turboSnail

Wile E. Coyote moment. It’s fine as long as you don’t look down.

Apparently reactional torque isn’t a thing in this case.

That “Google has to say it’s ok” type of thing used to be a total dealbreaker. So many things either required fragile workarounds or straight up didn’t work at all.

When I saw the posts about the new Jolla phone, I nearly bought one. Unfortunately, I still have some special hardware that requires android or iOS to work properly, and getting rid of them would feel like jumping back to 2010. That’s the primary reason I don’t think I could get rid of a mainstream mobile device.

However, I’m still tempted to get that phone and try it out as a secondary phone. That way, I would find out where the bottlenecks are these days.

Aurora already existed when I tried de-googling for the first time, so installing apps wasn’t really a problem. Making them run was, because I didn’t want to have any Google trash on my phone. Apparently, nowadays you can trick the apps into thinking that everything is vanilla. Sounds interesting how things have developed. Maybe Graphene OS really is becoming a viable alternative.

That's totally doable! Get a domain, find a server you like, pay for hosting, and you can install whatever you want on it. If you want to have your own cloud service, just install nextcloud. Install pihole and start blocking ads everywhere. Do you want to run an LLM in your own cloud? Totally doable as well. Maybe even host a Fediverse instance, while you're at it.

I know I don't have the time and energy to play admin in my free time, but I can definitely see the value in a hobby like that. I don't mind paying for a cloud service or email, because that way I can be sure amateurs like me aren't running the show. Obviously, I'm not paying Apple or Google to defile me. Those scammers don't deserve my money or my data. Privacy respecting companies deserve to be paid for their efforts though.

I did that too, but that was a very long time ago. At the time, I had some serious problems with getting specific apps working. Is it any better these days?

All the bare bones basics still worked fine. It's just that the modern world kinda expects you to have access to much more than what was considered basics back then. Just because you have email and a web browser on your phone doesn't make your phone smart enough in many cases. If you want to do modern things in the modern world, you're expected to run specific apps that may or may not run at all unless you have vanilla Android on your phone. Did you run into issues like that?

A fully de-goggled Android won't be able to run some apps. For example banking apps tend to be really picky about these things. Either the app runs on a vanilla Android or it won't run at all. Sure, you can get rid of Google, but you'll be making some sacrifices. Another option is to use iOS, but it comes with some messed up sacrifices too.

A third option is to use a Linux phone, but I haven't got any personal experience with that. Looks promising, but apparently many basic necessities aren't available yet.

If you don't really need anything more than email, SMS and phone calls, a de-googled android and Linux phones should be fine. If you want to be more compatible with the rest of the modern world, iOS is the least bad option here. Still, pretty awful but at least you can guarantee that all the modern mobile things work. Sure, you'll be living without Google, but you'll be living with Apple now so... Is that a win? Probably not.

Either way, Linux phones look very promising. Remember to check back in 5 about years to see if the situation has improved. Some EU countries are currently severing their ties with American spyware companies, and this move could result in developing the mobile Linux ecosystem to a more usable state. If that happens, I'm probably going to recommend ditching your iPhone and Switching to a mobile Linux phone.

Same here. Our It guys have good taste in browsers, but they also know that some people in the company may still need one of the messy sites that are incompatible with web standards. Chrome is for those edge cases.

Congrats! You've just beaten the final boss and finished the main quest of Gmail. Sounds like a great time to switch to Tutanota.

And install Firefox or one of its many forks.

Absolutely! The environment you grow in plays a significant role in determining who you become. Some times I wonder what my hobbies would have been if I didn’t grow up with computers. Maybe I would be disassembling engines and gearboxes all day.

Grok will be the pilot and Copilot will be the copilot. Air traffic control could be handled by GPT.