It’s part of /e/os. Basically it attempts to roll the functions of FDroid and Aurora store into one. I dont think it’s made for distribution outside their OS. For anyone on other platforms, Fdroid and Aurora will fill the same roles just fine.

This is so correct. Australia tried the ban and it’s done absolutely nothing. Put the restrictions on the ones causing the harm.

It already supports realtime audio plugins now, which are non-destructive.

Correct, there is extremely scant evidence for it being a backdoor in the video

I’ve been daily-driving it for several years. I think it’s very good, generally, and am happy to stick with it for the foreseeable future. Murena asks you to sign up for their cloud services on first boot, but if you say no, they’ll never bother you about it again. I don’t use them, so can’t comment on whether they’re any good.

I have found their App Lounge app (Google Play Store/FDroid alternatives rolled into one) to be spotty. Sometimes I’ve found I had to reboot the phone to get it to download/update apps. They have made updates recently that improve this a lot and I haven’t seen it presenting these kinds of issues over the last couple months, but I won’t say they’ve definitively fixed the issues. You can always fall back to Aurora store for Google Store apps and FDroid for FOSS apps if the App Lounge gives you big headaches.

I use FOSS apps where possible over Google apps. Organic Maps is excellent, often better than GMaps. Banking apps work fine for me. Haven’t tried NFC for payments, I don’t use it.

There’s no instances of Murena and related orgs doing anything shady about data collection or anything afaik, their big conceit is privacy and they’d be sunk if there were any scandals around that. If you have a threat model that requires an extremely high amount of security however, you may prefer to steer clear as /e/ freely admit they make trade-offs in hardening for convenience and ease of use. While they incorporate the latest security patches from LineageOS, GrapheneOS continually allege that /e/'s modifications can make their OS less secure than stock Android. How true that is, I don’t know. Assume your phone can be hacked at any time if it were specifically targeted.

If you’re in the market for a phone that’s just good for everyday use but doesn’t have all the Google tie-ins, I can recommend it.

Nor does it prevent him from being one

Something? You think? You were talking like you knew

If it’s any consolation, LibreOffice Calc have now merged Table Support for the next release, 13 years after it was requested. (Link)

Jitsi Meet would be the first one I think of.

I know that the market verdict is “eh who cares”, but I really dont think anyone should think that invasive kernel-level anticheat is at all acceptable.

Great distro, I ran it on the daily too for a good while. It’s extremely well designed and if you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt with its design opinions, I think you’ll often come to agree with them (not all, but many)

Only thing I don’t like about it was the bugs and not having an in-place upgrade path stops me from calling it a “beginner friendly” distribution. I admire their ambition though, given they’re just a small boutique distro and they’ve done some great work for UX in the free desktop.

I am using Dynu. It works fine and it’s free, no complaints. Their app for Linux to update periodically didn’t seem to work well from my experience, I just set up a cron job to do it instead.

I used it for a while. It worked great.

I am just starting to play around with SurgeXT, after coming from a metal background and playing mostly with amp sims, drum kits and some orchestral libraries. I feel like I’ve discovered a new world.

Fender Studio does seem like a nice alternative to something like Garageband.

I also switched away from Ableton on Windows a couple years ago. At this point, after working in several of them, I swear by Ardour.

It’s a little ugly, it’s a fair bit to wrap your head around at first, but it does serve every one of my needs. It even recently got a clip launcher much like Ableton’s “Live” view! The only thing I really miss from Ableton is its audio warping engine, but that’s long been one of Ableton’s killer features, even compared to Windows and Mac DAWs.

It kind of depends on your use case though; what are you using the DAW for? Demoing? DJing? Traditional tracking and mixing?

Also about people’s comments about Bitwig and Reaper - yes, they are indeed damned good. If you want a 1:1 parallel with Ableton and don’t mind spending a bit of money, Bitwig is about your best bet.

I think that’s q bit overblown. You have an option to use a Murena account in place of a Google account. I just said no thanks and everything works perfectly fine with no services affected. In terms of security of privacy of the Murena account itself, no idea. Never used one.

“Mum, if you really loved me, you’d be able to compile your own kernel”

I tried to use it for admin in a Windows environment, but half the modules I needed wouldn’t work in Linux which made it pretty much useless.

I guess not using it when everyone else is would be another way of fingerprinting too