I’m personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.

Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won’t be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn’r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to “add me” easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I’m not too bothered by having it as I don’t use it daily or anything.

None of my banks (a couple French and Belgian ones) seem to support anything but auth via app. Can’t log in on my computer without my phone.

I’m personally really excited for Linux phones and want to move to one relatively soon. They’ve done amazing work on the experience of using them. What I’d really miss, based off of talking to folks and trying them at conventions, is:

• battery life. My Pixel 3a lasts over a day on Android, likely much less on pmOS
• UnifiedPush for notifications. I only see a Matrix client listed as WIP. Every other app (Fediverse, Signal) I would have to keep running in the background
• Notifications while in sleep mode. Looks like we don’t have “Doze Mode” from Android, so only calls & SMS work while asleep
• Fingerprint sensor. More of a QoL but I kept my phone model specifically for the ergonomics of the sensor on the back, and being able to scroll with it. Communication with the sensor is not yet figured out

This title is gold.

While degoogling is accessible right now, what worries me is that all of these projects are 100% dependent on Google’s whims because they use Android as the upstream. Same reason why I don’t use Chromium browsers: yes, they can patch over things, but they can’t fight the direction of the upstream project and they are powerless if the upstream stops publishing commits / source, like Google seems to be moving toward. Additionally, what “the big distros” aka stock ROMs do to prevent FOSS apps being installed means a much much smaller potential userbase for them. I develop an Android app, and (while I don’t have analytics) I don’t find it unlikely that at least half my users are on stock roms that would lose access to my app with this policy. It’s much less motivating to develop something when I know less people will benefit, and especially knowing I’m supporting only custom roms that are 100% beholden to Google. Degoogling is a good first step. I’ve been on Lineage for many years now. But I believe that the step that will truly make us independent is moving to Linux phones.

Cool! Perhaps I’ll give Qwant another shot. Thanks for sharing :)

Very cool, but this is old news from 2024. I wonder how they’re doing now.

Cool! Hope it works out.

Gah, Nextcloud is missing all the features and is frankly unusable (mobile apps are slow, can’t make or view albums, and can’t “open with” links on Android at least). My family uses it and my biggest project right now is importing all our stuff to Immich when I finally get the NixOS server ready to replace Ubuntu.

Tuwunel had intentions to build a Synapse migration tool, but I haven’t heard anything about it since. Was waiting for it so I could bring over profiles and most importantly chat history for myself and my family.

I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can’t recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it’s a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction… I’ve only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it (“infect”) to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects… if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it’ll work forever and anywhere.