For a tiny fraction of the population this might be true, for the rest of the population it definitely isn't true. I'm part of that tiny fraction, and pissed away hours trying to find a LineageOS (or similar) build for my current handset. I don't consider the task easy
Even if it were easy, it means giving up access to a huge variety of apps that expect and test for official builds. Anything with DRM for example
"...for the rest of the population it definitely isn't true."
Right, I was being unreasonably flippant. I was referring indirectly to the bigger problem of the monopoly the Tech Giants have over our telecommunications and the fact that in last 30 or so years that we've gone from maddening over regulation by governments to essentially no oversight whatsoever which allowed the carpetbaggers to squat on and takeover our phones (which once would have been deemed unlawful in many jurisdictions prior to deregulation due to the secrecy of communications laws—it still amazes me how this actually happened without a backlash from governments).
In my opinion, the whole matter is a damn bloody shambles.
...And you're right about LineageOS. When things go wrong finding the right (original) stock ROM can be hard enough let alone finding correct 'official' LineageOS for one's phone in the first instance. I've spent many hours looking for ROMS forked from the official LineageOS because my phone was slightly different (regional differences—modem etc.). This meant that the official version would work but not properly in every aspect. I agree, solving these issues can be very tiresome.
(My 'that's easy' comment comes from the fact that it's now easy for me to root a phone because I've done many in the last few years. It's only easy because I've learned from experience what to do and what phones to avoid. One thing I've definitely learned is that most of the internet advice on how to root phones is crap in that often a general method is stated for many phones and various model numbers are just dumped in to pad the site out—thus much of the advice is either wrong or insufficiently detailed (and often the English is essentially incomprehensible). Moreover, precious few people actually know the important intricacies of the Android OS (as they pertain to different OS versions, phones etc.) such as disk partitioning, why TWRP backup fails on some phones, etc. etc. Furthermore, even advice on the XDA site is often inadequate, or misleading or sometimes even wrong.)
Precisely because the average social media user is petty, insecure, and attention-seeking. Like shaming is a fabulous concept I for one could get behind. Next up do follows, replies and retweets, and eventually people might slowly begin to measure social proof for themselves once more.
Can you imagine Donald Trump's twitter account with all those idiotic metrics scrubbed from it? It would have been a beautiful sight, just an angry old man typing in caps to himself
I had pretty much the exact same experience as parent comment. There is no apologizing for software that can quickly and easily accept your credit card number, but drag its feet and require non-existent humans to intervene to stop taking your money. Extremely bad look
This is the correct answer. Do not allow a subtly different technical design distract you from the largest switcheroo here: this is a single-vendor enterprise OS delivered under the guise of open source, it comes with all the trappings of a single-vendor enterprise OS.
Let's not be too quick to forget when Android first started out, all the idealism about the wonders of a free software mobile OS. A decade later, it's almost impossible to buy an Android phone that hasn't been strongarmed (no pun intended) into including Play Services, Chrome and Gmail, often including through threats to the manufacturer's unrelated businesses.
We're older and wiser, avoid this garbage like the plague, and don't fall for all the same old tricks.
Android would be dead in the water today if it wasn't for Play Services. Developing for Android is still painful today because but Play Services at least meant that you could expect a certain range of features spanning multiple major releases of Android.
I'm pretty sure that Play Services wasn't something Google really wanted to have but were forced to implement because so many OEMs just shit the bed w/r/t their Android forks.
Only because they didn't licensed Android in a way that would have prevented that in first place, nor have proper clauses on their Play Store contracts.
These licenses are totally meaningless when Google make anti-competitive threats to their partners for attempting to exercise that license. They benefit from all the marketing of their vendor ecosystem in the public eye using the open thing, while quietly holding a gun to everyone's head in the background. That is the absolute antithesis of what "genuine open source" is supposed to be about, it is a marketing ruse and you've fallen for it.
My point is that it's totally possible to have an Android phone without any proprietary Google software components, thanks to Android being open source.
Same with Fuchsia - its license should allow to make a fully FOSS privacy-respecting variant, and maybe it would be something I could recommend to my friends or family to replace Windows on their desktop for example (if Fuchsia becomes popular enough). At least such option exists, unlike in the case of Windows, so I don't see Fuchsia as a bad thing.
I'm not familiar enough with Android internals, but as I understood from a quick research this means that it will be possible now to upgrade the Android Runtime through the Play Store (which was handled by phone manufacturers?). Is it a problem for distributions without the Play Store like GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Why?
That's a highly optimistic read of it. China move fast and brutally when they decide to move, but often their motivations are approximately identical to what applies in the west, we just take a more gentle approach to changes in our extremely fragile financial system.
I think US banking is the outlier here. I've never paid anything like this anywhere in Europe, the vast majority of transactions (for example SEPA) are free, or very close to free.
I’ve found SEPA to be highly overrated. Upon further investigation I learned that Europeans have little experience with cross-border SEPA.
Its free but not anywhere near instant (although your conversation was not about speed). The instant version of SEPA exists in a thin patchwork, which might solve the most common use cases of people in the same country using that country’s largest banks. Everything else is pretty much the same as ACH in the US in that it also takes several business days, and is also free.
I've never had cross border SEPA take longer than a business day. Don't doubt it can happen, but if you submit before the cutoff and it's not there by end of next business day your bank or the recipient bank are violating the rules.
If the plot were smaller there's the risk that someone could calculate plots "on the fly" within the 30-second claim window, thus reducing Chia to proof-of-work (or even breaking it entirely? the "green" paper [1] is a bit too dense for me). It's expected and planned that k will have to increase to 33 in a few years to stay ahead.
For a tiny fraction of the population this might be true, for the rest of the population it definitely isn't true. I'm part of that tiny fraction, and pissed away hours trying to find a LineageOS (or similar) build for my current handset. I don't consider the task easy
Even if it were easy, it means giving up access to a huge variety of apps that expect and test for official builds. Anything with DRM for example