It makes sense if your phone is well supported in the custom ROM comunnity and doesn’t receive feature or security updates from the manufacturer anymore. I am already 3 Android versions past the last supported Android version by the manufacturer thanks to community maintained ROMs. (Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC).

Google play services is a monolith, that does a plethora of stuff on the phone, including features like quick share, location services, various Firebase APIs for instant notifications stuff, find my device and whatnot, so I think the size is pretty reasonable.

The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

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Chrome or Chromium project?

I think maintaning a Firefox fork is pretty demanding especially considering you are already maintaining a distro. And there are already a lot of Firefox forks out there.

Do the “right” thing.

Why don’t you explain your arguments or make counter arguments instead of attacking your opponent personally. How do I matter here?

I am not a Zorin OS fanboy or anything, but honestly I don’t see anything scummy about requiring payment from the user to get access to certain features of the product. It’s just shareware. It’s their product FOSS or not. I think they make it clear about what you get for free and what you don’t. If you don’t like that you don’t have to use their product and you can use an alternative instead. It’s not like they were a monopoly in the world of Linux distros and you have no other option. I see nothing scummy about this. It would be scummy if they would do some kind of false advertising (adverties features you actually don’t get or adverties features in a misleading way) or if they started moving features from the free to the pro version that used to be free, because some people may have relyed on these features.

Can you elaborate? Because to me this feels like saying that the local grocery shop is scummy because it wants people to pay instead of relying on donations. If the whole OS was paid like RedHat Linux is than it would be OK or you consider that to be also a case of taking advantage of users who don’t know any better.

Flutter uses its own UI engine. It does not rely on any webview AFAIK.

By contrast, Flutter minimizes those abstractions, bypassing the system UI widget libraries in favor of its own widget set. The Dart code that paints Flutter’s visuals is compiled into native code, which uses Impeller for rendering. Impeller is shipped along with the application, allowing the developer to upgrade their app to stay updated with the latest performance improvements even if the phone hasn’t been updated with a new Android version. The same is true for Flutter on other native platforms, such as Windows or macOS.

https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/architectural-overview#flutters-rendering-model

If you like VSCode you can try VSCodium which supports almost all features of VSCode but should be fully FOSS without Microsoft proprietary blobs.

You are kind of right. I should have thought about that before commenting.

I am not educated enough about this, but don’t these kind of games unnecesarrily strain all the servers that host the packages for people that really need them for download and most of these people run these servers for free in good will and faith that they will serve meaningful needs with positive impact? I am sorry for spoiling the fun, but I felt like I had to point this out.

There’s also the PersonalDNSFilter which does the equivalent while being a tiny open-source app that serves only for that purpose and also somehow still not getting banned from the Google Play store or AdAway which also has this feature or TrackerControl or…

The Simple Mobile Tools collection of Android apps. Forks have been made and are maintained fortunately, but the original autor sold the apps to some company that just adds ads and trackers to the apps to make more money out of it.

Win + V should bring up cliboard history which is basically the same pop-up just on a different tab.

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Breezy weather also allows you to select weather data from multiple sources. It even let’s you select which type of data to get from which provider.

It could be nice, but also annoying in some cases. I would at least want to have an option to allow all the time.