No, in a lot of ways the open Android roms keep getting better, despite every possible obstacle being thrown in their way. It’s easy to make a mature platform sound like it has “stalled”, when you’re comparing it to alternatives that are still so unusably bad that they have nowhere to go but up.
Do what you want, but get real. If you care more about making your ideals happen, maybe stop debating internet randos so feverishly, and start making pull requests.
Nothing that has or will happen can stop the parts of Android that are already open from remaining open. Yes there will be fewer choices. Yes this means alternative ROM makers will have no choice but to shoulder more of the development burden themselves. And yes this means there’s going to be significantly fewer open Android devices and new manufacturers will have to make the intentional effort to make and sell new devices that are free by design - a few of which already exist.
But no matter how many obstacles open Android has, the thing you’re ignoring is that it’s still in a far better place than mobile Linux. For a start, any device that respects rights enough to be Linux compatible will automatically be compatible with free and degoogled versions of Android as well.
What these growing problems are is a galvanizing call. Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, and Google were never our friends. Whatever their imperfections, at least Pine64, Purism, BQ, Planet Computers, Murena, Fairphone, F(x)tec, Volla, and SHIFT have sold hardware that was rights respecting by design. We need more companies or other organizations to do that, and we need to choose to buy and promote more devices like that.
And as that happens more, open Android and Linux are going to benefit equally, but there’s no getting around the fact that for now and the forseeable future, the open Android variants are still far more mature, far more feature-complete, way closer to the kind of user experience the vast majority of people expect, and far more established.
And again, probably the biggest missing thing we need there is an app marketplace that competes more directly with Google Play, that gives more devs good incentives to want to switch away from Play.
You might have better luck looking at the distros themselves. They’re not exactly great on any device yet, but there are cases where mobile Linux distros work at least equally or a little better on select Android phones than they do on dedicated Linux phones.
I get where this argument is coming from, but I don’t think there are meaningful differences in the success of gpl or other copyleft licenses, vs permissive ones (except maybe cases where someone was willing and able to enforce the gpl in court). Companies are no less capable of doing EEE with copyleft. There are also plenty of permissively licensed software projects that have gained a lot of popularity, just like some gpl ones have.
The difference in traction between Linux and BSD probably has more to do with the same kinds of forces that allowed Android to succeed and then crowd Windows phones out of the market.
While I support the continued progress of real Linux phones, have a Pinephone, and even wasted all of yesterday trying to make a working build of Armbian for retro handheld I have; I think it’s more practical to focus on open Android distributions, getting more phones out that can support multi os’s and buying those, and growing a robust app market system that can compete with Google Play.
F-Droid is almost there, but being open-source doesn’t mean something has to be free of charge. F-Droid should be extended, or possibly an additional app manager be established, that still promotes software freedom and privacy, but allows for devs to charge for their apps as well.
Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.
Part of an overall concerning trend, but as someone who decided to stop buying consoles years ago: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is true, but it’s also true that the older gpl versions can’t be revoked.
If you care about RetroAchievement support, this is what they support.
Beetle is the RetroArch core that’s most often recommended. If you don’t like RA (they have serious issues of their own), the Beetle core comes from the emulator Mednafen.
And the other main open-source option is PCSXR.
I ran Trisquel for a little while several years ago. It was an interesting exercise but ultimately limitations pop up. I’d say it’s useful as a motivator to try to choose hardware that is more liberated.
So, going from Mealie’s instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you’re working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?
Such as?
A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that’s not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I’ve been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won’t actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.
Then there’s things inherent in Discord’s design and how people use it. It’s become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it’s a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don’t want to join someone’s niche club just to “learn more.” If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.
Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It’s trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It’s just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they’re trying to do.
How so?
Isn’t everything a pain to selfhost?
Sometimes, but my point is you don’t have to start from scratch. It’s free software. You are allowed to make extensions or even fork it.
Sure, go for it. Though XMPP has so many features at this point, it might already have Matrix, irc, Discord, and email for all we know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn’t abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.
It’s more organic. It’s also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.
Matrix isn’t perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.
Yeah to be fair I don’t use it either. These days I tend to just look for editors with good markdown support.
I’ve put a GNU sticker over one, and a Tux sticker over another. I should see if there’s a Debian spiral sticker I can get (or even custom keycaps) for future keyboards.