Disabled

Looks like the year of the linux desktop might happen afterall. Though differently than what most are expecting.

Librewolf keeps a few manual features out and adding things back in. Pocket is automatically disabled in Librewolf. And they re-enable the ability to run unsigned packages, which is only allowed in Firefox Nightly builds.

Ah, thats fair, didn't know that silence hasn't been updated in awhile. But was mainly just using that app as an example, but I know there are tons of open-source messaging apps to bundle in. I think it's very likely you might see a "choose your default messaging app" at install, where you get to choose from a list of like 4 to have installed.

I've only ever seen 1 open-source dialer app and I think it's called "Emerald Dialer" I've seen some more on the play store (through aurora store) which are not open source. I imagine people didn't see a need to make a new dialer app, the default AOSP one always seemed to suffice. Messaging apps on the other hand, have many features which someone might want to add, whether that be more customizability, more privacy or some other thing.

For messaging app I don't think it'd be a huge deal, I could see ROMs just shipping with something like Silence or some other open messaging app, since there's a lot of them. Dialer is the one I could see being an issue. I think what's most likely to happen is there's going to be a new go to open source dialer app specifically made for this purpose. It'd make more sense than every ROM making and maintaining their own dialer, except maybe the big ones like Lineage and Graphene.

I definitely agree that this will be an issue, especially as they do more and more stuff like this. This specific change I think will actually be better in the long-run. I find the community made apps for this sort of thing tend to be better than the default AOSP ones anyway.

For the long term though it says some negative things about Google and their intentions for AOSP, wonder what will happen as they retire more and more features of it. Maybe there will be an AOSP fork which is made to kind of replace AOSP, I could kind of see that happening. Something that aims to stay updated with the new code, but also tries to break away from as much dependencies as possible.

These are just some of my thoughts/theories.

I'm sure more frontends will come out to get around the garbage, it's just a matter of when. The cat and mouse game continues. Might need to start archiving videos in the meantime though.

I'll be interested to see the ways ad blockers and similar tech try to get around this. I'll also have to think harder about archiving videos I like, instead of just assuming I have access to them, I do this with most things, but videos are not one of them.

Valve's Proton and applications like Bottles really help too, making things pretty much 1 click to get working.

The writing was on the walls with this one. Wonder if this will be the last straw for some people. I certainly wouldn't want all my files stored on a server, much less a microsoft one.

A folding phone would have to be in the $600 price range for me to buy one, I'd never buy a phone that costs more than that. But I'm definitely not an average phone user. I rarely use my phone.

I love this image.

That's definitely an interesting theory and honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was the case. I do remember SOPA and PIPA, but from my memory, Obama is the one who stopped those bills in their path to getting made into law. He even promised that bills like that would never get into law while he was president. Maybe I'm not remembering very much.

I wasn't even old enough to vote back then, so I didn't pay much attention. I know my dad absolutely hated Obama, though, lol. But my dad was also the type of person who would see the color blue or a D next to a candidates name and immediately cross them out. So, not exactly the most unbias person in the world, lol.