Solus. Snaps optional.

Honestly I thought it was an abbreviation for “for example” and probably used it one gazillion times 😅 now that I google it it seems like “e.g.” is what I was going for.

Nah sorry USA is the global empire. Of course everyone in the western world is paying very, very close attention to what you are doing and of course everyone can and should speak their mind.

That all said this just isn’t a smart, well thought out commentary. This is just piling on the “conservatives bad” meme. Low effort divisive nonsense. Just imagine posting a meme basically saying “US conservatives = worse than USSR” and then right below that writing “Can’t say much for the conservatives in the US part”. Oh the cognitive dissonance! Don’t try to get into us culture war op. Why would you. Chill.

Idk which third party apps are compliant which aren’t? There is this one feg: https://f-droid.org/packages/it.belloworld.mercurygram/ Unlocks the premium app icons for free. https://f-droid.org/packages/nekox.messenger/ This one surely has a few premium features no? Unlimited accounts feg?

Personally I just use Telegramm-FOSS since years. Not sure what the actual differences to official client are at the moment, but this one is just fine and I’m never annoyed by premium feature ads like it seems to be the case for you.

I highly doubt that F-Droid team removes third party telegramm apps when they are against tos of telegramm. They are actually out there defending our freedom, even and especially when proprietary services do not want us to use Foss third party apps. Google does not want you to use third party apps for their services. F-Droid still out there publishing foss YouTube clients. Give them some credit instead of just assuming they suck up to big companies.

Yet another problem the free market will surely solve aaaaany minute now.

“See when I slap you in the face that’s actually a really nice thing of me to do. Because if I don’t slap you in the face I’d kick you in the groin really hard instead. Do you want to get kicked in the groin? No? That’s what I thought.”

A little niche, but I am really happy with solusos! It’s a small distro, so software availability is the biggest issue imo. But if what you need is available it beats every other distro out there for casual desktop use!

Imo dual boot can lead to issues if you got both os on one drive. In this configuration Windows tends to mess with the Linux partitions. But I never had any issues with one os per drive.

I invite everyone to have a critical look at the study. https://www.ascl.org.uk/ASCL/media/ASCL/Help and advice/Inclusion/Safer-scrolling.pdf

Personally, they lost me on page 12.

Well technically it’s still $25 registration fee for the developer. Also, more apps being available on a platform increases the value of that platform, so google benefits even if an app is free. But I get what you are saying.

But this is where the whole monopoly argument comes into play. Just paraphrasing the issue quickly: No app store works even almost as well as play on android. And google is doing that on purpose. First issue is installing the alternative store in the first place. You have to download apks and accept scary warning how this is very very unsafe and you will get hacked and lose all your money and it’s your own fault. Then after that it still does not really work as a store should, you have to manually check for updates and approve every single update individually. Only way to get around that is to unlock bootloader and root, which 99.9% of users can’t and won’t do, and then we have safetynet put in place by google that btw does not check for any actual safety features but only checks if you modified your system, aka tried to escape google hell, and causes all kind of issues.

So in short if Android was a platform where stores and billing systems could compete in a fair way your argument would absolutely make sense. The whole point though is that it’s not, that google made damn sure that the only viable option for any company creating apps for android is to use their store and their ecosystem. Sure, if you ask google of course it’s all just for your safety and surely has nothing to do with them making a shitload of money. The jury decided on exactly that and their verdict is very clear, understandably.

Don’t worry though, there are still decades worth of appeals and other legal moves google can pull off to slow down any potential change. And by the time this case is won by google in 2040 everyone will fully accept this as normal and have already forgotten about the case in the first place. Just like with Microsoft some twenty years ago. Surely they don’t bundle their OS with a browser anymore, right? Wasn’t there a lawsuite?

Long story short I’m pretty sure Google will keep it’s monopoly. They got unlimited amount of money to throw at lawyers and for out-of-court settlements. Epic doesn’t stand a chance, they are on a whole different level.

Iirc this is phrased in a slightly misleading way. What they actually want is apps on the play store to be allowed to use their own billing system. And they want to be allowed to offer alternative store apps on the play store.

Android itself or more precise AOSP is open source and of course anyone can do anything with it. This is about what is or isn’t allowed in the context of google app ecosystem that comes with 99.9% of all devices running android.

Colour eink is still very limited, but can’t they make eink (semi-)transparent? Just put eink above the usual LCD/oled and enable/disable them as needed?

Just buy a phone that is not shit instead and apply a matte glass screen protector.

Yes, same, this is the way to go! Way better than the screen itself being matte. Just get the matte screen ptotector.

Stick to old fashioned paper tea bags and you are fine. Don’t use those pyramid shaped silky ones.

Amazing how it just ignored the “sitting on top of” part.

How can one “not get a good Android tablet”? You just… get one?

Nothing it’s like they don’t even care about me :(

The government is forcing the people to pay for the public broadcasting. That’s why they are inherently dependant on the government. Something that’s literally funded by the government can not be independent from the government.

I’m living in Germany actually. Don’t get me wrong, I like the ÖRR as alternative to private media. But to say it’s independent from the government is really naive.

Those are not independent, those depend on the state securing their finances.

You can read those with a regular blu ray drive. No special hard- or software needed.