ICs, passives, and transistors. /thread.

There are 2 big IC designers in Europe: Nordic and ST, but I believe all of their production is in China and Taiwan. If trade crashes, we have the IP, but no way to manufacture at scale. IMEC here in Belgium has 4 small fabs, but there isn’t that much else and the workforce is expensive as fuck which is why they do research IC’s almost exclusively.

We have a lot of camera IC designing in the EU also, but they are almost all fabless. Luckily we have ASML who know everything technical about IC manufacturing.

We have less knowledge on how to actually mass produce ICs anymore efficiently even though we create all of the tools and methods here because everything is done in the east that will see any volume production. PCBs and assembly are already 2-3x as expensive.

In my opinion, we need huge subsidies to get component and IC scale fabs here.

The few things I don’t like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):

• Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss

• Digital signing simply doesn’t work, won’t work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,

• Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don’t (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)

• The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)

But besides those small things, it seem great to me.

How it works for some people is the chest strap would be detected by the fitness app (polar, strava, run keeper, opentracks, etc…) and then the activity would be recorded with the chest strap. Then the activity is either synced with google health connect or google fit, apple health, etc… So it shows up in your watch app overview.

“Smarter” smart watches I think can also connect themselves to the chest strap instead of the phone and the heart rate from the chest strap would “override” the watch’s that it then sends to the app, so you don’t have to sync with an external app. Though there might be more problems with compatibility even though all chest straps should use the standard Bluetooth “Heart Rate Service” to be completely interoperable.

Withings has barely better than a guess heart rate correlation during activity sadly, so not great for sports. But they look nice!

What you can also do (that many people do) is get whatever fitness watch that has the features that you want, then get the Polar H10 chest strap for working out, which is the gold standard for heart rate measurement and much more accurate than PPG measurement.

That’s interesting because there are a lot of European companies with huge foreign investors (Spotify I think falls under this) where a giant share of the profits are going to foreign oligarchs and hedgefunds.

But then companies like Nothing (phones) who literally only have a sales office and are registered in London, but the entire business is carried out in China (design, manufacturing, coding, etc…) So the business is basically 80% chinese. I guess technically the profits are registered to a European country, but the CEO getting the profits was born in China, is a Swedish citizen, and has exclusively worked in the Chinese phone industry in China until this. (I don’t know if he is a dual citizen actually)

I think profits are only one part of the puzzle. Manufacturing being within Europe is very important also because the loss of manufacturing means you are completely reliant on others for basic functions (smartereveryday on YouTube actually has a good example of this but for America), also the wages for workers is another piece.

Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.

If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.

But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc… In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc… On the big HDDs.

It would require an entire separate TPM chip, integration of it on the main PCB, and all the the firmware and software handling that comes with that, and collaboration with the GrapheneOS team (which I hear on forums and people who have worked with them, is often not a pleasant experience) for an extremely small percentage of their sales.

Doing /e/ or calyx would definitely be significantly easier.

Absolutely can’t wait for new battery tech for grid storage too! Sand batteries that can use otherwise-unusable sand, sodium-Ion batteries (or mainly inverters that can handle the expanded voltage range compared to Lithium-based), expansion of pumped water batteries where it works. This is about to be THE time for government-funded alternative batteries across the world. Energy would get so plentiful that it wouldn’t even be profitable for fossil fuels anymore. That is the dream. Of course there is a 99% chance that every single government in the world drops the ball completely.

I’m sorry. There are people who go to an adult hardcore porn site and then type in “Suitable for work”??? Like do you think the site wouldn’t get flagged at your work?

KNX.

Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)

If you ever need a language buddy, let me know.

There is also a Learn Dutch discord that is fairly active.

Duolingo sucks ass for learning languages. Dutchpod101 is pretty good, but the best is a combination of dutch books + listening like dhtchpod101 or some simple news podcasts or so.

Maybe people have gotten Saned for network scanning working on other things than bazzite, but I can’t figure it out and the discord is never helpful.

But document signing is a technical limitation caused by flatpak. You can technically do it by installing your entire office and authentication suite on a rooted distrobox, but then that is defeating a fair amount of the point of ease of use and sandboxing. I haven’t tested that though so even that might have some bugs or not work.

There are but trackers on different upstream flatpak software for it like Firefox, but it has been completely dead for 5 years with no plans on looking at it.

Bazzite or an immutable if you do gaming and don’t need a lot of special functionality (e.g. network scanning doesn’t work, document signing doesn’t work and will never work, managing gpg keys, embedded firmware development, Belgian EID, etc…)

Mint if you don’t have a brand new system and just want an easy experience.

Arch if you want all niche software to simply be available through the package manager and never have to find rpm/deb packages.

Debian for a server (or maybe opensuse MicroOS nowadays)

Opensuse if you really want an EU OS or something very integrated with a snapshot system.

And of course, Hannah Montana Linux if you are enlightened.

Yes, but the most ecological phone is the one you already have or a second hand.

It is a good balance, AND for people from the EU who are getting big into the “Buy EU” movement instead of US companies, it is the only phone designed, engineered, and coded mostly in the EU.

Especially because virtually all high megapixel country cameras have smaller physical pixel size and use pixel binning and combining to try to recreate a better image through computation where smaller megapixel cameras can have bigger pixel sizes and absorb more light, leading to better raw images. (Of course there are great and bad implementations of both ideas)

This is literally every train in Belgium, I’m pretty sure it has been for a long time. We are anti-social

You can also look at the MKBHD 2024 smartphone camera comparison test with the FP5. I would suggest taking the test yourself if that is still possible.

I would guess that the camera will be comparable. (Everything below if FP5 assuming about the same performance with the FP6)

For me, daylight pics were after all of the pixels but before anything else. I like the more neutral not supremely over-saturated over-sharpened/smoothed pictures that many phones take nowadays.

For me, it was middle of the pack for dimly lit photos.

For the overall ELO with everyone, FP5 was on the mid-lower end (of a comparison of all flagships + pixel A series), but perfectly usable for people who aren’t doing social media as a job.

Hell, even here in Belgium, we take the green option to get all of our electricity from wind and solar (of which there is a ton) and it is slightly MORE expensive.

Plus tons and tons of people, like a significant portion of the population, have solar panels and batteries with grid feedback.

Electricity prices have only gone up, even when it gets cheaper for the company. Energy companies are universally corrupt and full of shit

Except network scanning is the furthest thing from “just works” on atomic fedora based distros. That is an essential usecase for many or most people.

I like fedora atomic and I run bazzite, but can’t break is quite different than “just works” in my opinion.

Don’t get a tablet if you already have a Linux laptop or a dedicated workspace.

Get a drawing pad. They are better, more cost-effective, have a better feel (non-display versions), have better pens, and you aren’t restricted to neutered programs offered on android/iOS.

Wacom is traditional, but expensive and their pen tech is kind of aging at this point, but they always work flawlessly.

XPPen is the great value alternative (with even better stuff on the top end). i have an XPPen Deco Pro Gen2 and it is an absolutely great pad with the texture of paper, and their little macropad with a scroll wheel works well. The downside is that you need a screen, but it is quite ergonomic.

The few actual artists I know use the XPPen Artist Pro series which is a drawing pad with a screen, and then they just plug it into their laptop and close the lid. Not as portable, but generally as good or better experience

XPpen also has good Linux drivers. They work in the kernel by default often, but the macropad and pressure sensitivity customization won’t work globally without their drivers.