Reset my phone so I could get the latest version of #LineageOS, and I am again saddened by how poorly an Android phone works without Google Play Services.
Apps crash randomly. "Open source" apps are either missing on F-Droid or their versions are months out of date. There's no way to get either Chromium or Firefox through F-Droid. Yalp Store (Play Store proxy) is the only reasonable solution.
On the bright side: geolocation actually seems to be working this time, for some reason. Huzzah!
And before someone says "microG": I have tried it, but I've found it causes more problems than it solves. Better to have no Google Play Services than a half-working Google Play Services.
The main issue with LineageOS is that my phone feels like it's held together with duct tape. Stuff randomly breaks, it's awkward, and every few months when there's a firmware upgrade I have to factory reset and start all over again, which takes hours, and I'm always afraid I'm going to break something when I muck around in recovery mode.
Using Ubuntu on a laptop is really not that hard; I don't feel like I'm missing much compared to either macOS or Windows. Why are open-source phones so hard??
@nolan Biggest one is that the various SoC vendors don't have proper open source drivers for things like their GPUs and radios for inclusion in-kernel, I believe.
Writing open source software that works is hard when you're tied to ancient, specific kernel versions e.g. from Android that have their own flaws/bugs/missing features, just to get working GPU drivers that are an un-debuggable binary blob.
We need open source *hardware* to underpin this stuff, I think. RISC-V, but for GPUs + radios.
Yep, we need #openSourceHardware / #openHardware that is ideally crowdfunded ... at a scale that at least takes it in the direction of being competitive price wise ... #fairphone was/is a good start, but at 500€ it's rather unaffordable for many people.
Generally, there need to be #openSource projects that attract enough people/users to form a community where people can help each other out.
The way I see it, one main reason why projects like #lineageOS (or open source projects in general) have a hard time attracting a broader user base which would in turn boost their ability to provide decent support ... is ... that the hard-working developers are scattered across many different branches/sub-projects/devices ... that's a clear disadvantage the open-source community has compared to lets say Apple, who only have very few variants of their devices.
So what could be done?
I think people should try to stick to devices/projects/software that follow the most important (political/technological) principles but _still_ have a big user base ... getting an exotic device will maybe fulfill special combinations of personal requirements, but it will also require spending more time to troubleshoot/maintain.
#RiscV for smartphones and laptops will hopefully be a thing in the near future
