Micro form factor corporate “desktops” are the easy and cheap answer here. More expensive but also easy are the n100 lil boxes. You may need to disable or cover a bunch of gamer leds.

Weirdly cheap but with one hidden cost is appletv 4k, you gotta either pay monthly or one time to the infuse (jellyfin client) app developer to unlock dolby decoding. TBH I don’t mind paying one time for software, it’s the subscriptions that bug me also it’s what we still use so that’s why it makes the list.

After all the stuff about super/bad box started getting around I haven’t been able to really trust android set tops, which sucks because the price is right on those little fuckers.

Also I often found awful support environments for safely using android tv boxes, lack of lockable bootloaders, undocumented memory for blowing the original install back in, weird variants of weird socs.

It made me do the Seinfeld at the movies gif, ymmv.

Yes the unverified apps thing will affect you no matter what. It’s not getting better any time soon. There are a lot of reasons for that.

You can’t “de-google” if you are 100% married to googles navigation service. It’s gonna become much harder to avoid play services (the google play store and all its telemetry) if you need a banking app and teams even if they seem to work now because the “reasons” above.

Other people have said that “privacy is a spectrum” in response to the following unconventional advice, and that’s true! Your conception of privacy may simply be getting away from the default apps and keeping the play store! Just keep that in mind:

If you’re actually gonna do any of the things we consider phone stuff on your phone, in terms of privacy and security it goes graphene > appropriately configured ios > a big gap > everything else.

Maybe consider switching. There isn’t a big cost difference anymore.

Speaking from experience with both android and ios platfoms including many custom roms and the alternative repos/app stores, it’s much, much easier to stay as private and secure as possible on ios.

I agree that the action is very consequential, the pipeline in particular was an unexpected shock with real tangible effects. I only was saying that the overwhelming majority of anti euro stuff is rhetoric, not that the actions weren’t important.

It was worth saying that most of what is done against Europe is rhetoric because a subsequent American regime could walk those positions back (not that any smart leader of a European state would trust them). Specifically if in the future one of the pressures that could be urging European nations to move to Microsoft alternatives were to disappear, it would be common sense to use the ms alternative program as a bargaining chip to get what the state actually wants: to not change anything and not have to retrain everyone.

I kind of agree with you but the whole point of the eurozone and eu was to elevate the interests held in common across the region to avoid balkanization and competition between constituent states.

Once the us is aligned against that construction the cheese stands alone and European crack up is inevitable.

Of course American anti euro aktion has overwhelmingly been in word instead of deed, despite your handful of good examples.

It’s very likely that European politicians will follow their unique european polities and place the interests of their individual nations over the interests of their region.

Doubtful. Us hostility to Europe is overwhelmingly in rhetoric rather than deed and on the off chance that tech independence is a European ambition (to the extent that a European identity, let alone European governing body survives prolonged American hostile deeds) the smart play is to use an open software test case to figure out what your requirements are then get a contractor like Microsoft to fulfill them even if that means making a spinoff company.

Even if the idea of some kind of libre Europe wasn’t idealistic utopian thinking, its actual existence would be just another elephant on the open source dance floor to be avoided, not a powerful ally to be celebrated.

Afaik it is, but it only started in 2024…

Every euro country or agency that has done or announced this has simply used it to extract concessions from Microsoft and either stayed with or switched back to windows.

Yeah I guess if you’re constantly slamming your penis in the car door than having a button that turns back time would be one approach.