Nice article! Are you the author? If so, I’d like to give you a suggestion: the part about the deepin Linux story and technical background is interesting enough to be its own article. That way, it would be more findable on web searchers and probably help a lot of people who look for information on it, which is a bit scarce in english.

Some software developers prefer to host their own repos and have more control over the release process and/or don’t want to fill all the criteria for being included on f-droid, so they create their own repos. Some of these apps can still be found on vanilla fdroid, but often aren’t updated so frequently.

Izzyondroid, on the other hand, is a different project, aimed at hosting different apps that are usually from smaller devs and can’t be included on fdroid yet, for different reasons.

The greatest thing about fdroid is that it allows anyone to create their own repos and you aren’t forced to depend on anyone.

5 years already? Shit, I’m old.

But what do you do when services and institutions in general require you to use whatsapp? That’s what is mostly keeping me from deleting that app.

I have been looking at this possibility, but running a bridge means that I will need to self host a service, which adds one more point of failure, while not really removing whatsapp from my life, so I’m not convinced it’s a good alternative.

Whatsapp

And no, I can’t simply stop using or ask friends to move to an alternative. I’m from Brazil and that thing is so popular and mainstream, that even stores or public services use it.

Just this week, I had to report an animal abuse case to the authorities, and the official communication channel I had to use was through whatsapp.

It’s sad to see how dependent of a single proprietary service for something so important we allowed ourselves to become…

I see now. You made some good points. Indeed, the targeted userbase doesn’t care about how the system works, so they may have a conflict in there,

Well… I’m using pidgin right now.

Thank you for explaining this concept. I still don’t see how it can be considered planned obsolescence, though. It looks more like a matter of optimizing the output and doing a tradeoff for more performance.

I see planned obsolescence as artificially limiting the longevity or repairability of a product, without any benefit at all, but with the intention of making it less durable. A good example could be locked smartphones without updates.

But perhaps, the definition of planned obsolescence is broader than i think.

but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.

Could you elaborate a bit more on that?

Whoa, I didn’t know tiktok was so popular. it’s like 1/8 of the entire world population, and considering that only about 70% of the world has internet access, it’s like 18% of all internet users.

Or are lots of these bot accounts, like other social media, and the real numbers are lower?

I was thinking it was something like what pidgin does on desktop, adapted for mobile, and was highly enthusiastic, but realized it works using matrix bridges and doesn’t process locally…

Well, at least it can be self hosted.

Foldable phone will always be either more expensive, less durable, or both, so it’s a no go for me, as much as I like the idea.

I used to think like that, but now I think about it in a different way.

These small distros often come with new approaches the big distros aren’t willing to risk yet, or provide an alternative to their dependence. Most of them will fail, but they’re important for bringing innovation to the linux-based OSes space.

Small distros come and go, but sometimes, even if they fail, their proposed idea gets integrated into the main ones, and that’s a bonus.

That particular one might not be so innovative, because there are already big distros pushing the immutable system concept, but, is doing the same while maintained by community effort, uses debian as a base, and focus on ease of usage. I think it still adds some value to the community

App lounge looks really interesting.

When I first heard about /e/ os, it looked a bit too weird, and I was too skeptical, but they’re growing so nice and creating interesting tools. I think I will give the project a shot.

No, but they accepted to publish political fake news ads for one of the running parties (the fascistoid one, of course) in the last elections here in Brazil.

That party has lost, but it was too close. In the 4 last years, during their mandate, hunger, violence, discrimination rape, and other problems rose to the highest levels in the century.

Google and other big tech companies have been influencing elections in a lot of places, and the consequences are enormous.

People also have that tendency to personify AIs. I don’t really understand why.

Would be even better if we did our own on lemmy.

The thing with grapheneos is that it’s not available to anyone. For example, pixel devices are extremely overpriced here in brazil. So, the best we can do is something like lineageos or /e/.

Such definitions are becoming more and more complicated. I think we should standardize a name for the family of systems we use, or it will become uglier and uglier.

Recently, I had to write an academic work in the area, and an entire section was dedicated to explaining this controversy and defining what kind of system I was talking about, so that the work is reproducible.