Sounds funny, but maybe donate the food instead to your local shelter or food bank in these hard times? :)

Some are very easy to play without spending any sort of money, and there’s several that have pity systems in which you’re guaranteed to get what you’re pulling for, so at least they’re slightly better than gambling. But yes, I won’t deny they’re predatory, but I’ve managed to make my gacha journey without spending a penny across the 20+ gacha games I’ve played and dropped for a little over a decade now.

Not all of them have great stories, especially the older games which focused on collecting rather than story content, but within the past few years we’ve gotten great ones that have long arcs that are actually interesting, especially if the game has side lore that you can read about.

I get that a gacha isn’t going to be as good as the average game, but when you’ve only got a few mins to play something and you’re out and about, they’re nice.

I thought Fennec was the continuation of Mull, but I checked and you’re right, it’s IronFox. Am dummy.

You don’t have to even get very technical, you can use a GUI instead of terminal controls, as mentioned in the same article.

I used ADB App Control to debloat my stock, unrooted Galaxy Tab.

They’re all bad.

Yeah, it was definitely more effort than any other Fediverse service. Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, and Misskey? Have an easy, immediately noticeable join or severs tab where you can search for pretty much any instance and by categories.

PeerTube? Doesn’t have a Servers/Instances tab, only shows a quick 6 platforms on the main page, have to go to the “Browse Content” (Blank sepiasearch page) to then click the “Go Here” link to search instances. Other issues:

• Only language filter is English. Which is weird considering Framasoft is French
• Many of these promoted instances don’t even allow sign-ups
• If you’re trying to upload videos now you have to look for instances that allow a lot of video uploads
• In addition to that there’s video quality, live streaming, transcription, etc to worry about

I signed up for an account, but I’ve barely used it due to lack of content I want to see on there, plus search isn’t that great. Just far more hurdles than the other services.

Still shopping around for a cheap enough Optiplex or ThinkCentre that has bare minimum encoding (HEVC 10-bit) and RAM (16 GB), but once I find my baby I’ll be running Nextcloud, Immich, and Jellyfin in Proxmox. I want to leave Google behind very badly, especially for my files and photos I got in the cloud, but also for music streaming since I’m a daily YT Music user.

Man, I have to stop reading so I don’t continue a stream of tears in the middle of a lobby, but I felt every single word of that article in my bones.

I couldn’t ever imagine hanging myself or shooting myself, that shit sounds terrifying as hell. But for years now I’ve had those same exact “what if I just fell down the stairs and broke my neck” or “what if I got hit by a car and died on the site?” thoughts. And similarly, I think of how much of a hassle it’d be for my family, worrying about their wellbeing, my cats, the games and stories I’d never get to see, the places I want to go.

It’s hard. I went to therapy for a year and found it useful even if it didn’t do much or “fix” me, but I never admitted to her about these thoughts. I think the closest I got to it was talking about being tired often, and crying, but never just outright “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow.”

If you don’t need traffic data, CoMaps (uses OpenStreet Map data).

If you do need traffic data (understandable) Magic Earth is what I use. It’s unfortunately not fully open source, only the map data is from OSM, but I find the navigation good 95% of the time, sometimes you have to make your own judgement for if a route might have bad traffic. At least it’s not Google or Apple, and no ads.

I don’t do car play, so I have no idea about how that works.

I wish we had better alternatives or that cars all exploded and we went to public transport and walkable cities

I know I sound dumb, and forgive me for not having work experience yet, but…

Why doesn’t your company pay for any license they need for you to do work? Like I get if someone was a freelancer, then they’re gonna have to pay for their own stuff, but like, a professional, in-house employee pays for their own license?

Am I missing context here?

Very valid and true point, but that requires companies to openly admit that they’ve made their devices to not work if it can’t phone home, and no company is gonna do that. At best, they’ll tell you it needs internet access, but even then they’ll probably downplay it.

Either that or some poor sacrifice will have to be the guinea pig and buy the thing to test it and tell others. Ah, I guess Consumer Reports could do that at least.

ReVanced will work almost flawlessly 90% of the time. Newpipe, Freetube, Pipepipe, Invidious, etc. will frequently break and require so much VPN hopping that I barely bother with them. Watching YT on my laptop is a pain in the ass compared to my phone.

Honestly, until late summer ReVanced hadn’t done me wrong at all and I had been using it for about a year, but YT managed to patch whatever loophole they found for YT Music, so I suffered for a month and listened on the regular YT app. It works now, although sometimes I have to VPN hop because it’ll play a song only up to a minute, and then hang.

Couldn’t you just use uBlock and/or NextDNS/PiHole to avoid porn ads rather than use a VPN?

Ok, I heard about their app store being closed, but I thought it was for all devices, not non-amazon devices. Thanks 👍

Yeah, I’d probably let go of the app and just change the settings, saves space.

Furthermore, I saw you have OpenVPN for Android. I’ve never heard of that app tbh, so it makes me wary. If you need a free, open-source, and audited VPN from the play store, then I’d stick with Proton. If you can pay money, then Mullvad.

Yeah, saw that on another comment. Then just stick with plain Firefox and download the uBlock extension. Seriously, ditch Brave. It doesn’t do anything FF with some settings turned on can’t do.

Unrelated note: I see you have NextDNS as an app. You can’t just change the DNS settings on your phone? Is that blocked by parental control?

Well, whenever you get the chance to use developer options, you can try Permission ManagerX instead. Does the same think Shizuku does but isn’t outdated and can be downloaded from the Google Play, Fdroid, and the repository (and Amazon app store??? If that’s still alive???).

Can verify, it’s super easy to do and I nuked the Gmail app from my phone afterwards.

Try IronFox or Fennec (Firefox forks), both are privacy focused and aren’t bad like Brave.

GrapheneOS has shown FF does have some security issues, so if you prefer Chromium then use either Vanadium (GrapheneOS only) or Cromite.

For desktop I do use Librewolf, and Ungoogled Chromium when a website refuses to work on Firefox.

Sorry Mico, you gotta go