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i'm having some decent success using cmus and a tiny wrapper script to save some typing.

i'd rather see the DOGE discord server

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don't want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won't actually move off it.

for teams i'm sure theres projects in development, i just don't know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there's lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.

I'm using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.

for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.

for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)... is all stuff that would be convenient but it's all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don't know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn't worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don't actually know any such distros right now.

easiest thing for me was to just... uninstall the app and use it in a browser.

the experience is so terrible, i don't spend much time on it anymore. seriously, go to reddit.com and see what it looks like with no account and no extensions.

instagram is even worse, once in a while i try to open a funny post someone sends me in the browser, and ... it usually works for the first post (after clicking away a bunch of popups) but if i open a second one i get completely blocked. thanks meta 👌

i mean.. it is massively better, but yes it still sucks. but what do you move friends and family to? last i looked into element it was not an option for several reasons, and i don't think anyone would switch to basically noname apps like simplex or similar, even if they might be decent solutions. i really want the last few contacts i have on whatsapp to move, but i'm not gonna push hard to get them to use signal just to get it enshittified in the near future. also a few switched to telegram, which while not facebook, is not really better mainly because it doesn't even e2ee by default.

luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point...), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company's funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we'd all save money.

i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn't work, but i don't recall what it was.

cat works perfectly fine too 👌

well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won't spontaneously die either.

for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.

knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i'm not a grub user i haven't had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i'm confident enough it'd be a quick fix.