I've never had NewPipe present me with a sign in prompt or any bot challenges, that's a very strange scenario to be facing.

No it does not increase subscriber count unfortunately. It basically treats that channel like an RSS feed for you. Views are also not counted due to the way newpipe accesses the video content.

I've used graphene for over a year, and it's been solid. If you have the sandboxed Google play installed all apps will work fine, and as long as you don't rely on heavily commercialized apps everything will likely work without play services as well (sans push notifications for apps that rely on firebase). RCS will work if you have Gplay services and the carrier services app installed.

One in a while there will be a slight hiccup in the UI, but I've experienced far worse on stock android, so I'm assuming it's normal operating stutters. All in all it's very reliable.

Awesome setup. I tried kvaesitso in the past but couldn't get comfortable with it. I'll have to give it another shot and try to get it dialed in.

You should post this over in !c/android_homescreens@lemmy.ml, it would be appreciated there too.

This is awesome, thank you. It's a bit hit or miss, but the site Project Gutenberg has a lot of obscure texts in the public domain converted to various eBook formats and available for free. I'm going to scan through and see what they have that's discussed on this site.

EndeavourOS. I like the simplicity and minimalism of stock Arch, bloated distros bother me. I have been thinking of trying out Linux Mint again though, I used it for years and it was really good.

SNW S01E04

Context is important on this one, but even without the rest of the episode around it I still really like it.

Spock: "The lower decks are beginning to buckle."

Noonien-Singh, urgently: "The evacuation isn't complete there's still crew down there!"

Pike, with intensity: "Get them out."

Spock: "Decks are collapsing, if we do not seal them off now loss of pressure could spread to the whole ship."

Pike, pained resignation: "...Seal the bulkheads."

Noonien-Singh: "Structural collapse on deck 22, we've lost one crew person."

Spock, to Pike: "You made the logical choice..."

Pike, to Spock, quietly: "Why doesn't it feel like that?"

Spock, to Pike: "For the same reason you made it: because you value life."

KDEConnect works great, you can share every form of content I've run across between desktop and mobile device. Runs on Linux, Windows and Android. Not sure if there's a Mac client.

tasks.org is pretty excellent

This is pretty much my same set up as well, it's refreshing to see a fellow firefox derivative user standing on principle 🤩. Here's a few more mentions that are daily drivers for me that I really respect:

• Tasks.org: highly configurable to do list app.
• Doodle: high quality live wallpapers for degoogled devices.
• KDE connect: iOS/MacOS like integration for your mobile and desktop devices. Share files, copy clipboard contents, sync notifications and a ton of other stuff I haven't gotten in to myself.
• Photok: encrypted vault for your sensitive photos.
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon: a fun top down RPG to kill time with. Very difficult and dynamic.

Lastly, the music app: I would actually suggest an audio converter instead of trying to find something that can play m4a. I've used this linux app (soundconverter) and its been great for getting my files changed to either mp3 or ogg. If you're on Windows I'm sure there are other apps that would do the same thing, but if you happen to be a penguin user definitely check that app out.

For your use case I would definitely recommend Immich. It has a "partner sharing" feature that allows you to view your partners photos from your account while still maintaining separate archives. You can then download or add to albums from there. Immich has been fantastic for my family because it supports android and iOS (being as I can't get some members off Apple products.)

Here's the description of the feature. Sorry it's a Reddit post, that's the only place I could find the developers summary of the update.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/13lbp2r/immich_selfhosted_photos_and_videos_backup/

I second LinuxMint. When I first got in to linux I was (shamefully 😅) looking for something that was as close as possible to Windows and a turn key experience with both installation and app compatibility. Linux mint was what I settled on personally.