I am in need of a separate degoogled phone for some things that require high level of privacy (nothing illegal).

I have 2 phones that I can use. One of them is my business phone (it has my business number, apps, data and that sort of stuff) which is now running an OS with all the Google spyware because it's necessary for the apps to work. I can reinstall everything on the second phone and use the first one as the secure device since it supports everything I need. The problem is that it has some issues on vanilla ROMs that I don't really want to deal with and the reinstalling will take a lot of time.

The issue with the second phone is that it is rocking an old MTK chip and rooting instructions are let's say a bit beyond my ability to understand. I still want to use it without Google if possible though. So can I degoogle its stock ROM with ADB or something? And is it worth trying or there will still be some vulnerabilities?

EDIT: to clear some possible misunderstandings, the reason of why I need a separate secure phone is that I am forced to use a very invasive proprietary app that I'd prefer just keeping on a separate device instead of trying to limit its spyware abilities with firewalls and that kind of stuff. I don't trust the last solution much. Also I can't use it in a VM because I need it to always be accessible wherever I am and yk carrying a PC is not an option

When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was "fixed" by just not letting the malware part communicating with the vulnerable ssh related stuff and the actual malware is still there? (I didn't understand 80% of the technical terms and abbreviations in it ok?) Like it still sounds kinda dangerous to me, especially since many experts say that we don't know the other ways this malware can use (except for the ssh supply chain) yet. Is it true? Should I stick with the new distro for now or can I absolutely safely switch back and finally say that I use Arch btw again?

P. S. I do know that nothing is completely safe. Here I'm asking just about xz and libxzlk or whatever the name of that library is

EDIT: 69 upvotes. Nice

I have LineageOS installed on my phone and it has almost weekly updates. Since the device is quite budget, I believe its memory can be damaged by such often updates so I'm not updating it for 2 months already. But there are security fixes and patches in newer versions so I do want to update. My question is: do I have to install every update one by one (there are like 8 of them lol) or can I just install the newest version? All of the updates are minor of course. There are no Android version jumps

EDIT: I installed the latest version as everyone suggested and everything seems to be working fine. Thank you all for help

Recently I tried to clean my PC with an I5 11400F CPU. I removed the GPU and wanted to remove the CPU cooler too but couldn't do it. I tried though and I think I might have damaged the motherboard with a screwdriver in a few places during the process (don't ask how). Can it be the reason for the spikes? Like could I damage some sensors and now they sometimes fail and show 0°C (which is what 100°C to TjMAX means)? There are no other visible issues with the PC though so I guess it can be a just a bug. Btw I can't add screenshots because of some weird Jerboa bug

I updated Jerboa from 0.0.60 (or 0.0.59 I don't remember) to 0.0.61 (all are F-droid versions) and I noticed this issue: the "create post" ("plus") floating action button hides under the navigation panel. Cleaning the cache and disabling-enabling the panel didn't help. The button is still clickable but it doesn't look right. When the panel is disabled it looks fine if course. I'm on Android 13 btw

I'm recovering after quite a bad period of my life. Everything else seems surprisingly ok so far. Absolutely nothing out of ordinary happened yet

EDIT: nvm the good bad repeat cycle is still there so it's all still the same

I've been on the Fediverse for like 2 weeks and the system itself was pretty good and even enjoyable. But I can't stand what's being posted recently. It looks like the humanity is just dead. The negative influence is real on here (and I think it's around the same on other social medias) plus I have some personality development issues now that do cause vulnerabilities to that. I don't want to die with this society so I have to go. I will most likely miss some of the places from here and I will miss my username but hey surviving and being able to help people in the future is much more important. Goodbye Lemmy. It was a nice experience

EDIT: everyone who made me stay here is to be fought. This place has some good things to it but still there's too much for me to handle. And there is bad stuff too which is not that easy to notice but it does intoxicate me over time. FOSS is good but FOSS community sucks.

Introducing the all-new Debian 12 ESDE (Enhanced Security Desktop Edition) Plasma UI pre-alpha v0.2.1: a Debian desktop setup created for a fiction organization's low-end office computers. It features simplified KDE apps, no blur, generally lightweight system settings (some features are disabled or tuned for higher performance and security) and a custom auto-hide floating panel (on the right) with a large clock and a system monitor overview. Security features are planned and are not added yet. For now the main issue is that it's quite difficult to use scroll bars on full-screen windows because the panel opens every time the mouse cursor touches the right edge of the screen. Would love a solution for this. And it often crashes in certain scenarios so yea it's just a pre-alpha now. Oh and the specs:

Distribution: Debian 12 DE/WM: KDE Plasma 5.27 Theme: Breeze Dark Icons: Papirus (it would be more realistic to use the stock icons but I just hate how folders look there so custom icon pack it is) Apps: Konsole, Dolphin (Qt apps) and Firefox (GTK 3 app)

The Debian logo on the top left just opens a slightly tuned KDE's Application Menu so I didn't show that. Everything else isn't really ready yet. Well, could you expect more from a bad setup?

P.S. The actual purposes of this post are to show the flexibility of KDE and deleted

I wanted to post screenshots of my riced KDE setup on Unixporn so I copied them to my phone using a USB cable. And now when I'm trying to add them to a post, it seems to always show the same error (Client request(POST https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image) invalid: 403 . Text "<..."). The app has all the required permissions granted and I'm not banned from the community. What can it be then?

10 - 9, 2 - 1, all the same but all mean "one". And one is nothing. But if it's nothing, why I still haven't put that knife into my heart? Or fall off the edge of level 26? Is it hope or is it fear? In any imaginable case it's still no more than just some pain. But here there's no place for pain. It's just a waste of resources. Though no matter what it is, I'm still waiting for that Altair notification sound. Or I guess it's an orange circle cuz the sound is turned off.

I started it wrong (or maybe right and then switched to wrong it doesn't matter). Even though it was like 3rd attempt, it wasn't a regular attempt at all. It was something else. And it's been 14 months. Quite a lot of time if you ask me. Quite a lot of time of complete happiness. But started wrong and not fixed in time was the recipe for failure. I tried to fix it but I was never even brave enough to say one censored sentence. And it expectedly fell apart. My fault. My bad. My punishment. But guess I just never was brave and honest enough. I understand. But it's not like it's enough to start a normal life again

Even though different Linux distros are often fairly close in terms of real-life performance and all of them have a clear advantage over Windows in many use cases, we can't reject the fact that Arch Linux has undoubtedly won the competition. And now I'm so glad to have another reason to proudly say "I use Arch btw"

::: It was a joke of course :::