ono

Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.

It's still nice to know a tool like obtanium exists, though. Thanks for the link.

If new versions don't make it to F-Droid, they might as well not exist for me. There are only a couple of apps that I find important enough that I'll spend time manually building/pulling/installing, and a Lemmy reader isn't one of them. Thanks for the tip, though.

I start with whatever is on F-Droid, and narrow it down from there.

Jerboa was the only option there until recently. I see Voyager and Eternity are there now. I'll have to give them a try.

Same. Our communications and communities shouldn’t be owned by a company.

In most places, there's money in enforcement, and power in disenfranchisement.

I don't know what Thailand-specific motives might be in play here, if any.

Well, yes, that's why I asked. Some newcomers to linux find Plasma more familiar than GNOME et al. Having it preinstalled can help them get comfortable faster, with less effort.

Do Pop!_OS AND Linux Mint have KDE Plasma variants, for newcomers who don't know how to swap desktop environments?

I’m completely for shutting down the affordable connectivity program

The ISPs should have to provide the service at a minimal rate to same said families and also offer 100/100 minimum service to anyone

Maybe reverse the order of those ideas, so as not to make the lives of people who are already struggling even harder.

in the regions they operate.

ISPs would then have an incentive to avoid operating in poor neighborhoods. Mitigating that could be tough, given that internet service deployments are already patchy in many places.

Another approach might be municipal broadband, which big ISPs have been lobbying against for ages, often successfully.

we have no real way of knowing where the spyware is. It may may be baked into the main OS, the added apps or other.

Or in the hardware, like the baseband processor or even something more obscure. Replacing the OS won't help with that.

Just wait until you learn about the Benevolent Dictator For Life.

Your current approach of talking raw SMTP is likely to be more hassle than is worthwhile, and since the days of permissive SMTP servers are long gone, might not work at all.

Since you appear to be using an Debian-based Linux distro, I suggest this approach:

• If you don't specifically need exim, consider replacing it with the lightweight dma package (DragonFly Mail Agent): apt install dma
• Configure dma (or exim) to use your ISP's SMTP server as a smart host. (Or the Gmail SMTP server if your ISP doesn't provide one.)
• Use the /usr/sbin/sendmail command (which comes with dma or exim) to send messages from your scripting language of choice.

If you prefer to receive messages as SMS, note that most major mobile carriers maintain an email-to-sms gateway for this purpose. Some web searches will probably lead you to the one for your carrier. They usually accept email at an address like 123456789@sms-gateway.example.com