2020-08-09
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I think I have bought one new computer during my lifetime and
maybe two phones. Both of them were the sort of phones that would
be called "burners" these days. The rest of my gear is second
hand. Except for the Pinephone.

I was following what Purism was doing for maybe a year or two,
but I couldn't make the huge commitment of paying something like
700 dollars for a phone that didn't exist.

Then I found out about the Pinephone and followed the development
for a year or so. When they started taking orders I still wasn't
sure but decided to take a chance since it was for "a good cause".

Well now it is six months later and it really starts looking like
I will finally have the sort of smartphone that I can carry 
around without feeling like some creepy entity owns me.

Sure, the phone was made in China so there is an amount of guilt
that comes with it. If you want a guilt free phone, maybe Purisms
2000 dollar phone will work out for you. I guess the way I
balanced the ethics is something like this: 1) The open source
aspect is very valuable since the phone market is in a 
stranglehold. 2) Purism seems to not have the backing of the open
source community. 3) Open source is pretty much the only tool we
(the people) have against tyrants of any kind. So in a way China
is building tools that can be used against its rule. So in some
ways it is better than buying Chinese built Apple, for example.

This guilt trip is sort of a normal step in any bigger purchase
I make. That's why I don't buy many new things.

But anyway, now I have the phone and some of the OSes are starting
to mature. I have been quite impressed with what PostmarketOS has
to offer, Arch and Manjaro are getting there as well, but now this
week I came upon SXMO, simple x mobile or whatever. What it is is
a tiling window manager with dmenu and a lot of the control
happens through the two "volume buttons" and a "selection button"
on the phone. These are hardware buttons. You click two times on 
the selection button and a terminal appears. You click one time, a 
keyboard appears. There is a system menu you can browse with the
volume buttons. I really like the tactile feedback here. You
really know how many clicks you made. This is something that was
lacking in smartphones and I didn't even realize.

Of course there are more important things, like running Lynx
through Tor, for example! The freedom! Don't have to worry about
some third party software saving the keypresses or some other
sneaky business.

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