to them. You're not likely to find many of those people in this thread.

Speaking of EOL hardware and unsupported OSes, October 14, 2025 is gonna be a rough day in this house.



Besides, after making the move I now prefer KDE over DW's MacBook. Less clutter, cleaner, faster, simpler.

KDE on Manjaro can be quite buttery smooth, eh?

I want to prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed's rolling release implementation over Manjaro's, but Manjaro's default KDE implementation is second only to KDE's own Neon across all the distros I've tried.

That said, Manjaro+KDE isn't even enough to keep me booting back into Windows anymore. Either Linux as a whole has lost its way, or I'm no longer a marginally catered demographic. It doesn't help that Serif Affinity has completely ruined using GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus for me, either, and Affinity + WINE == U+1F4A9

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #90 on: March 29, 2022, 11:25:49 PM »
You're buying this stuff because you're a technology hobbyist?

I'm not sure that I am, though.  I don't actually like the stuff, but it's the world I know (I make a living in the weeds of it), and I keep trying to figure out if there exists a safe and sane way to use a modern computer on the modern internet (and that's separate from the ethics of it, see earlier).  I have two "smart" things in the house (a Roomba, which is a pain in the ass but my wife likes it, and a Nest purchased 6 years ago, back when they'd not merged into Google and started accumulating more data).  I wouldn't mind getting rid of both, but the Hestia Pi project doesn't seem to have enough relays on their board for my HVAC system (standard US heat pump, I need heat, cool, blower, and emergency heat/coils, they seem to have two relays - and the relays are EOL as far as I can tell, so I'd have to redesign the boards anyway).  Much less controlling a water heater, though that should be replaced with a heat pump unit.

I've started trying to keep track of how much time I spend "working on computers to try and make them less toxic, so I can use them."  Lately, this has been... a lot.  I spent my evening adding a third boot option to the house PC, having spent time over the weekend moving an OS install from a larger to smaller SSD to free up an install for this machine, so I now have Qubes on a small scratch SSD, and can then nuke the Windows/Linux installs and clean them out - I don't think I want my server admin creds sharing system images with browsers and such anymore.  That means that single system image machines, even the ARM boxes, are somewhat less useful, though aggressive removal of Javascript from my life except on a few sites I trust does seem to reduce some of the risk factors.  And at least the ARM boxes aren't the standard x86 targets, but... still.  I should probably work with Xen on them and see if I can get some split SSH going.  Or simply not spend the time.  The Rock5s, I'd like to port Qubes to, but... also a huge time commitment down in technical weeds.  I think if I stopped using computers entirely outside work, and brief periods of use on "safer" OS configurations, I'd save an awful lot of time in my life.  But that still presupposes there exists a safe, sane, ethical way to use a modern computer.  And that's an awfully strong claim I can't begin to back.

Syonyk couldn't have know that Apple was going to go full big brother, for example.

No, but as they were the most privacy-focused of the tech companies in a number of ways (mostly in that they used to sell hardware, not data, although now they're all about those subscriptions), it would have been a good bet that they'd change direction at some point.  Such heel-turns are common among the trusted tech companies, sadly.  I timed things wrong.

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...and better at packaging an entire ARM Linux FS with custom kernel at my house (but who has time for that)?

If such things are the only way one can somewhat sanely use a modern computer, such things then should be done.  If hacking together your own OS images to gain a bit more performance let things work on weaker hardware, then one ought do such things.  Maybe.  I'm not sure anymore.  Perhaps one ought simply "Go Galt" and let the whole tech ecosystems crumble.  Does one person matter?  No idea.

For those considering a new laptop, a quick plug for Framework. I was in the market last year for a laptop and decided to take a risk on these guys. It's not the cheapest hardware, nor is it the most performant. [Sorry Syonyk, Intel only at this point.] But I love the concept and really hope they succeed long-term.

If I had to buy a new Intel laptop, it would be a tossup between them and a Purism.  Neither one works well, from what I understand, in terms of having basic stuff like sleep and wifi reliable, which suits me just fine.

I like the concept of repairable, upgradable laptops like the Framework.  The acid test, to me, is "Will they release another board that's a significant upgrade?"  When that happens, I'll be sold on the concept, but for now, until that's been done, it's a good concept awaiting proving.  Pine64 is the same, I like their stuff, but if they release a RK3588 upgrade board or something, well, that would be amazing.

I'm running Catalina on a 2009 Macbook with no issues thanks to this patch.

Can you explain how it works?  Not a "I run it, and can install the OS on unsupported hardware" - but what it's actually doing under the hood?  The source is available, and I've not felt the desire to chew through all of it to understand what it's actually doing.  I played with it briefly, but then decided it wasn't worth making all sorts of rather undocumented changes, via a random binary application, to the core of the OS I was planning to trust.

It's a neat trick, certainly, but I'm not convinced it's a good one.

Speaking of EOL hardware and unsupported OSes, October 14, 2025 is gonna be a rough day in this house.

The sooner you free yourself from that anchor, the better. 

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That said, Manjaro+KDE isn't even enough to keep me booting back into Windows anymore. Either Linux as a whole has lost its way, or I'm no longer a marginally catered demographic. It doesn't help that Serif Affinity has completely ruined using GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus for me, either, and Affinity + WINE == U+1F4A9

I expect less and less out of computers, and am usually pleased with the results.  At this point, I no longer consider anything but a software framebuffer to be required.  If my systems can't play videos, oh well.  Such is life.

My attitude has changed to be, "If I can't do it within a system/OS framework I don't yet object to, it's not worth doing."  It's limiting, certainly... but I'm also not convinced it's wrong, in the approach to computing.  I do still keep Windows around for some gaming, but I'm trying to get off that, and Steam/Proton seems to be worth something there, as is the fact that Minecraft and KSP can run on Linux tolerably (just not Qubes - no GPU acceleration to be found there).  I can't get a new GPU?  Ok, I just won't do things that require one.  I'm still strongly considering de-Inteling the house desktop, but it's a chunk of change I don't know I need to spend.

Anyway.  Sorry.  Rant about the horrid state of modern computing over.  I think most of my new Qubes install is updated, so I'll let it sync mail down.  Thunderbird beats gmail, anymore... though I've not migrated my email hosting off Google yet.


neo von retorch

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #91 on: March 30, 2022, 06:48:44 AM »
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though I've not migrated my email hosting off Google yet.

Not that you asked, but I used the "free" Google Apps / GSuite / <insert 5 more names> tier for custom domain name email hosting with catch-all for 10+ years. Finally made the switch with the looming deprecation of the free tier. Using https://privateemail.com (under NameCheap, which I've been using for domains for a long time). I'm sure it's not perfect, but it worked well enough for me. $1-3/month per account, supports custom domains, catch-all, IMAP/POP3/SMTP/SPF/DKIM, has reasonably good spam filtering, a good enough web UI for managing manual filters, and works just peachy with Thunderbird. Also has some cloud/calendar/contacts storage if you want that kind of thing.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2022, 06:51:04 AM by neo von retorch »

ChpBstrd

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #92 on: March 30, 2022, 09:04:27 AM »

I'm running Catalina on a 2009 Macbook with no issues thanks to this patch.

Can you explain how it works?  Not a "I run it, and can install the OS on unsupported hardware" - but what it's actually doing under the hood?  The source is available, and I've not felt the desire to chew through all of it to understand what it's actually doing.  I played with it briefly, but then decided it wasn't worth making all sorts of rather undocumented changes, via a random binary application, to the core of the OS I was planning to trust.

It's a neat trick, certainly, but I'm not convinced it's a good one.


I haven't dissected the patch either, but as I understand it the gist is to remove/edit the parts of the upgrade that a) detect incompatible equipment and error out, or b) would be incompatible with the older hardware such as modern graphics drivers, or c) prevent upgrades / cause upgrade regression errors.

I was suspicious too, but after a few hours of reviewing years and years of articles, posts, etc. about dosdude1, I decided to take the chance rather than trash working Apple equipment. Most linux distros and apps are also developed by strangers over the internet, and when you install open source software your trust system is the assumption that the broader community would probably identify and eliminate any malware written into the code. There are additional assumptions about the integrity of the websites hosting the images.

If I was running IT procurement for a bank, I would probably not be issuing 12 year old Intel processors with open-source software found on the internet to make it work. That would lead people to hold ME accountable for anything that went awry rather than mega tech companies like Microsoft, even if both options were equally secure and equally buggy. But to worry about such issues from the perspective of personal use might be overkill. Not clicking email links is 95% of the battle.

FINate

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #93 on: March 30, 2022, 09:32:08 AM »
I was suspicious too, but after a few hours of reviewing years and years of articles, posts, etc. about dosdude1, I decided to take the chance rather than trash working Apple equipment. Most linux distros and apps are also developed by strangers over the internet, and when you install open source software your trust system is the assumption that the broader community would probably identify and eliminate any malware written into the code. There are additional assumptions about the integrity of the websites hosting the images.

Concerns about malware being written into OSS relative to proprietary products are, IMO, overstated. I worked the software mines for about 2 decades and witnessed an appalling general lack of controls and auditing around what gets released into the wild. The big tech companies are generally much better about this, but everyone else? Just terrible. All it takes is one disgruntled employee, or a security breach (most of these places also have awful security hygiene) and malicious code can go unchecked for years. Transparency and traceability are the main defense, and the Open Source community does this quite well. And the core parts of Linux are mostly funded by a collection of large tech companies who fund professional OSS developers. In other words, it's not really strangers writing code, but a collaboration of professionals that know each other well.

RE the integrity of sites hosting images, this is where cryptographic signatures come into play... it's really a non issue if these are being verified before install.

Really though, my main issue with an upgrade patch isn't malicious intent, but rather the hackiness of it. The OS/firmware/hardware interface is immensely complex and finicky. I simply don't trust that dosdude1 is going to get these details correct for an OS for which they don't even have source code.

scottish

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #94 on: March 30, 2022, 10:57:50 AM »
You're buying this stuff because you're a technology hobbyist?

I'm not sure that I am, though.  I don't actually like the stuff, but it's the world I know (I make a living in the weeds of it), and I keep trying to figure out if there exists a safe and sane way to use a modern computer on the modern internet (and that's separate from the ethics of it, see earlier). 

I don't get it then.   If you don't like doing it, setup a Linux system for the internet.   Create a VM running Linux or Windows as required for each user to do their internet stuff.   Purge the VM at some regular interval like once a week.   You could probably automate this without too much trouble.

You'll be pretty safe from malware - if you get infected it almost surely won't be able to jump out of the VM and it'll only be around for a maximum of a week.   And you won't be spending so much time doing stuff you don't actually like.

Or is this a trusting trust issue?    https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf     That one's a lot harder...


ChpBstrd

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #95 on: March 30, 2022, 11:03:16 AM »
I was suspicious too, but after a few hours of reviewing years and years of articles, posts, etc. about dosdude1, I decided to take the chance rather than trash working Apple equipment. Most linux distros and apps are also developed by strangers over the internet, and when you install open source software your trust system is the assumption that the broader community would probably identify and eliminate any malware written into the code. There are additional assumptions about the integrity of the websites hosting the images.

Concerns about malware being written into OSS relative to proprietary products are, IMO, overstated. I worked the software mines for about 2 decades and witnessed an appalling general lack of controls and auditing around what gets released into the wild. The big tech companies are generally much better about this, but everyone else? Just terrible. All it takes is one disgruntled employee, or a security breach (most of these places also have awful security hygiene) and malicious code can go unchecked for years. Transparency and traceability are the main defense, and the Open Source community does this quite well. And the core parts of Linux are mostly funded by a collection of large tech companies who fund professional OSS developers. In other words, it's not really strangers writing code, but a collaboration of professionals that know each other well.

RE the integrity of sites hosting images, this is where cryptographic signatures come into play... it's really a non issue if these are being verified before install.

Really though, my main issue with an upgrade patch isn't malicious intent, but rather the hackiness of it. The OS/firmware/hardware interface is immensely complex and finicky. I simply don't trust that dosdude1 is going to get these details correct for an OS for which they don't even have source code.

Somehow dosdude1 did it though. For my install, I experienced zero issues with peripherals, graphics, TimeMachine, preservation of user data and settings, etc. and experienced exactly no crashes or bugs. That ain't bad for decade+ old hardware. It was easier than installing Linux because it was just running an app and getting an update. Plus IIRC the patch app allows you to regress to the original OS.

Perhaps Apple's methods to limit upgrades to eligible machines are simpler than one might think. Write a script to swap out a few key files from the machine's older OS and off you go.

Another option for those who want a corporate development team on their side to keep old hardware up to date, is to enroll in the Apple Beta Software Program.

All this is not to say installing Linux on an old Mac is a bad idea. It's a great idea actually, that will cause the device to outlive your desire to use it and justify investments like new batteries. Beats the hell out of being one of those people who buys a whole new machine every 3-4 years at enormous financial and environmental cost.

Syonyk

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #96 on: March 30, 2022, 11:52:49 AM »
Finally made the switch with the looming deprecation of the free tier.

Yeah, that's biting a few older domains I keep around, I may just drop them entirely and let them go to the spammers.  I don't get much email on them anymore.  Migrate a few things and be good.

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Also has some cloud/calendar/contacts storage if you want that kind of thing.

I'm certain it won't sync to KaiOS... though we've gone back to a wall calendar on the home for most scheduling.  It's nice - kids can view it, and it's not phone-based.  Downside is no portable calendar, but we don't have that busy of a schedule that it's required.  I could always port to a daytimer sort of thing, but it's just not been an issue.

But to worry about such issues from the perspective of personal use might be overkill. Not clicking email links is 95% of the battle.

It's probably overkill.  However, I've been in the weeds of it long enough, and seen how broken it is, that to not do anything about it personally is not a path I'm OK with.

Further, it's not just local system security that's a problem - it's all the data collection going on for general internet use, and that's much harder to avoid.  Aggressive blocking of trackers/ads, browsing without Javascript, etc, help a lot there - but you do lose a lot of website functionality that way.  On the other hand, some quiet corners of the internet still work with JS disabled or mostly nerfed...

In some ways, I'm trying to figure out "Minimum viable computer."  Unfortunately, "minimum viable computer" and "isolated silos" are at odds.  See below.

I don't get it then.   If you don't like doing it, setup a Linux system for the internet.   Create a VM running Linux or Windows as required for each user to do their internet stuff.   Purge the VM at some regular interval like once a week.   You could probably automate this without too much trouble.

Done. ;)  https://www.qubes-os.org/

That's actually exactly what Qubes is doing, just in a more flexible way.  You have hardware separated VMs, all rendering into a common window environment, with dom0 drawn borders around each window so you know which domain it's from.  There are defined paths between VMs if you want to use them, but it's designed to constrain untrusted workloads.  You can have "restored on reboot of the VM" root directories with persistent home directory storage, fully standalone VMs, or disposable VMs that don't persist anything across reboot - and there's support for using those disposable VMs to open PDFs and the like, including a neat "render safe" option that renders a PDF in a disposable VM, and copies out an image-based copy of it that's removed all the fangs from nasty stuff.  Throw in some DNS filtering, and it seems to be a decent option for casual use, as long as you don't care about GPU acceleration, and are OK with needing a lot of RAM.  16GB is useful for a toy, 32GB is more required for moderate use, and heavy use would require more.  You might keep a separate OS install around to dual boot into if you need the GPU or something, too.

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You'll be pretty safe from malware - if you get infected it almost surely won't be able to jump out of the VM and it'll only be around for a maximum of a week.

VM escapes are... less rare than one might prefer, really.  Though Qubes uses Xen for the smaller codebase, and doesn't pass the legacy hardware through.  That's where most of the bugs are.  Don't pass a floppy controller to a VM you want to keep isolated, stick to the virtio/paravirt devices.

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Or is this a trusting trust issue?    https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf     That one's a lot harder...

I'm quite familiar with that paper, have seen modern implementations of it in practice, and it's part of why I don't trust computers... root of trust is hard.  It's harder when things are so complex nobody understands the whole stack.

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #97 on: October 02, 2022, 08:07:28 AM »
@Syonyk are you still done with Apple even though they quietly removed CSAM scanning from iOS?

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Re: Facepunch away. I bought an Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
« Reply #98 on: October 04, 2022, 07:13:24 PM »
Syonyk are you still done with Apple even though they quietly removed CSAM scanning from iOS?

Unfortunately, and please facepunch hard for my failures here, I'm back to using iOS at the moment on my existing 2020 SE.  The hardware of the Flip IV was not holding up to moderate use - I got sick of keys double and triple pressing.  It was to a point after a year of use that I couldn't even dial a phone number without several corrections in a 10 digit dial, and you can imagine just how difficult that makes T9 texting.  I got halfway into the phone to dismantle it before running out of ideas without a lot of prying, and it was far from clear that the issue was dust ingress anyway - probably, but there are a range of other failures for "clicky" buttons that aren't repairable.  I was also somewhat tired of trying to deal with large group texts on it - any sufficiently long chain I had to regularly delete and wait for new messages, because more than 20-30 messages in a chain and it would start responding very slowly, and with more than 100-200 total text messages on the phone, it would take seconds to open the app, similar amounts of time to open a thread, etc.  It did not handle even moderate use very well.  It also didn't handle casual moisture very well at all - being in my pocket in the evening on a fall evening got enough moisture in it to make it act very strangely until it dried out.  I wasn't swimming or anything, just a humid fall evening, in my pocket.

There are some other KaiOS devices that are supposedly more rugged, or perhaps higher performance, but after a year I more or less gave up.  Spending $70 or so on the experiment was fine, spending several hundred for a more rugged device to continue the experiment with an OS that isn't getting updates, and generally wasn't working well for even mild use, didn't strike me as a good use of funds when I had a perfectly good iOS device (facepunch) that I'd already purchased, and was sitting around for the things I couldn't use a KaiOS device for.  One of the buildings I have access to is app-access only, and I do some Part 107 drone operations (commercial flying) on occasion that requires a smartphone (yes, facepunch away, I have a DJI drone that exfils everything to China like the rest of all consumer electronics, I try not to use it very often and I've not built my own with comparable image processing and stability, or written my own apps to interact with it - I just generally try to run with no network connectivity when operating).

I agree that Apple seems to not have actually pushed the CSAM scanning, removing the most serious objection I had.  They've also added Lockdown with iOS 16, which adds quite a few things I find of value - removing the "complex external parsers" for iMessage/SMS, removing complex image formats, eliminating JIT for Javascript, eliminating web fonts, WebGL, WebRTC, and a few other things that are large, complex, exploitable surfaces.  I'm still done using them for desktop, but, yes, facepunch away, I'm back to using one as a phone.  It's stripped of almost all apps except the basics of what I need for communications, and it spends a lot of time shut down and tossed in a backpack pocket somewhere.

I would still prefer a device that wasn't Apple or Android, but, unfortunately, it does seem as though the modern world relies on those to a far greater extent than even I was willing to deal with.  Someone hardier can probably make KaiOS or a ZeroPhone or such work better for them.  I just ran out of patience with it around the time the hardware failed on me.

I'm not using Apple on the desktop anymore, though.  Despite the M1 MacBook Pro being exactly what I've always wanted in a laptop, I'm making other hardware work, and have generally been migrating to Qubes on all my hardware for better isolation between domains in my life.  It doesn't run on ARM boxes yet, and I haven't carved out the six months or so to make that happen (it should be possible, but the ARM SBCs are a bit short on RAM, and the new boards that support more RAM on the RK3588 don't exactly boot and run even the Linux kernel to a desktop yet - not that I've been spending much effort on making those work either).  So that does, annoyingly, require some x86 class systems.

... sorry, I think I hate computers, what we've done with the internet, the data collection habits of consumer electronics, etc.  This is awkward, with it being my income source.  And I clearly don't hate it enough because I've not gone through the process of building my own alternative systems that don't do things I dislike that are yet interoperable with modern systems.  I just host my own server, silo things, and aggressively adblock.  Again, facepunch away, I'm not posting from SyonykOS.

Sufficient to continue making fun of my idiocy for ever having used a computer in the first place?