When I was in college, two older classmates whom I respected got into a hilarious argument of why Gnome was awesome and now eats rocks (their views, I had no views).

Their elaborate and very specific descriptions of functions and inconveniences drew up a picture of functionality and a e s t h e t i c I had never experienced on windows. So I proceeded to install a distro and take it for a ride

getting a developer account with redhat you can have up to 10(?) instances of RedHat Linux LTS. super stable, is run on servers for many critical serves. Or just use rocky linux (bug for bug compatible with red hat) and establish a roll back procedure. There are rollback options at the filesystem level so you can snapshot before an update.

I use fedora and I don’t typically have any issues and that is considered bleeding edge.

Macs have too many guardrails that get in the way which can be as disruptive as something breaking bc you need to work around it. But I am acknowledging that it is use case dependant.

reminds me of the John Oliver episode on Data Brokers where he started buying up data on senators in an effort to get better regulations about tracking data and aggregation bc that seems to be the only way they want to pass bills. Their interests > interests of the people they should be representing

if you’re not doing any weird shit at home, why have blinds in your windows?

honestly, having a spare phone that sits at home is a great solution. Your main phone can be a native pixel/grapheneos (not lineage, graphene has no issues with feature comparability). And the spare phone at run all the apps for, idk, your robot vaccum, smart home, etc. At home you have more control of data and connectivity.

we all have old phones that can be used as spares. My 8 yr old phone is the “remote control” for my house. Using accounts that don’t tie to me, on it’s own vlan, pi-holed, etc

for speech recognition there is “futo voice” which not only works better than Google’s speech talk-to-type by allowing the user to fluently speak, but it also works offline and doesn’t upload voice recordings anywhere. You won’t be able to use it with gboard because google will not allow the use of another talk-to-speech engine with gboard, you’ll have to download another keyboard first.

mobile banking is an unnecessary luxary. Moving money around/paying CC biils often takes days to go through anyway so the urgency of “doing it now” mobily can wait until you’re at your desktop.

Push notifications, I’ll give you. Without any services some apps cannot recieve push notifications. As the other user suggested, using a pixel with grapheneos, you can install sandboxes google services or microG and then have full functionality.

On grapheneOS you can choose which apps have access to internet/data much more fine-grained that what google allows you.

that is on-par with my experience.

If on android, you can visit a google app store mirror (like aurora) which has all apps not locked to a region. Meaning, you can get that transit app.

On iOS, there is no side loading to get around that at the moment.

I echo this.

For the non-tech savy, having one messaging app (Signal/SMS) was excellent because a user can send a message to a contact and it would automatically use signal if the recipient was also using it and use SMS when the recipient wasn’t.

Now I get SMSs and have to gently remind the contact (or just reply in signal).

Or a frantic call from family “hey I can’t message my boss, I have their contact but signal isn’t finding the contact” then having to explain that SMS and signal are different.

worth mentioning that SMS messages are plaintext as they traverse the carrier network. They are also logged by seemingly any equipment that they traverse. Also when they aren’t delivered immediately, they wait in a queue on the network waiting for the receiving device to “phone home” (pun intended 😎).

The caveat here is often times the plaintext message is in an encrypted tunnel (physical wireless layer, and data tunnels in carrier EPC) but at tunnel endpoints, SMSs are nakey

I’d add to this “GMaps WV” (Google maps web view wrapper). It’s available on FDroid and wraps the web version of google maps. I use it to find locations and GPS coordinates and then navigate to them in OSM bc OSM based applications are poor and doing so.

check out Kodi and Plasma Bigscreen. I am eager to set up plasma bigscreen bc it can work with KDE connect.

to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of “we are doing this for the user’s benefit”.

I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I’d like to support. In fact, I’m more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.