Even some shops working with Windows Server are asking “wait, why are we paying for these licenses?”

Then it comes down to whether it’s cheaper to rewrite legacy applications or continue to pay for licenses.

Yeah and ARM servers are cheap. You can often get twice the processor cores and memory for the same price.

That doesn’t always map to twice the performance, though some benchmarks would suggest it could for certain applications.

Absoutely. I mostly use Firefox because I’m so familiar with it by now but the privacy is generally much better and it doesn’t have a massive monopoly on the web. I’m just a lot more comfortable with it.

When I have to, I use ungoogled-chromium on desktop and Bromite on mobile. I recommend those to anyone familiar with Chrome.

I’ve read not to bother with Decentraleyes. The dependencies are often out of date which mean you’ll hit 3rd party CDNs anyway. Unless its coverage is 100℅, it’s less than useless for privacy as the hit pattern to CDNs might even make you stand out.

Privacy Badger is also redundant if you have uBO.

These two form a “mesh VPN” which use direct encrypted links between any number of devices. You can think of it as forming a virtual LAN where you can communicate with devices, including open ports. A lot of them have clever tricks to overcome CG-NATs, which you seem to be struggling with.

Another option is to just rent a server. You can get massive storage space for less than some VPNs cost and you don’t need powerful hardware if your device supports the codecs you’re using. You could even get a cheapy VPS and reverse proxy to your Jellyfin server through an SSH tunnel or similar. Lots of options here.

I read Signal is changing that. I agree, I don’t like phone numbers as IDs.

Has anyone independently verified that this is the case for the FP4? It’s well known that the FP3 accepts testsigned ROMs, but all discussions regarding the FP4’s trusted keys points back to the same FP3-specific thread on Fairphone’s forum.

It seems so.

I don’t know, it does make flashing custom ROMs easier but I would rather have to install my own signing keys or signing keys for the ROM as this way renders a part of the device security completely useless. I’d at least like to have known when I bought it.

I’m not paranoid which is why I’m still using the device but these three points were each huge disappointments which make me not want to buy another Fairphone.

I think it’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon SM7225.

It’s not really about better, it’s more knowing what I’m getting. It’s not their fault that Qualcomm’s support is only 3 years (at the time) or that it takes them 10 months to develop support for the chosen SoC which eats into part of that 3 years. Still, I got the phone thinking I would have a reasonably secure device for 4-5 years which wasn’t entirely accurate.

I love the idea and, if you’re willing to sacrifice some security for sustainability, that’s great. I just want people to know what they’re getting into because I didn’t.

As the owner of a Fairphone 4, don’t get one.

It’s sold as a 5G phone but crashes intermittently if you actually enable 5G. I bought a 5G phone and I’m still on 4G. I wish I could say that’s the most of the problems, I could live with that.

The software support, in my opinion, is falsely advertised. You do get 5 years of kernel and Android updates but the system-on-chip updates, which aren’t made by Fairphone, end October of this year. That’s a whole important part of the updates which cease only 2 years into support.

Then, there’s the real kicker; the hardware root of trust has the (publicly available) AOSP test keys installed. This means anyone can sign and flash a verified ROM if they have access to the unlocked phone. That’s perhaps not too important for most people, but it screams incompetence and it means you cannot trust a second hand device.

When the SoC support is up, I’m moving to a Pixel. I’m done rolling the dice on Android phone manufacturers and I want a well implemented device.