Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.

― Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

It's almost 2024, so everyone should harvest something in 2023 :)

• In 2023, I have gone from being a pragmatic open-source software lover to a free software enthusiast. The ROM on my Android phone was switched from MIUI which is the stock firmware on my phone, to the AOSP-based crDroid. I was struggling to use as little proprietary software as possible both on my phone and PC, minimizing my dependence on proprietary network services.

• In February, I joined the FSF by paying $5 membership fee on a monthly basis. When I discover a nice free software on Github, if the developer has set up Github Sponsor, I will probably financially support him/her (individual FOSS developers will be given $1 or $2 per month).

• In March, I submitted my archlinuxcn maintainer application to @lilydjwg who is one of the founders of archlinuxcn via email, and became an archlinuxcn maintainer. In the following 9 months, I committed more than 900 times (initially I was unfamiliar with lilac hence made a few mistakes).

• Due to the poor battery life and hardship of portability with the peripherals of ROG Zephyrus M16, I purchased a chromebook at the end of March. After trying ChromeOS for several hours, I flashed coreboot and installed Arch Linux on it (it's my first experience of an x86 PC with open-source UEFI firmware). Now I take this chromebook with me when I go out, which is very portable weighing 1.3 kg. Instead of turning it off, most of the time I close the lid to make it suspend.

• In May, I found a Tauri-based and GPL-licensed translation application on Github (namely pot-desktop). Nonetheless, after installing it from AUR, I realized its Wayland support is inferior. Therefore, I gave feedback to the developer, and soon the Wayland support became immaculate. The updated version of pot-desktop added support for OCR and plugin functionality, thus I participated in the development of its plugins.

• In June, I joined PLCT and worked as an openEuler packaging intern for 3 months, but I found this position was not suitable for me. From my perspective, its init system, sysmaster, is entirely a pointless refactoring product of systemd.

• In July, I participated in LLUG (Linux Lovers User Group) in Shanghai, and met several friends with whom I get acquainted in the Arch Linux Chinese Community. In a 5-minute lightning talk, I shared my experience from a Linux novice to an archlinuxcn maintainer.

• In September, I attended the Software Freedom Day hosted by USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) online by means of Jitsi Meet, and delivered a speech centered around FOSS. During my presentation, I shared my experience in the open source community, introduced the notion of free software and recommended notable free software including Mastodon and Matrix. Additionally, I got to meet some free software enthusiasts in USTC.

• Since the bug I reported to Ark (the archive software of KDE) in September was not fixed in several weeks, I took the initiative to fix it myself and submitted my first merge request to KDE in October. From then on, I have been learning Qt and Kirigami and trying to fix simple bugs in KDE software (not capable of fixing the complex ones at all yet)

• Overall, I had some regrets but also quite a few gains in 2023. Hankering for a more wonderful 2024 :)

• Last but not least, happy new year!