Jiří Král

The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

I stoped using yt-dlp frontends the moment I saw youtube actually serving upscaled opus media files (very visible line on a spectrogram). Also their metadata is totally fucked-up and not very well organized and full of shit (comments with huge spaces and non useful metadata…).

Wow really? Are you sure it applies to all audio files? YouTube gathers music records from different companies so they could be of varying quality. To me the opus quality from YouTube was always decent and personally I cannot hear any compression in the audio. The metada is not perfect, but I usually use some tag editor to complete what’s missing. YTDLnis on Android does a great job of scraping as much usable metada from YouTube Music as possible.

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?

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.