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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Nope, pretty normal. You’ll find that you’ll need frontends and proxies for tons of things. For example Instagram hasn’t ever worked for me with a VPN. I no longer have an account anyway, but for the times someone sends me a link I’ve had to find sites that let you view the content without actually visiting Instagram. Same with reddit, reddit frontends are very good these days (I’d recommend any Redlib instance). Also, sometimes a specific VPN server is IP blocked and you can just connect to a different server to view a web site that blocked you initially. It is a fair amount of work, but honestly its helped me slow down my consumption of random bullshit anyway haha. I use ProtonVPN and pay for premium.



  • NVIDIA definitely has stability issues, newest drivers still kernel panic on resume from suspend. Only thing more you can do is try to capture debug logs with nvidia-bug-report.sh (I go in during a crash via SSH, usually the system is still responsive for a little while after), and post it to the NVIDIA Linux forums. They do actually seem to use the feedback there, NVIDIA reps respond from time to time and say they’ve submitted bug reports from the feedback. Otherwise, after that yeah you just do what you have to do for a usable system and wait…


  • You are getting replies because you are posting opinions that don’t hold up in the real world. As a former Catholic I know from first hand experience the crisis of identity that occurs when your personally held beliefs start to clash with your local culture and the doctrine of the religion you gew up with. It is not surprising (hence the effectiveness of this con) for someone to still identify as a member of a religion that explicitly rejects their belief system.

    I grew up thinking that the LGBTQ community were lost souls who faced damnation if they did not remain chaste (official doctrine), which of course led to deep prejudices resulting from this “othering” of queer people (Catholic community culture). For years after I began to disagree with the official doctrine and recognize my prejudices, I still identified myself as Catholic. For those who grow up in religious environments the religion becomes an integral part of your identity growing up, and it is not easy to let that go.

    My personal experience is that I still felt hope that the Catholic Church’s doctrine could be changed, and that my participation in the community could help bring that about. It took a long time to realize this was a lost cause, and that reconciling my internal conflict required real action. Telling my parents I was no longer Catholic was one of the hardest things I ever did, and I am no longer close with them.

    So, to sum it up: someone who identifies as both gay and Muslim should not be an object of ridicule by default. Everyone’s experience with religion is different. I hope this gives you a new perspective; sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. The article describes a pretty impressive con job, which was realistic enough to last for years…








  • Graphene here as well! I gave them that feedback in the support email chain… no reason to allow this setting combo without a warning. Also not clear why split tunnel doesn’t remedy this, I would have thought apps excluded via split tunnel would be exempt from the VPN while it is connected and Kill switch is active (although obviously it makes sense that nothing is excluded when kill switch activates on vpn disconnect)






  • My experience so far as a new user, which might be a little redundant but here goes:

    • Overall, there is a balance to work out between security, decentralization and FOSS, and anonymity.
    • for the average user, using sandboxed google play is pretty much essential. Otherwise you’ll spend days trying to figure out why you aren’t getting notifications, why certain integrations aren’t working, etc. Notifications especially are just painful without google FCM. HOWEVER, I do not believe it is mandatory to sign in to your Google account for notifications to work, so you could in theory avoid signing in at all and still take advantage of FCM.
    • multiple profiles don’t make sense for my use case (and possibly most people). Graphene does advertise the use case of having banking apps on a separate profile, but after attempting to do just that I believe it is a very niche use case that would actually benefit from it. Obviously a great tool to have for privacy and security, but not something you’ll went to use everyday.
    • For the move away from Imessage, it is indeed kinda painful and still ongoing. The simple fact is that people are super weird about switching from I message, and honestly going straight to Signal was a no-go for many of my contacts. I’ve had to settle for WhatsApp, Telegram, and even Discord… I just have had to accept that the transition will take time. I’ve weighed that privacy issue against the privacy gain of GrapheneOS itself, and the benefits of supporting a 3rd party OS option, and I still believe using Graphene is better overall. And, once people get used to using a 3rd party app vs Imessage, in a couple years the jump to Signal will be no problem at all.
    • banking apps are super painful. That being said, here is an opportunity to vote with your wallet… Support apps that don’t require invasive system access for “security”. For me, the biggest eye opener was that there are NO GENERIC THIRD PARTY TAP TO PAY PROVIDERS IN THE US. It is only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google Wallet. And, as is pointed out on the Graphene user guide, 3rd party apps are allowed to implement their own NFC payment system, but the extremely vast majority simply choose to use Wallet or Apple Pay. This is obviously rather scary as more and more retailers use these systems, and I’ve realized I would gladly support and use any alternative at this point. Without Graphene, I would have never even thought about it.



  • If it works on chromium I’d consider that even if it is a quirk on the bank website, chromium is handling it cleanly and allowing you to use the site. That’s something we probably want incorporated in Firefox. I’d encourage submitting the bug report to Mozilla, and don’t assume too much about what they can/cannot do!


  • I think the key part here is that it’s a guess on your part whether using Firefox is the cause. Do you get any specific error when using the website? Or does something just “not work”, such as you click a button and it does nothing?

    Also, I’ve run into stuff like this before, and my best bet has been to be flexible about using other browsers to work around issues. I would suggest testing the banking website with Chromium (or even Chrome). If it works, file a bug with Mozilla (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla) and just use Chromium/Chrome for only that website until the bug is fixed.

    This will allow you to still do business, while still participating in open source via a helpful bug report that could end up benefitting others as well.