Always eat your greens!
I can’t speak to any other countries, but in the states, Magic Earth has been great for me. Been using it for over two years now, several different regions of the USA. It’s not as good as Google Maps, but it’s plenty good enough for my needs.
Navigation and routing is solid, traffic data is acceptable, and the dashcam feature is awesome.
I play Lichess on my GrapheneOS Pixel6a, works well. Same with Signal, Firefox with several mobile browser extensions.
Bitwarden, NewPipe, Tailscale, Duolingo, Uber, Discord, Matrix Element, all the Proton mobile apps, Backblaze, etc etc.
Pretty much every app I try works flawlessly. On rare occasion I’ll experience minor bugs, and twice I’ve had to use GOS’s extra privilege mode to get an app to work.
Overall, Love GrapheneOS and I’ll use them as long as they are around and making an awesome alternative to Google’s garbage.
Magic Earth. Organic Maps as a backup. I’ve found that Magic Earth is the happy middle ground of map apps.
Closed source client, but uses OSM for its map data. European company, so better on the data front.
I tried using Organic Maps as my main navigation app, but there were slightly too many times where it couldn’t find the address, or the navigation got stuck, etc.
My IT job requires me to get to places quickly if they need on-site support. I have to be able to depend on my map app to get me there reliably. Magic Earth does that, Organic Maps is very good, and I keep it around to use in case I have issues with Magic Earth, but at least in my region of the country, it just isn’t quite up to snuff.
My hope is that the Microsoft store continues to be so shitty that users just reject any future attempts to do that.
That being said, if a large number of devs and users eventually adopted it, I would abandon gaming and stick with only native Linux games and vintage PC games that ran through Wine/Proton.
I refuse to use Windows for anything. And as much as I love gaming, I love my freedom, privacy, and rights as a user far more.
This is kind of like asking, “what is water worth?”
To an upper middle class person in the developed world, a dollar or two. To a person stranded in a desert, they might literally kill for it.
If you are just a Joe shmoe out in the world living a basic life, privacy might not be worth hardly anything. But if you’re a whistle blower or a political dissident in an authoritarian country, your privacy is worth everything.
I agree to an extent, but usability is not a sufficient condition for mass adoption. I think Lemmy for end users is just as usable as Reddit was, at least for me it is. But people don’t want to leave their communities.
That’s why personally I have a Discord still. There are too many communities I am an active part of on there to abandon Discord outright. Plus all of my friends and family are on there, and I’ve already approached some them about switching and they all have said the same thing I just did.
I wasn’t ever super invested in Reddit, so it was easy for me to abandon it for Lemmy, and I vastly prefer the communities here. Discord though is a different story for now, unfortunately.
It’s the timeless debate between accessibility and exclusivity. Do you want more people in your community by compromising some values? Or would you rather be a hardliner but never reach those people?
Most of the time you have to pick somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a question of pragmatism and utilitarianism.
Does it do more good for lots of people to be slightly more privacy-aware, or is it better to have a very small portion of the population that are super privacy-aware?
You have to decide, and the debate rages on all the time.
I’ve been on the Proton premium plan for about a year and a half and love it.
I mostly use it for Email and the VPN, but I do use Proton drive for some random stuff.
I don’t use Proton Pass because I already use Bitwarden for all my PW management needs.
Email and calendar services have been pretty much flawless so far. I like the interface, the Proton mail bridge works well for desktop clients like Thunderbird if you want to use those. The apps work really well on my Android device, all of them, Calendar, Mail, and VPN.
My torrent box Proton VPN CLI app has been solid too.
Should you quit smoking even though you’ve already been smoking for 7 years?
Better to not have started smoking, but still good to stop now.
The longer you go without giving new data, the less useful your old data will be. 6 months without new data? Not that big of a difference. 6 years without new data? Now that’s a big deal.
If you found out that your mechanic had been ripping you off for the last 7 years, would you keep going to them for car repairs just because you’d already lost so much money to them?
It’s not just about the practical aspects, it’s about the principle. The big corpos make money from selling your data, do you really want to keep helping them make money off you after finding out how they do it?
Discord for me. A bunch of my family and friends are avid gamers. Discord is the universal standard app they all use for general communication.
Not only do they use it for all their gaming related stuff, they have additional servers and channels for just chilling, chatting, off topic stuff, memes, politics, etc etc.
It’s the network effect. Even if there was an open source app that perfectly replicated all the functionality of Discord and was just as simple to install and run as Discord, most of them still wouldn’t switch to it, because all of their friends and family are still on Discord.
So they would have to have two completely separate apps with totally separate social groups to maintain, and nobody but hardcore advocates for FOSS and privacy are willing to do that.
Sure, I have Discord, Matrix, IRC, Signal, XMPP clients, and a Private Mumble server, all on my systems, but I’m hardcore about FOSS. None of my friends and family are willing to do that. It took all my energy to convince two of my most techie friends just to get Signal on their phones. And only One has been willing to install a Matrix client to chat just with me.