Taxes contribute to providing services and infrastructure to the people. This takes money from the people and deposits it into the bank accounts of the wealthy. I see two very different things.

While I agree with you that some software isn’t capable of running on Linux (even through wine), there is another aspect that’s important to remember. Want and choice. The software that doesnt run on Linux is developed only for Windows because of market share. If more people used Linux, and more importantly, demanded Linux support, more software would support it. I WANT to use Linux instead of windows, so in order for that to become a reality, I push companies to support it and I talk to people and encourage trying Linux out. Can everyone make the switch? No, but some can; and the more that do the more Linux will be supported.

Your voice and opinion and choice matters. Don’t let a big corporation steal that from you. Even if you want to use Windows, you should still have the choice.

Signal provides a backup option. The auto backup for SMS on android is provided by google and likely uses google drive. I don’t know for certain but I would guess the encryption options and security of that route would be impossible to guarantee and the public backlash of signal users knowing their data was being sent to Google’s servers would be massive.

I’ve setup my signal backups to a local folder on my phone. I then have SyncThing running on my phone and home computer so it automatically gets sent once it’s created.

True. Unfortunately Google’s intention isn’t to protect the user experience by keeping the OEMs in line, it’s to control and profit off of that control.

Is Android heavily associated to Google? Of course. Should it be? I would say no. Hence the original comment.

Android is not owned by Google. Android comes from the AOSP (android open source project) which is free and open source. Google contributes but so do the other OEMS.

Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol

Eventually the chromium base will be too hard to patch if Google has their way. Surfing on ungoogled chrome is keeping the user agent the same as chrome. This shows devs and companies that chrome dominates and therefore they should only code sites to support it. Only true way to protest these changes is to switch to a different browser. Firefox and its forks are the only privacy focused options.

This is your friendly reminder to not use Amazon. Give up a small convenience so that you can vote with your wallet.

Brave’s objective is to create a system that looks altruistic but they control it and take a ever increasing cut. Google started off the same way. I like the idea, but it’s one that needs to be controlled by a not for profit or by the people. Giving that control to a for profit company is just repeating history.

Firefox isn’t perfect, but my argument for choosing them or a fork of FF is to combat the market share of chromium based browsers. With google pushing for Web Environment Integrity (aka web DRM) using a different browser is one of the few good ways to protest.

I would also like to point out that popular open source projects often get contributions (both code and financial) from large corporations. Sometimes it’s their main source of revenue. This isn’t just a Mozilla problem. I wouldn’t even say it is a problem. A problem would be if those contributions affect the project in a negative way.

Just like in most things these days our choices are limited to the shitty and the less shitty. Obviously where Brave and Firefox lands on that shitty spectrum will depend on your priorities, but for me at least Firefox is less shitty and far from perfect, but decent.

Edit: grammer