Regarding android version, I think @boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net already gave a good hint. Currently f-droid version 1.21.0 supports android 6.0+.

According to f-droid basic URL:

NOTE: The Basic version of F-Droid Client has a reduced feature set (e.g. no nearby share and no panic feature). It targets Android 13 and can do unattended updates without privileged extension or root.

I don't see the target version varying between them, I found both to be 1.21.0 on Android (I have enabled unstable updates), and both indicate they support android 6.0+. So if you have LOS or plain android on a version 6.0 or beyond, f-droid should be able to install and work on them.

I use F-Droid since it comes pre-installed and with privileged extension set by default on LOS for MicroG, so I don't find it particularly appealing to install F-Droid basic instead, but if that were not the case, I'd go with F-Droid basic, given I don't set F-Droid to serve nearby devices on any phone, and I haven't ever thought of using the panic feature. I'm using LOS4uG 21, meaning android 14. with no issues, so perhaps 1.21.0 already target android 14, and not just android 13.

So I believe both, the basic and the not basic versions of F-Droid target the same version, and support the same versions, the difference is in basic with a couple of less features. But you can always take a look at the version, and there you can tap on the specific version to see what versions of android are supported.

Greetings !

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, :)

Have you read it's github front page?

This is an experimental cryptographic network library. It has not been formally audited by an independent third party that specializes in cryptography or cryptanalysis. Use this library at your own risk.

BTW, if you look at its issues (including closed ones, which most probably aren't really closed) you'll find pretty interesting discussions about its crypto not being right. That said, I'm not sure what irungentoo brings to the picture...

At any rate, if you're looking for distributed messaging, I'd look into Jami. It also uses DHT and something similar to torrents mechanism. Jami is my only option so far for distributed messaging. There's also Briar, but I don't like it for regular messaging, particularly on phones (too much battery usage), neither its underlying technology, but if it's to your liking, then that's another option for distributing messaging.

Well this one is not false, :(

browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled

Though this one is:

browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled

So it seems not quite fully disabled... But telemetry is supposed to be off on librewolf...

Probably Guix, and GNU endorsed distributions. Binary blobs are not allowed on free/libre distributions, or not on their official repos. That said, most gnu + linux distributions don't care about those. Most will take care, if they get to realize it, about distribution licenses, so if something has some sort of legal issue to be distributed, that will get purged from its repos most probably...

How about bcachefs. I'm waiting for it to support swapfiles, which seems to be in the TODO list, but so far doesn't work. If you use swap partition[s], or prefer not to have swap at all (I never fell for this, and besides swap is required for hibernation if that's a thing for you), then bcachefs is ready for you. It's already part of linux since 6.7, and on Artix, current linux is 6.8.9...

To me is the FS to use. I'm still on luks + ext4 (no LVM) and do entire home backups with plain rsync to an external device. I'd have to learn new stuff, since ext4 is really basic and easy to configure if in need, but I think bcachefs is worth it, and as mentioned, just waiting for it to support swapfiles, :)

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.

But strip is still enabled on new makepkg.conf, so all debug symbols get removed when packaging. Actually I don't get it why stripping debug symbols while also generating them first. So are those two actually compatible?

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...

Second one, which I'd rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.

Though I don't really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don't like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don't like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don't like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant... All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)

it's not just osm instead of gmaps for the FOSS version. It's NOT using google push notificationss neither gapps at all. Using sockets instead of push notifications. It makes molly FOSS being more battery hungry, but at least it's not using google stuff. Not sure if the dev would be willing to integrate suipport for unified push for the FOSS version, that'd be even better...

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).