Good thing I’m a libertarian and we hate roads!

Well, for android at least I understand that app used for paying (Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, Bank apps) are blocked in a root environment, you never know if the app could get compromised and your bank account emptied or whatever. For the remaining, yeah it’s shitty…

It is overwhelming. Just take it slow. Dont ban yourself from non open source things. Maybe try adopting one open source thing at a time

On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

Try to use a mix of both open source and proprietary software depending on the software. I use YouTube with a subscription, and I also use RSS feeds and foss and donate to the creator.

Follow the current, it’s encouraging you to reassess what your actual needs are, and giving you an opportunity to simplify your digital life.

Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post

Rant my friend! Preach! I feel you on this.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

Sure is but the pay off is worth it in the end. I see a future where we all (or most of us) have our own little home servers that federate and communicate our own needs vs relying on big companies forever.

Either that or pay for services vs using free ones. Proton suite is a great value and Kagi (paid search engine) is good too. Just little by little be the change you want to see in the world my friend. I started my foss journey with pihole and now I selfhost many things and I even pay for my own website to host email aliases and content on.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

Just fyi, I found that aurora store often works a lot better if you log in with a google account. I know its not the best option for privacy but I kind of rely on some play store apps working and being updated and I still had a google account either way.

Also, do you have microg installed? Most google play apps work without much hassle for me on lineageOS microg

I mean, those services do exist. You have that middle ground. Services like Proton exist. And you can use PixelFed instead of Instagram. The issue with trying to use a FOSS frontend to a proprietary backend… well, it’s already a broken system at that point. And Linux lands on a spectrum of building your own car from scratch and dealing with those problems yourself all the way to someone else maintaining it but you’re limited in scope to what it can technically do unless you go under the hood yourself, and that all depends on the distro.

Computers are technological wonders. Making everything simple and easy actually takes a ridiculous amount of work. So doing stuff yourself is absolutely going to be more difficult than paying for a mainstream turnkey solution where they offset the cost by selling your data or showing you ads. Anything that’s proprietary and private will always cost a significant amount more.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Please let us know if you figure this out. There are at least a few talented, detail-oriented developers who dislike both ads corporate life.

I feel you, but looking at it in perspective the foss world has come a long way and I hope it will get better and better. I try to carry on because I feel it is the right thing to do and I’m encouraged to actually do more with less, but I don’t have any critical task to perform on foss stuff either.

I just use linux until fstab inevitably breaks again and my system won’t boot. And then I install Windows again until I am fed up with how bloated and slow it has become, and install linux again. And then the cycle continues.