Steam Deck adhesive is unironically one of my favorite smells ngl. Guilty as charged

I’ve been using Calyx for about a year and I feel like it does the job well. Here are some things I’ve done to harden my Calyx phone:

VPN: Turn on “Always on VPN”, " Block Connections without VPN", and “Global VPN” in Settings>Network>Your VPN. I use Mullvad VPN as I think they have a great reputation and also is easy on battery. Furthermore, you can pay with cash voucher or crypto. You can also use the built in Calyx VPN but it is a bit slower. If you use Mullvad you can also turn on custom DNS, quantum resistance, and multihop if you wanna go a bit further.

Apps: Only use trusted apps and avoid “big tech” apps like instagram and anything google. Anything from FDroid is vetted through a strict FOSS policy and is generally safe to use. Look for alternatives to playstore apps and try to replace as many as you can.

Settings: App access: In settings>Apps>Permissions, only allow what apps need. For example, your photos app doesnt need location data, so keep location off. Go through each app and remove as many permissions as you see fit. Also make sure any apps with systemwide access are trustworthy. Camera and Mic: Calyx offers camera and mic off switches via the main pulldown menu. Make sure they are always off and only enable them when necessary. DNS: use a private dns host, such as base.dns.mullvad.net (found in network settings) Auto-Reboot: turn on auto reboot in settings so that if your phone is ever brute forced physically, it will make it much harder to crack USB: turn off USB access to your phone unless needed under “More privacy settings”

SIM/Contacts/Phone Generally apps have access to your contacts and phone calls. If you get a sim and phone number through JMP, all of your calls, texts and contacts will be sent through your vpn/internet rather than a cellular network (although they only service Canada and the US). This wont protect you from whoever you call/send to, but it will secure you on your end. Also note that any sim has the ability to triangulate location via cell towers. Jmp doesnt protect from this, but does have a degree of separation from the actual telecom provider. You could also use a faraday bag while you’re out as an alternative. (Edit: just saw you are stuck with a sim. You can actually get JMP as a second sim with a second number. Use your main sim for data and your JMP sim for call/text. You would still be able to be triangulated, but your provider would at least be barred from monitoring the XMPP communications.)

Firewall: Use the built in firewall to always block new network requests. Only allow vpn access with exceptions you see as needed. Also do so for the system apps, but only block what you know about. You can research what each system app does, but there are a lot.

Work profile: Use the work profile to isolate higher-risk apps apart from your main apps. For example, I have a copy of the fennec browser in my work profile to access instagram, so that not only is it isolated by browser, but also it’s completely separate from all of my other apps.

Browser: use Iceraven, Fennec, Tor, or Firefox to browse. Be aware that Firefox sends diagnostic data, but the other ones are much more hardened. All of them also have a feature to add webpages as apps if you don’t want an actual app (e.g. instagram).

Messaging: Use Signal, SimpleX, Jabber/XMPP, or Matrix for communication. Only compromise for friends and family, and if possible try to get them on board too, although that is harder than it sounds.

Physical protection: Use a long login password and the Sentry app from fdroid to purge your phone if password is entered wrong too many times. Set up a bare bones dummy user profile in case someone forces you to login to your phone (e.g. a criminal or a nosy relative).

Location: Keep your location off or disabled entirely. Try to navigate maps the old fashioned way. It’s hard at first, but gets easier with practice. You can use an offline map like Organic Maps. I used it with no internet to cross the USA from New York to California and it went smoothly if you have a good sense of navigation.

I hope some of this helps!

I did a deep dive into frontends because I love organizing stuff in general. I use different frontends for each device I have because they all have different pros, but overall my favorite is Playnite because of its metadata and sorting features. For Windows I use Playnite, on Linux I use Pegasus, on Steam Deck I use RetroDeck/EmulationStation, and on handhelds I use Knulli Firefly.

Playnite is imo the king, because it has really beautiful themes with custom cover art and can sort games in basically any way possible: by system, rating, genre, name, release date, you name it. The only con is that it’s Windows exclusive (for the near future) and is janky in Wine/Lutris.

Pegasus is spectacular for its fine grained control, and can be configured to do basically anything. Its like the Arch Linux of the frontend world; start with the basics and build from the ground up. With tinkering, it works great on almost any platform.

RetroDeck is great because it’s plug n play. I love to tinker, but I also wanted a platform to just play my games without hastle or messing around. I find myself actually playing my games on the deck instead of tinkering with the frontend.

Knulli Firefly is great for smaller screen handhelds for a similar reason. It’s very customizable, but also works straight away with little to no hastle. It’s also better than most stock OSes that ship with emulation devices

And the Linux community is Gordon Ramsay

In my opinion linux runs old windows games better than windows itself. When I was on XP I used to play games like Starcraft and Lemmings Revolution which absolutely refused to work on Windows 10 after I switched, even in compatability mode. Later when I switched to linux, they worked great with Lutris with very few issues. Linux is great for older games. For newer games, Steam has most bases covered and worked ootb.

I see a couple of other comments reccomending exfat; I’ve had problems with exfat with both the Steam flatpak and the Steam system package. Exfat does not support linux symlinks which are needed for some if not most Steam games to work properly. You will have to re-install your games onto an ext4 or linux-friendly filesystem, for Steam at least.

Emulation and GOG is a different story though. I have both on an exfat drive and I can access and play them with both windows and linux.

In terms of security, you will be at a slight risk using an unsupported os in the future. But hey, some people I know are still on Windows 7, so it isn’t a huge risk. As long as you practice basic computer hygene and have an antivirus running (windows defender (easy), malwarebytes (secure), or clamAV (open source) are decent picks) you’ll be fine.

Yes, you can find it in the themes directory. It also has really good documentation on github in case you want to make custom collections or swap out game system cover art. I went down the qml rabbit hole because of pegasus, it was super fun

The problem lies more with the phone itself no longer being supported, as both Calyx and Graphene only do harm-reduction updates after end of life, not full security updates. You will be taking a risk using either, but both are better than stock android.

For some reason you’ll find a lot of Calyx/non-graphene os hate on lemmy (just look at the dowvotes on anything calyx related, even on this post). But if your threat model is just combatting coprorate data harvesting, de-googling, or further securing your phone, it works well and does as promised.

You should also look into Fairphones with Calyx. They’re a bit pricey, but they get hardware support for 10 years instead of 5 (most android phones) and they are built with replacable parts in mind to prevent e-waste and unnecessary cost.

So in other words, yes you will have to buy a phone every 5 years (or 10 with fairphone) in order to have comprehensive security, even with graphene or calyx.

No problem! I think it depends on the theme. I use the Retro Mega Next theme which is optimized for handhelds, but it works great with mouse and keyboard.

Very nice! I will look into using it

Yeah, but I see it as a pro and a con. With previous browsers I used like Mull, Fennec and Bromite, the store versions usually lagged behind, usually due to FDroid shenanigans, and downloading it from the source eliminates the middleman. While it is more work, I do use my browser for many important things, so I feel like it’s worth it for my use case.

I use Pegasus at the moment as it’s extremely customizable, although it does have a bit of a learning curve since you do most things through media.txt files. You can configure launch commands, box art/media/videos through an external scraper (I use Skyscraper), and you can point to bash files which opens up use of the terminal for basically anything you want to do OS side. It also has many different themes, basic metadata, and sorts games by system.

Emulation station is also another popular choice and is more out-of the-box minded bit still requires a bit of know how.

I also really like Playnite because it’s video game sorting heaven, but sadly it’s windows only and is really janky in wine/lutris. I eagerly await the day a working linux port arrives.

Iceraven is my go to, been using it for about a year now. It works great

I second this, I greatly prefer news from real people with their own style, especially when there’s so much ai stuff and corporate boringness elsewhere. I’d love to see a part 5, good job!

Edit: Part 5!

I also enjoy dualsense and there is definitely quality there, but I could not get it to work with a handfull of emulators on linux for some reason. I’m sure there could be some tinkering to do to get it working but I’ve just been using xbox series for plug n play

Not generic, but I’ve been using Xbox Series controllers with LMDE. They were plug n play and work flawlessly out of the box. I’ve used them with both bluetooth and wired and have had no problems with emulation and steam. You’d probably save more buying a used xbox controller for about $30-$50 than trial and error with cheaper off-brand gamepads

Can second this strategy. I still dual boot W10 and LMDE, but every day I find myself booting Windows less and less. All I really use it for is Roblox and Playnite, and Playnite isn’t even necessary because I’ve been getting more and more used to Pegasus on Linux.

You just gotta get comfy with a bit of program migration, for example I used to use programs like Word, Brave browser, and Playnite, and learned LibreOffice, Librewolf, and Pegasus one at a time until I didn’t need the often worse Windows version.