I've been a long term freetube user, but lately I'm finding pipeline built locally through AUR, formerly known as feetuber, a much better experience at least for me. I've set it up to use ytdlp and mpv all the time, so I don't care about Piped sites. It supports Peertube already, and it's way light, at least with mpv playing it is

There are a bunch of non bloated alternatives with whether wayland compositors and also X11 window managers, and there's also kde/plasma, xfce and mate if still wanting full DE, plus a hybrid lxde-gtk3/lxqt (lxqt supports both X11 and wayland I believe).

If going the non bloated ways, distributions can offer some modifications on the system configurations files, so that users can start with working software out of the box, and can even offer installation meta packages for a complete set of i3/sway packages to have an equivalent DE experience. What would be left to users is custom settings to get more appealing aesthetics depending on the user, if not i3/sway, then openbox/labwc, and so on. For a DE experience including into the meta package a toolbar like yambar (works on X11 and wayland), dunst/mako, udiskie, redshift/wlsunset and so on. The missing part on non bloated alternatives is easy of configuring through buttons and widgets, and even so lxqt made an easy of configure software component for openbox, and there might be something similar for labwc.

So non systemd distributions are far from dying because of gnome's hostility.

And if I recall correctly, several gnome users (not its huge base of course) are moving away from gnome any ways unhappy with its plugin support, given gnome is known to leave plugins unsupported on its releases and not caring about them.

Librewolf is a privacy oriented fork of Firefox, it grabs some setting from arkenfox. Betterbird is not a privacy oriented fork of Thunderbird as far as I remember. When I tried it the only thing I was attracted to was its tray support, but as I use non DE compositors, so far wayfire, labwc and sway (tabbed layout), and as there's currently a Firefox bug, I didn't see any reason to keep trying it, and now on sway with tabbed layout I see no reason for a tray any ways...

do you mean you use a more privacy oriented fork like Librewolf, or instead some chrome/chromium derivative or fork?

Where did you get this idea?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the fsf either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

I think you are confusing FSF with the Linux Foundation, and you can see MS as part of the platinum LF members. Was that it, or you really meant FSF?

Quick question, why not considering lemmy as your "blog" provider? If the "community" concept wouldn't apply, perhaps creating your own "community" and becoming its "mod", disabling posts from others except yours, wouldn't that work? Lemmy already provide RSS feeds so others can follow/track your posts without any lemmy account, just like with any blog providing RSS/atom feeds, and you get "blog" feedback through lemmy, but the same applies to other blog providers, only the ones subscribed can provide feedback.

I was looking for an anonymous blogging mechanism with digital signature (not to identify the author but to verify its authenticity). Long story short, nothing out there seemed to really fit into what I was looking for, but among the suggestions lemmy was there as an option. You can avoid following anything, and looking into lemmy's default from page, just use it to post and get feedback, forgetting about the social networks characteristics of lemmy, and make it work as your blog provider...

Neither servo rendering engine (like gecko), nor verso (an actual rust based web browser based on servo) are quite ready for prime time. But I'm hoping they will be there sooner rather than later. I don't use Firefox directly, but rather wrappers based on it, Librewolf for the desktop and Mull in part because I'm lazy (I prefer the ankerfox stuff and other to be done for me), and if I want to avoid chromium based browsers, dominating big time (MS browser edge is as well chromium base, electron is chromium in disguise, and now a days QT web engine underneath is chromium as well) well there's no option yet.

On the other side, nothing guarantees servo and verso (or whatever other servo based browsers in the future) will care about net free advocacy, neither user freedoms, just be concerned about being better technical solutions, :( But I still have high hopes as you might...

Just being a good technical alternative is not good enough now days, :(

This is sad, not just because it's a trend on Mozilla, but because it shows how mozilla has embraced the corporative kind of mindset. The advocacy team was fundamental for net free principles.

Mozilla based browsers keep being the only practical alternative to web browser dominance, but it itself has degrading its status of resisting bad practices against users and the web in general. And emerging alternatives are also technical alternatives only, with no intention of net freedom advocacy, GPL sort of principles to protect the user and so on.

Sad days indeed, :/

I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I'll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn't experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn't suffer the same fate. And linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can't think of any kernel more adopted than linux...

To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today's world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:

• Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
• On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it's where corporate reach deeper offering "cheap" educational licences.
• From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
• Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
• In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today's world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There's nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don't really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn't guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that's not the majority of open source SW.
• The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
• Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there's the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that's one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it's easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.

Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it's not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future "technologists"...

On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don't think there's any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.

On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it's actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)

I would recommend using apkupdater for closed source apks, in particular enabling apkpure repo, rather than insisting on using google repo with aurora store or any other mechanism.

Also looking for FLOSS alternatives if possile (granted things like whatsapp and waze won't have alternatives for example).

Some metioned apkmirror as the more trusted repo for closed source apps, however it's currently formatting apks on multiple apks, and supposedly requesting for the apkmirror own instaler, so I recommend apkpure instead, which is also pretty well regarded, and they also in theory offer the same packages as the ones on google play...

For FLOSS apps, the different f-droid repos (official ones and non official ones such as izzy-on-droid) offer a good amount of them.

Mozilla being Mozilla, I'd guess. They should have gone sel-hosted with sourcehut, or at least gitlab. Or if not self-hosted, the choice should have been at the least gitlab or better, given it allows to chose DCO over CLA. But perhaps not everyone cares... I remember when gitlab introduced DCO, and how that helped debian and gnome to migrate to gitlab. After allowing DCO, other projects migrated as well.

I'm not that fan of gitlab, and I'd prefer sourcehut for open source projects, but if wanting something closer to github, then gitlab might be the answer. But Mozilla is a corp, maybe they don't care much about these things, and as a corp, perhaps they were looking for CLA sort of contribution any ways...

What I'm missing from wayland, it's not really something from wayland itself. Examples are several needed electron based applications, which some will refuse to properly work (for meetings, desktop sharing, etc), wine, gtk4 applications not respecting GDK_DPI_SCALE (not sure if already addressed) when not using gnome (wayfire being used as compositor), no proper support for conky (or eventually equivalent wayland functionality) yet, and several nuances with waybar, and some other tools. Major issue is my work dependency over some non floss electron binary blobs, like teams, slack, and so on, which particularly for desktop sharing and meetings don't yet work properly, no matter the electron options one can use for them, and some floss I use like signal, freetube, jitsi. Wine has a horrible hack, which I might live with, but it's horrible...

So I'll have to wait further for non wayland stuff to truly support wayland, and it has taken ages for that to happen, :(

I haven't tried labwc, andit sounds interesting, though I don't like openbox configs, and I really love fluxbox ways, which are also text files, but I never got used to openbox configs, perhaps just because I got way too familiar with fluxbox, which is what I use with Xorg (fluxbox + picom + tint2 + conky).