It makes sense if your phone is well supported in the custom ROM comunnity and doesn’t receive feature or security updates from the manufacturer anymore. I am already 3 Android versions past the last supported Android version by the manufacturer thanks to community maintained ROMs. (Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC).

Google play services is a monolith, that does a plethora of stuff on the phone, including features like quick share, location services, various Firebase APIs for instant notifications stuff, find my device and whatnot, so I think the size is pretty reasonable.

I stoped using yt-dlp frontends the moment I saw youtube actually serving upscaled opus media files (very visible line on a spectrogram). Also their metadata is totally fucked-up and not very well organized and full of shit (comments with huge spaces and non useful metadata…).

Wow really? Are you sure it applies to all audio files? YouTube gathers music records from different companies so they could be of varying quality. To me the opus quality from YouTube was always decent and personally I cannot hear any compression in the audio. The metada is not perfect, but I usually use some tag editor to complete what’s missing. YTDLnis on Android does a great job of scraping as much usable metada from YouTube Music as possible.

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Cannot speak for other schools in other countries (and I guess this question was targeted at colleges in USA), but I am currently studying Open informatics at Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech technical university in Prague and all the courses I have that are not mathematical, but require to use a computer do take into account that you may not be using only Windows, but also MacOS or Linux. I haven’t yet encounterered a software that we would be required to use and wouldn’t work on Linux, nor did I have to go through any more hassle because I use Linux, but rather contrary to that. In some cases using Linux made things easier and more straightforward for me.

The only thing I still don’t like much about recommending Linux Mint to beginners is that their Cinnamon desktop still uses Xorg which has some horrible display tearing on some Nvidia graphic cards (can be usually fixed with some tinkering and this is also only my personal experience), which is usually not a thing with Wayland and being Xorg it also means it has inferior touchpad gestures (surely not as smooth as Gnome or KDE) which can be important for notebook users. While being very user friendly it is one of the more resource heavy DE’s I would say even more than Gnome or KDE. It also seems to have some problems with battery life? The official Gnome and KDE desktop packages for Linux Mint are pretty outdated, are still Xorg versions and aren’t officially supported AFAIK (maybe there are some good community maintained packages). Otherwise I agree it’s one of the best choices.

My personal favorite for beginners is Fedora Workstation or KDE edition, because it’s up to date and fairly hassle free and stable (except the frequent kernel updates which sometime cause issues, but booting the older kernel is straightforward) and does not much modify its packages from the original or push their products on you like Ubuntu.

You could license it under the (A)GPL, charge for downloads in the Play store or for compiled binaries on ur website and ask for donations on F-Droid.

You could even do a freemium version where some features are locked in the binaries you distribute and need a license from ur website or smth (for those who don’t want to use Google Play). (iirc SD Maid 2/SE does this)

Someone else could just compile the app themselves, unlock all premium features and distribute it to play store without violating the license?

For TVs the manufacturers are the ones who control the bloated adware and make money off of it while on notebooks and laptops it is Micro$oft. Except maybe for TVs coming with Android TV OS, but I think even that can be modified to promote their services.

Honestly what you are describing here would bother me too. For example on my notebook I rely on configuring grub to use kernel argument amdgpu.abmlevel=0 which fixes the screen colors getting washed out when in battery saving mode, but I doubt I would be able to configure grub on an atomic distro.

I think maintaning a Firefox fork is pretty demanding especially considering you are already maintaining a distro. And there are already a lot of Firefox forks out there.

Why don’t you explain your arguments or make counter arguments instead of attacking your opponent personally. How do I matter here?

I am not a Zorin OS fanboy or anything, but honestly I don’t see anything scummy about requiring payment from the user to get access to certain features of the product. It’s just shareware. It’s their product FOSS or not. I think they make it clear about what you get for free and what you don’t. If you don’t like that you don’t have to use their product and you can use an alternative instead. It’s not like they were a monopoly in the world of Linux distros and you have no other option. I see nothing scummy about this. It would be scummy if they would do some kind of false advertising (adverties features you actually don’t get or adverties features in a misleading way) or if they started moving features from the free to the pro version that used to be free, because some people may have relyed on these features.

Can you elaborate? Because to me this feels like saying that the local grocery shop is scummy because it wants people to pay instead of relying on donations. If the whole OS was paid like RedHat Linux is than it would be OK or you consider that to be also a case of taking advantage of users who don’t know any better.

Flutter uses its own UI engine. It does not rely on any webview AFAIK.

By contrast, Flutter minimizes those abstractions, bypassing the system UI widget libraries in favor of its own widget set. The Dart code that paints Flutter’s visuals is compiled into native code, which uses Impeller for rendering. Impeller is shipped along with the application, allowing the developer to upgrade their app to stay updated with the latest performance improvements even if the phone hasn’t been updated with a new Android version. The same is true for Flutter on other native platforms, such as Windows or macOS.

https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/architectural-overview#flutters-rendering-model

You are kind of right. I should have thought about that before commenting.

I am not educated enough about this, but don’t these kind of games unnecesarrily strain all the servers that host the packages for people that really need them for download and most of these people run these servers for free in good will and faith that they will serve meaningful needs with positive impact? I am sorry for spoiling the fun, but I felt like I had to point this out.

The Simple Mobile Tools collection of Android apps. Forks have been made and are maintained fortunately, but the original autor sold the apps to some company that just adds ads and trackers to the apps to make more money out of it.

Can’t Python be translated into machine code and packaged into a binary? I swear I have no experience in OS development, just curious.

Breezy weather also allows you to select weather data from multiple sources. It even let’s you select which type of data to get from which provider.

It could be nice, but also annoying in some cases. I would at least want to have an option to allow all the time.

I would like to see the same thing for clipboard read access. In the same way app has to prompt you for location permission it would have to prompt you to read the clipboard and you would actually have the option to allow it all the time which is handy for some apps like clipboard manager, or don’t allow it alltogether which is handy for some random apps you don’t trust.