I don’t know what your financial status is, but a nice Synology NAS unit is a terrific investment. I’m really happy with the one I got a while back.

I also wasn’t aware of that, so thanks!

A thousand upvotes for you, my liege, for beating me to the punch! 🙇‍♂️¹⁰⁰⁰

Morale. Just fyi sincerely not being snooty :-)

It’s definitely click fodder like 99.99999% of today’s content. That’s where we’re at because many years ago we let the pigs into the palace.

Elementary OS, or something like Garuda or Debian with either Gnome or KDE desktops.

Just seeing the main image in the post, immediately made me think of Lands of Lore!

Ah, right. Why let you use the tech that’s already built-in and designed for just that, when they can call it something else and charge you more for it?

Fucking savages.

Ah… yeah I forgot. My bad.

And what is the problem with VoLTE anywhere? Just curious.

Looks phenomenal.

I was recently so excited to discover Fortress Forever also, which is the old TFC game. I dominated in that.

Swimming Nougat.

Did I do that right?

Exactly. And as I said in another comment, you can make a wrapper for it if their website is not the most mobile-friendly. Any browser can handle everything beneath the skin.

Well, they all have standard web interfaces, and so many apps are merely wrappers for it or a rebuilt front-end. On a Linux device one would presume you’ll have a standard web browser so all you need really is a wrapper for the website and the browser engine handles all security. Is there any reason not to just go that route?

The Apple App Store is a cesspool. Has been for years. It’s just pushing short-term games with gobs of micro transactions by the hundreds. That’s almost all you see. Tons and tons of it.

That blog post is such a heap of shit. Do they think they’re fooling anyone? It’s politik-speak. Nobody believes them, yet they bother to make those statements anyway.

What about the fact that when I buy a device I fucking own it. I now should be able to do whatever I want.

It’s so pathetic. And yeah, I’m not going to buy a new phone for a very, very, very long time. I’ll stock up on Android phones that are decent but still have the freedom to do what I want.

This shit is obnoxious and if we really want to fight it, we need a serious, globally unified boycott that gets advertised and shared daily. If successful, the device sales would drop drastically and the registrations of higher Android versions, usage etc. data should all show they are throwing away their user base.

Because literally one and only one thing ever matters: the almighty dollar. So take your dollars back, make them lose money, and have a very well-established unified protest where they can see the losses are directly tied to their decision to take away ownership. This is the only way that POSSIBLY, we may gain back what we have now.

Also - on the same front, a companion campaign could be active to persuade any hardware maker to fully allow custom ROMs and GSIs to be installed. No e of this hacking and exploiting… fully endorsed but I would not expect support and that’s fine. Hardware warranty is ok. But anyone who wants should be able to change their OS and install whatever they want.

One day you’re gonna see big manufacturers like Dell, HP etc. make consumer lines of products that literally won’t run any OS other than Windoze, because of an agreement with Microshaft. That’s their next step I absolutely guarantee it. Try to install Linux, and the BIOS will be programmed to reject it.

Because money. Sorry, not because money; because MORE money. Sorry, not because more money; because more and more and more money. Sorry, not because more and more and more money; because insatiable greed for every farthing they can fuck out of your goddamn pores.

But back to this architecture: if there is a financial incentive for a few manufacturers to make devices we can own and install our choice of Android, they would have at least one demographic guaranteed to buy. That pressure may or may not change Google’s mind, but it would open up a whole world of FOSS options or even paid versions, to compete with the giant.

Thoughts?

Most people don’t care about their privacy anymore. They don’t think there’s any value in it.

Indeed, it has. If we really want it to stop, there needs to be a boycott on buying new devices. Only buy used, and encourage others as well. Educate them how google is turning android slowly into another iOS with closed walls.

I’ve tested quite a few and most of the differences lay in what kinds of customizations have they built into the settings module. And most of them are aesthetic or things like easy switches. There’s really not much difference at the functional level, except for some come with MicroG integrated already which simply saves you time and occasional nuisance of installing it. But really, whatever you can find that works is good. Ironically, Lineage itself is the most vanilla and least gadgety; most of the others are built on either Lineage or Cyanogen. Understandable since they were early progenitors of the custom ROM if I’m not mistaken.

crDroid is a really good one. I have it on a few devices. Quite a bit older even than yours and it runs beautifully. One of my faves.