It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.

I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.

As far as I’m aware, Samsung or Amazon are the only other real app “marketplaces”. Most developers using Fdroid otherwise rely on donations or patreon for active development, depending on the nature of the app

When people refer to a particular piece of development aoftware as closed or open source, they are referring to the license/availability of that software’s code. You can use proprietary software to produce open source code, which is the case with Android Studio. The code that makes up Android Studio is not open source, but your own work made within it can be.

In general, “open source” is a broad term that just means “can I see the code that made this?”. There are differing degrees of open source software as well. The MIT license, for example, opens up code to some modification/re-use but protects some libraries. Something like a BSD or GPL license is far less restrictive, usually allowing free modification and use of the code. Android Studio falls under the Apache license, one of the more restrictive licenses that still applies copyright, and may employ proprietary libraries that cannot be modified or copied for use. Again, this ultimately isn’t likely to affect your own work or projects, but it does mean there’s less transparency about the tools you are using to make it.

I apologise if this is overwhelming, but the distinction is important, and I think that as a beginner it makes sense to start with where there is the most documentation and ease of entry. Once done, it’s definitely easier to move towards projects that more closely align with FOSS philosophies.

Android Studio is just the work environment for code and app development. You could continue on to publish all your code/work as an open source application through whichever means you choose during or after the fact.

Imo that’s fine. It’s also still the best tool for learning since it’s the most widely supported one, and contains the greatest amount of documentation for working with android development. It costs nothing to use, and doesn’t lock you into any kind of ecosystem you can’t later migrate from.

Android Studio is the primary toolkit for developing native android apps. If you have no background in programming, there are some more visual tools like Budibase (open source) or Softr (closed source), but you are likely to run into difficulty getting them to apply logic the way you’d like.

If you’re a tinkerer, then honestly I’d look into learning more about Android Studio and Kotlin, the language most used these days for app development on Android.

The launcher is a fair point. Though for me at least, not having the spotlight-esque search hasn’t been a problem. Appearance is an odd one, since the best part of Both Gnome and KDE is the wonderful flexibility in visual customizability. At the end of the day, I suppose I’d happily use either. Right now, I think Plasma’s big features for me has to be window snapping and, once 6.0 releases, hopefully HDR support.

Maybe I’m missing some of the nuances between KDE and Gnome, but I’ve enjoyed the out of box experience with KDE far more than Gnome. That said, perhaps I’ve simply timed my switchover to Plasma such that I missed its teething pains. I say this as someone who used pretty much exclusively Gnome over the years.

What would you say sets Gnome apart?