This post was posted two times, so you might want to delete one of them.

Bookmarks and GPX export is a great addition. OrganicMaps continues to improve and I find myself using OsmAnd less and less (unless I need specific features).

Spotify and Crunchyroll also require DRM, like almost all commercial video sites.

Great to see Unified Push on the list. As well as improved Wayland input method support, whatever that exactly means.

I’m pretty sure microG isn’t installed by default because of how it’d conflict with installing MindTheGapps (Google Apps).

It’s great to see LMFG continuing for a while because its users would have to wipe their device to switch to LineageOS + microG.

That’s awesome. Is it as simple as adding the microG repo to F-Droid and installing from there?

Adding to that, there’re builds of LineageOS with microG preinstalled, which should be relatively similar to CalyxOS.

https://lineage.microg.org/

Immich recently changed license from MIT to AGPL. As far as I understand they can’t sinply relicense to a non-free license unless they redo a good chunk of code from the last half a year.

If they still used the MIT license I’d be worried too.

I personally would be hesitant to host Immich publicly until they’ve done a security audit. The risk of accidentally exposing my photos publicly is too big for me.

That’s why I recommend using Tailscale or Wireguard directly. Personally I’m using Wireguard for me and Tailscale for other people I want to easily access my services.

(Of course, not realistic if you have 500GB of music and no SD card slot in your phone)

That’s the problem right there. SD card storage is so cheap, but the manufacturers don’t include a slot for it.

It’s a sad day. E.g. former MEP Felix Reda did incredible work around the time of the 2017 EU copyright reform and helped the protests through transparency.

Now with the risk of badly written laws enabling (atm. restricted) surveillance, we’d have needed them more than ever. Luckily there’s still MEPs from the Czech Republic in the EU parliament.

Torrents are based on the idea that everyone using them pays for it with their bandwidth and hardware cost. Except for those leechers who don’t share.

I’m paying more for my seedbox than for my usenet subscription. If I used my own hardware I’d pay with stress on my hardware, e.g. the disks aging and failing earlier because of seeding. The power consumption is also not negligeble, altough the server is also used for other purposes.

With private trackers this idea of an equal exchange is more obvious because of ratio requirements.

Edit: I’d say it’s similar to open source in that no single individual has to pay for it, but someone does have to, for it to exist. Most often with their (valuable) time and knowledge. If no one helps out and does their part (through money or time+knowledge), a project won’t survive for long. Same is true for torrents.

I will be surprised if Spotify won’t announce a new more expensive HIFI subscription with their support for lossless audio. Imo this still makes it less interesting than Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz since it’ll still be impossible to permanently download music from Spotify.

Nonetheless it’s great that Spotify will provide lossless audio for those who want it.

You’re right, thanks for correcting me.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/10598850

You’re right, my apologies for confidently spreading misinformation and thank you for pointing it out. Material You colors are available on LineageOS and GrapheneOS, probably CalyxOS too.

With Android 12 GrapheneOS and CalyxOS choosing different colors was not possible, maybe because they didn’t implement something at first, but with 13+ Material You works as intended.

I’ve edited my parent comment accordingly.

Google has always been able to remove installed apps remotely, although I believe they only use it for malicious apps, not for apps that simply get removed from the Play Store.

But I’ve also been mislead by the headline.

Clickbait makes me appreciate my preferred small tech news outlet, which has been doing serious journalism without sensationalism for over 25 years. The authors even interact in their forum, which is still active because of how the site actually cares about the community.

My mental list of sites I try to avoid is longer than the list of actually good sites. Sadly those thrash sites get pushed up in rankings of Google News and similar aggregators because clickbait clicks well.

It’s important to note that Android ≠ AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Most of the actually interesting features advertised in a new Android release won’t be available to you if your not installing Google Services.

E.g. heavily advertised features like Android 12’s “Material You” adaptive themes aren’t even available on AOSP and thus GrapheneOS, CalyxOS or LineageOS.

New privacy features often already existed for years on custom ROMs like LineageOS.

This is why since around Android 10 I’m not even following new Android releases, at least not beyond reading glancing over an article. I didn’t even notice my phone updated to from 12 to 13 (GrapheneOS) until I noticed the new background apps menu, which is pretty much all of the changes.

Edit: Being able to set a language per app is a great feature of Android 13.

Edit 2: As pointed out in comments below, my Material You example was wrong.

A better example are heavily advertised translation and image editing features, which are sometimes locked to Pixel and definitely locked to installs with Google Services. Same is true for apps like “Digital Wellbeing”, which don’t work on AOSP but its features are advertised as Android features.

tl;dr
Android updates are even more uninteresting if your using a custom ROM, because most features won’t even be available in open source Android.

Shares aren’t necessarily voting shares, but I don’t know how that works and if it’s even relevant for the private Valve corporation.

So maybe Gabe Newell does have full control over Valve, or he might not.

It’s definitely interesting that it’s only 25%.

It’s great how Firefox can be customized through userChrome.css und user.js. I’m only using the former to put the tab bar in the same row with the url bar to save vertical space while using sidebery/vertical tabs, but it’s good that it’s still available.

Visually impaired people prefer being able to use the browser and actually be able to understand the content of websites.

These features are local, private and improve accessibility, so I really don’t see any similarities with telemetry which can be turned off anyway.