this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don't mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that's bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home's NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.
Granted, I've always had the spirit of avoiding "smarts" in stuff that doesn't need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need "smarts".
So far I'm quite happy with it all: I've maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I'm better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.
Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.
Since that machine is mostly for gaming, I went with Pop OS!
Pop!_OS is great, not just for gaming
Watch out, rooting a phone may have unexpected consequences, like losing LTE on Samsungs or losing access to banking apps.
You don't lose banking apps, banks lose you
I'd like to leave a warning for anyone working with Uber or Lyft as well, a friend of mine flashed his phone with a custom ROM and couldn't work for a week until I managed to reflash the original ROM on it.
It took a while cause his phone was from a not so well known brand and it took a lot of hours on russian forums to find the stock ROM.
https://plexus.techlore.tech/applications/uber
Gotta check before you flash and fuck up a livelihood...
Note that if you are Uber user (idk about driver) their website is good enough; for me it works in Firefox mobile (in "Desktop" mode only). Lyft is app only....
Yes, I was talking about the driver apps. The apps won't work on custom firmware, I know there's some magisk thing you can do but there's reports of account blockages in my country following that method.
Banks are a bunch of dicks anyway. I recently received a ToS that forced me to have all my OSs on their latest update, and never install anything that doesn't come from official stores.
Next day all of my money was in another bank.
Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.
And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn't be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.
Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they're pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn't work on my phone reduces convenience.
As it so happens my banking app works fine.
That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.
Xiaomi is such a hidden gem. I just got a new wifi6 router off AliExpress for like $50 and threw openwrt on it in like 5 minutes.