Transfem Non-binary Aro Bi | Progressive Left

Game, software & web dev from Romania. Interested in science, politics, humanities and more.

Against all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

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Developing games at my indie game studio, @vantainteractive, working on #Prisonia on Godot and other projects using my engine toolkit, Sapphire.

Also check out my alt accounts on my own instance:
@alextecplayz
@vantainteractive
@prisonia

#gamedev #gameenginedev

  • 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: November 18th, 2022
  • AlexTECPlayz@techhub.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com•CalyxOS is back
    41·
    2 months ago

    @WitchKnight AFAICT CalyxOS is similar to LineageOS, the defunct DivestOS and so on, basically only modifying ‘surface-level’ things to improve privacy and security by editing the Android OS, but no significant modifications to the kernel.

    GrapheneOS can go deeper and create their own, more secure memory allocator, they can integrate things better via the kernel since GOS is only available for Google Pixel devices, which means they can provide the most security on those devices.

    CalyxOS is still secure, it’s basically the same as AOSP, which already has a good security model (being the official Android source code and all), and they try to minimize what data gets sent to Google, and trying to spoof what they have to share with them.

    GOS goes a step further, they don’t include GMS by default, and they have developed a custom integration which lets you install Google Play Services as user applications (as opposed to system-level), which means GMS cannot access some data, and is basically sandboxed within the user-mode limits. They also forked Chromium (as Vanadium) and also modified it to integrate with the kernel-level improvements such as the hardened memory allocator (malloc).

    Of course, people will go out of their way to say that CalyxOS actually weakens the security because they can’t keep up with the frequent security updates to upstream AOSP, which may be true, but they have recently retuened from a hiatus, promising new features and more updates, which remains to be seen if they can keep up.

    -–

    There have been debates about what’s what between CalyxOS and GOS for probably years, I don’t really keep up with shitty drama, but at least on a subjective level to me it seems Daniel is quite the asshole to other people that aren’t fully aligned (or neutral) to GOS.

    They dried retracting the rights to the browser patches used by Cromite, but that didn’t work because that’s not how code licenses work, for the simple reason that someone from the CalyxOS project created a pull request on GitHub. Created a pull request!

    It didn’t even get merged since there wasn’t much to see, but for the sole reason that the PR was made and Cromite’s developer had a few comments, Daniel barged in and caused a scene. The GOS account regularly gets into arguments with people on Fedi, they block anyone that’s even slightly opposed or critical of them.

    -–

    Sure, the code is great and I probably would use GOS if I could afford a Pixel device, but it comes with the stink carried by Daniel’s drama. If there was a comparable project to GOS, I’d use that instead.

    There’s also this “objective” comparison page: https://eylenburg.github.io/android/_comparison.htm, but do note that Daniel lurks and comments on the github PRs and issues of this site.

  • AlexTECPlayz@techhub.socialtoCybersecurity@sh.itjust.works•GrapheneOS: Another contributor attacked & banned by Daniel Micay
    6·
    1 year ago

    @maltfield Here’s another example of I’m guessing Daniel, being an asswipe towards someone that had a genuine concern with the ‘apocalyptic’ way GrapheneOS tends to exaggerate their messages. It’s clear from that sentence that “the final version of GrapheneOS” is not intended to be referring to some 24-hour support or whatever they tried to explain later in the thread.

    https://mstdn.io/@eskuero/114824540277758406

    Notice the loaded words in the thread, “extreme”, “misrepresenting”, “lying”, and so on. That user wasn’t fucking lying or misrepresenting, they were genuinely concerned after reading that stupidly-written message on their Matrix.

    There’s a boatload of threads like these where the GOS account jumps to people’s throats with a knife for the smallest things.

    Write something that may not be entirely true, perhaps you’ve heard some rumor or whatever somewhere and just want to get official news? Oops, you’re lying, you’re extremely misrepresenting what we wrote, please don’t ever interact with us again, we’ll ban you, etc.

  • AlexTECPlayz@techhub.socialtoCybersecurity@sh.itjust.works•GrapheneOS: Another contributor attacked & banned by Daniel Micay
    13·
    1 year ago

    @maltfield Here we go again, another nothing-burger that doesn’t surprise me at all. I love the project, but Daniel just seems insufferable from his comments in that thread, and other, older, comments.

    With all respect to him and the project, but if something as simple, as miniscule, very little drama-worthy such as a thread asking for a simple gesture feature causes him to “lose an hour of [his] work” and to make him worry about more attacks on the project, it just indicates bigger problems than just a simple focus loss due to some small issue that gained virtually ZERO interactions besides a total of four people, including Daniel and the community mod.

    I get GOS has been harassed by other projects, but even mentioning a ‘competing’ ROM such as /e/OS or CalyxOS counts as bad behaviour and inciting harassment and this and that, it’s obviously not a good look.

  • AlexTECPlayz@techhub.socialtoF-Droid@lemmy.ml•Neo Backup vs DataBackup
    4·
    1 year ago

    @arschfidel They’re almost the same, save for a few things. Neo Backup supports scheduling backups. DataBackup does not.

    I’ve tested Neo Backup a while ago, but I’ve settled on DataBackup instead.

    Note that for DataBackup, the APK architecture that you install MUST match your device’s ‘primary’ architecture. If it’s arm64, you must install an arm64 version of DataBackup, other versions such as arm (32-bit) will not let you past the start screen, it’s a limitation they’ve imposed, perhaps it makes sense?

    Either way, DataBackup served me well for the past year that I’ve been using, and it’s been incredibly helpful since I frequently upgrade custom ROMs or mess around, and DB hasn’t failed once.

    Do note that when you copy apps to be restored (e.g sending a folder from a backup server or PC to your phone, you must also copy the ‘config’ folder as well, otherwise the restore operation will fail).

  • AlexTECPlayz@techhub.socialtoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Nextcloud or Immich?
    3·
    1 year ago

    @simop_jo Well, I’ve only tested Nextcloud so far on my Raspberry Pi 5, but I would definitely use Immich if I had the budget for a NAS right now.

    I want the Google Photos experience, which is most likely the intended target audience for this service.

    They’re not really comparable IMO, different feature sets for different use cases.

    Nextcloud is more like a budget Google all-in-one that has fewer features, looks and behaves differently, while dedicated services such as Immich (alternative to Google Photos), FileRun (alternative to Google Drive) aim to be the hyper-specific, ultra-seamless alternatives you can plop in and not feel that you’re missing any feature, and that look and feel the same.