Nah, cheap phones often have their bootloader unlocked/unlockable. Really happy with my POCO M5 running modified AOSP. Also, unlike every expensive phone nowadays, it has 3.5mm jack, SD card slot, and exceptional battery life for hiking/trekking (it survives 5-6 days as just a camera+map phone with all power saving on, in comparison people with flagships typically only last 2-3 days with the same usage and power-saving techniques).

You can almost always replace the battery, even when the manufacturer doesn't want you to. As for flashlights, they typically come with easily user-replaceable ones, often even sold separately. Worst-case, you can get a AA or AAA flashlight and use rechargeable AA/AAAs.

I've paid quite a lot for my second headlamp for hiking, but I am really happy with the purchase as it's very light (35 g) compared to my first cheapo one (~120 g), while being the same 200 lm max. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough for me to not even notice it, while the heavy one was getting annoying after a while.

I'd say it depends. For safety-critical stuff maybe, but for a headlamp or something I prefer rechargeable as I can easily recharge it from a power bank or a portable solar panel if needed. If you run out of a disposable battery for whatever reason, you're screwed.

I'm not sure you should "cheap out" on headphones per se. The really cheap ones are usually horrible, both in terms of sound quality, usability and comfort (well, except for wired Apple ones, allegedly, though they never fit me right). It's just that it makes no sense to go for really expensive ones, unless you're really into audio and love hearing the tiny sound reproduction differences between them, or enjoying the different tech etc. The middle ground of $50-$100 for in-ears and $100-300 for over-ears will often offer you good/great/excellent sound quality and the same usability&comfort as more expensive ones.

Hoe do you self host a nix package repo & install nix packages from 3rd party repos? Is this even possible.

So, one aspect of this has already been answered by @Klaymore@sh.itjust.works . If you just want to package some stuff yourself, then do it (look at various NUR repositories for inspiration), put it in some git repo (or even a .tar.gz somewhere), and then fetch it from your NixOS config, either with flakes or þe olde way with let myPkgs = import (builtins.fetchGit { url = "https://..."; rev = ""; }) {}; in ....

Another aspect would be providing a substituter/"binary cache" for your repository, so that its users wouldn't need to build everything from source. This is a tad more complicated, as you have to set up some form of CI+CD, a place to host the cache, and your users would have to configure their systems to trust your build infrastructure.

It's all quite doable, and if you have some CI system&s3 bucket ready, boils down to nix copy $(nix build --print-out-paths) --to s3://your.hosting/your-cache with some authorization and error handling. There are also some readily available services that do it for you, like https://nixbuild.net, https://garnix.io, and https://cachix.io; however, be prepared to pay for the convenience.

Then, on the user end, you'd have to add extra-substituters = https://your.hosting/your-cache; extra-trusted-public-keys = <...> to ~/.config/nix/nix.conf, and it should all mostly work.

Examples of complex 3rd party repositories with a binary cache would be both aforementioned Chaotic and Nixified AI, and a more unusual haskell.nix.

FYI a great way to share your logs (if you have internet on the machine but no GUI) is to use a pastebin like 0x0.st. E.g. do journalctl | curl -F'file=@-' https://0x0.st and post the link here.

I'd try the kernel version used in 23.11 to see if that fixes it. Add boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxKernel.packages.linux_6_1; to your config (make sure to add it before the closing }) and sudo nixos-rebuild switch . You can also try older versions, like linux_5_19. If it doesn't fix the problem it might be that the ACPI error is a red herring and the problem is something else entirely, in which case it'd be more difficult to diagnose, and I'd recommend just staying on 23.11 for now and only taking the new packages that you need from 24.05. There's a great post on how to do this here: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/installing-multiple-packages-from-unstable-channel-in-configuration-nix/19271/2 (probably also in the docs somewhere but I couldn't find it easily).

If Signal was to pull a MITM, it would have been noticeable as it requires active intervention in the protocol (it hasn't been noticed yet), it would destroy all plausible deniability for them going forward, and it wouldn't be possible on existing chats (once the key exchange between two parties happens, it's impossible to do MITM). Telegram can just straight up read your messages, past, present and future, do whatever they want with them, with no way for anyone to check if that happens. It's two different tiers of communication security.

To quote another commenter,

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

Navalniy and his team openly supported the annexation of Crimea (and destruction of Ukrainian and Crimean Tartar culture).

Not really: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/opinion/how-to-punish-putin.html ; this is just days after the annexation. I'm no fan of Navalny for various reasons (his nationalist views, xenophobic comments and narratives, etc), but he was very much against all Putin's shenanigans in Ukraine, and vehemently anti-war.

The recently exchanged “dissidents” also showed their true colours by supporting the annexation of currently occupied territories in Ukraine.

What are you on about? Name one of them who supported the war. Most of them were jailed due to their anti-war positions.

Upon further inspection, it's almost definitely AI. Look at the better-quality original: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/937874691150982659/

In particular, note the nonsensical reflection in the mirror (which is inexplicably placed on the floor?), weird toilet paper roll, and half-unicorn horn half-third ear thing sticking out from the head.

And if you check out that Pinterest account, it's full of AI-generated crap too.

Which mostly just demonstrates how good the AI has become, to the point where if you scale down the image somewhat, it fools humans and AI detectors alike.

Yep! I've been running NixOS on Librem 5, which is aarch64, and everything I needed was available straight from the cache, which was nice.