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Cromite 🤓

Cannot speak for other schools in other countries (and I guess this question was targeted at colleges in USA), but I am currently studying Open informatics at Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech technical university in Prague and all the courses I have that are not mathematical, but require to use a computer do take into account that you may not be using only Windows, but also MacOS or Linux. I haven’t yet encounterered a software that we would be required to use and wouldn’t work on Linux, nor did I have to go through any more hassle because I use Linux, but rather contrary to that. In some cases using Linux made things easier and more straightforward for me.

The only thing I still don’t like much about recommending Linux Mint to beginners is that their Cinnamon desktop still uses Xorg which has some horrible display tearing on some Nvidia graphic cards (can be usually fixed with some tinkering and this is also only my personal experience), which is usually not a thing with Wayland and being Xorg it also means it has inferior touchpad gestures (surely not as smooth as Gnome or KDE) which can be important for notebook users. While being very user friendly it is one of the more resource heavy DE’s I would say even more than Gnome or KDE. It also seems to have some problems with battery life? The official Gnome and KDE desktop packages for Linux Mint are pretty outdated, are still Xorg versions and aren’t officially supported AFAIK (maybe there are some good community maintained packages). Otherwise I agree it’s one of the best choices.

My personal favorite for beginners is Fedora Workstation or KDE edition, because it’s up to date and fairly hassle free and stable (except the frequent kernel updates which sometime cause issues, but booting the older kernel is straightforward) and does not much modify its packages from the original or push their products on you like Ubuntu.

You could license it under the (A)GPL, charge for downloads in the Play store or for compiled binaries on ur website and ask for donations on F-Droid.

You could even do a freemium version where some features are locked in the binaries you distribute and need a license from ur website or smth (for those who don’t want to use Google Play). (iirc SD Maid 2/SE does this)

Someone else could just compile the app themselves, unlock all premium features and distribute it to play store without violating the license?

You mean the margins between the rounded buttons?

For TVs the manufacturers are the ones who control the bloated adware and make money off of it while on notebooks and laptops it is Micro$oft. Except maybe for TVs coming with Android TV OS, but I think even that can be modified to promote their services.

I have a good experience with CalcYou.

Chrome or Chromium project?

The kernel is open-source AFAIK, but anything built on top of it is part of AOSP which is licensed under Apache 2 and allows for proprietary modifications to be redistributed. To be honest I don’t know how this licensing stuff works exactly.

There are no nearly custom ROMs for phones with mediatek processors AFAIK because the drivers are not open-source. Either that or there is a legal issue with modifying and redistributimg the modified drivers.

There are plenty of custom ROMs for phones where the chipset drivers are open (usually Qualcomm) and the phone has unlockable bootloader. If these 2 conditions are met in many cases the community is able to do better job of keeping the phone up to date with newer Android builds than the manufacturer itself. My phone would be stuck with Android 12 if I did rely on the manufacturer, but thanks to the community I run Android 14 with security patch from this February and Android 15 is also available. The problem is of course that most users aren’t going to flash their phone with a new ROM on their own anyway even if it is possible the ARM ecosystem unfortunately relies on the hardware manufacturer to keep the drivers and everything up to date (to work with the latest OS realease) and not on the OS distributor like most x86 ecosystem does, so you are lrobably right ARM is kind of cursed in this way. I know there are also drivers on x86, but the whole nature of things much more open. Correct me if I am wrong.

Honestly what you are describing here would bother me too. For example on my notebook I rely on configuring grub to use kernel argument amdgpu.abmlevel=0 which fixes the screen colors getting washed out when in battery saving mode, but I doubt I would be able to configure grub on an atomic distro.

I think maintaning a Firefox fork is pretty demanding especially considering you are already maintaining a distro. And there are already a lot of Firefox forks out there.

Do the “right” thing.

Why don’t you explain your arguments or make counter arguments instead of attacking your opponent personally. How do I matter here?

I am not a Zorin OS fanboy or anything, but honestly I don’t see anything scummy about requiring payment from the user to get access to certain features of the product. It’s just shareware. It’s their product FOSS or not. I think they make it clear about what you get for free and what you don’t. If you don’t like that you don’t have to use their product and you can use an alternative instead. It’s not like they were a monopoly in the world of Linux distros and you have no other option. I see nothing scummy about this. It would be scummy if they would do some kind of false advertising (adverties features you actually don’t get or adverties features in a misleading way) or if they started moving features from the free to the pro version that used to be free, because some people may have relyed on these features.

Can you elaborate? Because to me this feels like saying that the local grocery shop is scummy because it wants people to pay instead of relying on donations. If the whole OS was paid like RedHat Linux is than it would be OK or you consider that to be also a case of taking advantage of users who don’t know any better.

Flutter uses its own UI engine. It does not rely on any webview AFAIK.

By contrast, Flutter minimizes those abstractions, bypassing the system UI widget libraries in favor of its own widget set. The Dart code that paints Flutter’s visuals is compiled into native code, which uses Impeller for rendering. Impeller is shipped along with the application, allowing the developer to upgrade their app to stay updated with the latest performance improvements even if the phone hasn’t been updated with a new Android version. The same is true for Flutter on other native platforms, such as Windows or macOS.

https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/architectural-overview#flutters-rendering-model

If you like VSCode you can try VSCodium which supports almost all features of VSCode but should be fully FOSS without Microsoft proprietary blobs.

AFAIK you have to give the app location access for it to be able to scan sourrounding networks and see the SSIDs (At least that’s how it works on the newer Android versions circa around Android 10 or 9). For bluetooth you have to enable at least the nearby devices permission. If you do these things then it makes sense that the app can track your location.