"Sideload" is such a dumb name for what is just the act of installing apps of your own choosing.

The USA certainly has rotting infrastructure additionally suffering from slow construction times, and inflated costs with bloated contracts going to feed leeches at the "top" of our trickle-up chain.

But the claim "Iran got all their bridges fixed" needs citation and sounds like some made up bs - it's very likely they repaired some of them, but the Iranian people have been suffering from massive bombardments for months, as well as decades of sanctions, and earthquake on top of this, so doubtful they have repaired most of what has been damaged, let alone all.

Get rid of income taxes and do a national Land Value Tax on all business properties instead, like Henry George talked 145 years ago, problem solved.

My old man pet peeve: the plural of "vinyl" is "vinyl." They are "records" or "LPs" - not "vinyls". Now get off of my LAN! ;)

Good to know. Also a point of info: RFK Jr. is against "big pharma vaccines".

In order to do that Trump would need a MAGA-Republican majority in the US Senate as well, due to a recently bi-partisan enacted law by Congress stating as much - https://thehill.com/homenews/4360407-congress-approves-bill-barring-president-withdrawing-nato/

I'm not missing any point at all, your post is in essential agreement with mine, lol.

Sadly in this cycle even the declared independent and third party candidates are beyond mediocre so far as well. Stupidest election of my lifetime (and I was born when LBJ was Pres).

Other options are Fairphone, Volla, Murena - or flashing "vanilla" custom ROM's on phones other than Pixels - or using Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, Mobian, Droidian or Sailfish OS.

the solution is to eliminate income taxes, and replace them with a national Land Value Tax on business properties, excise taxes and fines on anything that causes "negative externalities" (aka pollutants), and fees on every equities market transaction. That way these are way harder to avoid, and don't depend on self reporting

Steve Ballmer lacked two things: vision and taste, - and his personal lackings ended up coloring all of MS's efforts and products during his tenure as CEO.

2025 will likely be way more the year of massive e-waste than the "Year of the Linux Desktop (TM)" - but I still think it is in the realm of possible that Linux market share close to doubles into the 5 to 8 percent range.

While I already regularly use Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch for my "infotainment" desktops, laptops and tablets - I have 3 desktops in my studio that run Windows 10 that work great for my pro audio work needs, none of which qualify for Windows 11 according to MS's "PC Health Check" app. So I've been investigating running Ubuntu Studio dual booting on one of my machines as a possible way of keeping these boxes going after Win 10 stops getting security updates. Some things look promising, but given I was not able to get the available kernel module device driver to build for my Merging Anubis (which is my main audio interface for my mastering studio) I will likely still need to get a Win 11 box in order to be able to continue my current work flow.

Edge is better if you are wanting to always have your data mined by Microsoft, for sure.

Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don't do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).

The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android ("vanilla" Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.

Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I've got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.

For those new to the process, the best general resource for instructions on how to unlock your phone’s bootloader and flash alternate AOSP ROM’s or non-Android OS’s is https://xdaforums.com/ Please note that not all carriers and oem’s allow you to unlock the bootloader though, so choose your device carefully for this.

You will also most likely need a PC (desktop or laptop) with adb & fastboot on it. These are apps used in the terminal, but you only need to copy and paste a few commands into them to use it.

If you have a Google Pixel then best option is Graphene - https://grapheneos.org/

For other devices you can use a “degoogled” Android ROM and get apps from the open source F-Droid app store - https://f-droid.org/ Some choices for this are: Lineage - https://lineageos.org/ crDroid - https://crdroid.net/ /e/os - https://e.foundation/e-os/ Iode - https://iode.tech/iodeos/

OR use a a true alternative mobile OS. Options for this are: Ubuntu Touch - https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/ Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/ Mobian - https://mobian-project.org/ Postmarket OS - https://postmarketos.org/ Plasma Mobile - https://plasma-mobile.org/ Droidian - https://droidian.org/

You can also purchase devices with alternative OS’s already preinstalled from: Volla - https://volla.online/en/devices/ Jolla - https://jolla.com/ Fairphone - https://fairphone.com/ Murena - https://murena.com/ Furilabs - https://furilabs.com/ Brax - https://www.braxtech.net/

The Librewolf project is up to date Firefox core with some hardening and the telemetry going back to Mozilla removed - good stuff.

The M chips have been a truly impressive innovation. But on so many other levels Apple under Cook has just been resting on laurels - including putting out absurd industrial design faux pas's like placing charging ports on the bottom of mice, or power buttons on the bottom of MacMinis, as well as deliberately making so many of their products close to impossible to repair. And on a software level Apple is a total mediocrity, I've never encountered a worst file manager for a current OS than when I use MacOS for work (professional audio production) & iOS for my kiddo's iPad. Somehow those flaws haven't prevented its massive financial success with their cult, but that seems to go with the times these days.

There is a heckuva lot to be said for the classic "start" category based app menu, tied to a task bar. XFCE, MATE, OpenBox, all draw from a paradigm established in the Windows 95 design.

You could do what I did:

1. only buy a house in a place that has no HOA
2. xeriscape the front, let most of the back just grow out wild, and keep a small patch of grass in an area where you like to chill (for me this is in a courtyard)
3. use an old school push mower for this small patch. You get a little exercise with this, but not enough to ever stress ya, and it requires no gas, no oil, no electricity and barely ever any maintenance.

Aka, more war crimes committed by the regime in charge of the USA.