Despite the downsides of F-Droid, there’s one thing they provide that other stores like Accrescent simply can’t. F-Droid provides APK builds with the exact source used for the build available. There’s a lot of trust involved, but this trust is in a single entity, rather than random developers. F-Droid has existed for a long time without adding malicious code to builds, so when they say “this source code produces this APK”, they have years of history doing exactly that to back their claim.

A random app developer has no such trust built up. Stores like Accrescent, even if you download only FOSS apps, trust the app developer with building apps. It’s less prone to one massive takeover, but APKs built by random devs are much harder to verify and check for malicious code than the source code. If F-Droid is taken over, it should be noticed relatively quickly, but affects everyone using F-Droid. If an app on Accrescent bundles malware, only users of that app are affected, but it may go unnoticed for a much longer time.

Afaik the bug was never present in a release. The developer who quit had to jump through a bunch of hoops, and treat it as a security issue, when it only affected people running the latest git commit.

KDE Connect, and if needed, ntfy.sh.

I don’t have a direct source other than the source code of the software they use: https://github.com/mautrix/signal

When using one of their “cloud hosted” bridges, the bridge software (that connects between Matrix/Beeper and other protocols) has to read all message content. Otherwise, it’s impossible to bridge to another protocol. E2EE becomes end (other users) to bridge (beeper) encryption.

With “local hosted” bridges, E2EE stays intact, but messages can’t be sent/received if the device hosting the bridge is unavailable.

In the future, with MLS (a different E2EE protocol), it could be possible to keep E2EE even when bridging to Matrix on cloud hosted bridges.

iirc NPxSP was getting messy internally, the author went and rewrote a lot of things

per-site process isolation, as mentioned here: https://divestos.org/pages/browsers#processIsolation

My experience with several firefox-based browsers on Android was not usable, with constant freezes, crashes, and performance issues.

There are some security considerations to using a Firefox-based browser on Android. In my experience, performance and stability has not been as good on Firefox Android as Chromium Android.

https://divestos.org/pages/browsers

Depends on how it’s implemented. Anyone using a “media proxy” will see their discord bridged media probably fail to load (outside of possible caches) after a day. Anyone who has their bridge configured to reupload discord media to their homeserver should see no change.

You want a magic Discord speedboost? It’s called OpenAsar. Mitigates telemetry, and speeds the client up to usable levels, especially on lower end hardware.

Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.

The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.

The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.

As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.

Your iPhone 13 syncs slower over USB because Apple decided to stay on Lightning connectors, which use USB 2.0 on the other end. Although FireWire was faster back when it co-existed with USB, the USB standard has surpassed it a long time ago with more power, faster speeds, and better physical connectors.

The source code for a decompilation of a game can only be available legally because someone who isn’t the original dev created the decomp and decided to share it publicly. All assets in the game were still created by the original developers, and can’t be freely shared. This means the open source decompilation will need a way to load assets from the original game to remain legal to redistribute. This includes things like textures, 3d models, and music.

Chances are, once this project is completed, you’ll need an original copy of the game to play, and it’ll use the cars, maps, and music from the original game.

“Android” phones can sometimes have “close to mainline” Linux distributions flashed onto them. You can get some of those, used, for less than 100$.

A custom Android rom would provide you with a decent chunk of the freedom you want in a mobile device.

A phone specifically built for Linux, with as much as possible FLOSS firmware, will cost a lot more. The cheapest is probably the PinePhone.

VRChat in particular has been degrading in quality and experience ever since they needed to start pleasing investors. You can give it a try if you want, but there’s a lot of toxicity there. Platforms like ChilloutVR or NeosVR have a better (but smaller) community.

Although some titles like BONELAB or Pavlov do feel a lot more like “tech demos”, they are still great titles. Some desktop titles also have VR ports that are worth playing, No Mans Sky and The Talos Principle come to mind.

The modding scenes of a lot of games have good VR mods too, “Vivecraft”, if you’re into Minecraft. Subnautica has a good VR mod, Half-Life 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Outer Wilds, and much more.

Not when “Intel based Macs” go out of support. There is no way to run the M1/2 MacOS version without having Apple hardware.

Lets take the imaginary program Y. It is free open source software with the GPLv3 license. If Valve wants to include Y in SteamOS, they are free to do so. Any time Valve makes changes or fixes to Y, they are legally required to provide the source code of their changes, as stated in the GPL license included with Y.

A lot of programs have this license (or a similar one), which forces corporations to contribute back to FOSS projects.

Some Valve-made components in SteamOS are truly “SteamOS only”, but a good amount of fixes to non-Valve programs are submitted “upstream” (to the original project). Due to the nature of Linux, it might be possible to copy the few non-foss components in SteamOS and directly use them in another distro.

Alongside forced contributions due to licensing, Valve contributes a lot of code to “gaming” programs on Linux, such as Wine or DXVK. They also make some SteamOS components FOSS, including Gamescope for example. Valve is (currently) doing a lot of work “for the community” rather than for direct profit.

Mainly their creation of Proton, and contributions to DXVK and WINE have helped Linux gaming become possible on any distro.

It is up to the device manufacturer. Google develops Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Google apps and services (Google Play Store for example). This feature (afaik) is in AOSP.

Google developed the version in AOSP, which is open source. Device manufacturers are then able to change the code as needed. If a device manufacturer uses base AOSP with (nearly) no changes, the fix Google made will be applied when the AOSP update goes through the manufacturers build pipeline and to the device (on Google Pixel phones for example). For manufacturers that have a lot of changes compared to AOSP (Xiaomi, Samsung, and many more), they might have to create their own fix that works on their own version of Android, which takes a lot longer.

One of the reasons people run “Custom ROMs” on their Android phone is to be responsible themselves for updates and fixes instead of the device manufacturer.

The IP you registered with permanently, and 3 months or 3000 entries in my case.

The same “rumors” exist about Matrix. According to some, “a lot of metadata is unencrypted”. While somewhat true, there’s literally no way to be able to deliver a message from person A to person B without knowing who the message is from and who it’s going to, especially on a decentralized platform. Most of the (not E2EE) metadata sent with an event in Matrix needs to be read by the homeserver, and thus can’t be E2EE.