On the one hand, I would tend to agree that making things painful enough might force people to stop ignoring and improve things. On the other, after seeing waves hands at everything since 2016 makes me very skeptical of accelerationism: sometimes things just get worse and worse, there's no bottom to bounce from. Or maybe we just never really hit rock bottom?
Given much of the internet today, I'm not sure if a pan-EU level blocklist on all of cloudflare (damaging as that would be) would even be worse than the status-quo, let alone rock bottom.
The bottom is just so much farther down than we remember. Tremendous progress was made in the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and we've kind of just been coasting on it for 50 years.
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.
You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better.
The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible.
So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems.
For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats:
So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going.
It took tens of millions of dead to create the relative peace of the later 20th century, that is a hell of a rock bottom. We got the UN, nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, war crimes treaties, free trade, unprecedented prosperity. It's humanity's greatest achievement but we're throwing it all away. Partly due to attacks from monied interests and propagandists, partly to protect Israel (the 15th Crusade), partly because of hatred of peaceniks and bureaucrats, but largely because we've all forgotten the costly lessons.
Delaying the run of clippy until CI would be annoying, because then you'd get a build failure for something that was preventable and could have been quickly addresses during development before pushing. Just feels like a pebble in your shoe.
This allows for the learnings of uutils (and by extension GNU coreutils) to be able to be leveraged by any other project that needs the same functionality. I noticed on a quick scan of the dependents on uucore that other projects (like nushell) do so.
I've found that RCS works ok-ish on the Owner user, but doesn't work at all on any other (it appears as an empty message). Moving to the Owner account you can tap to redownload the message and then it appears correctly in all accounts. It's a mess that makes daily driving a secondary account not worth it
I haven't found the need for deeper integration with my laptop beyond what KDE connect is capable of, and my Pixel has a high enough resolution that I can't notice pixels :)
The interaction of secondary users with RCS is borked to all hell. It just plain doesn't work.
Firefox + stock keyboard stopped properly working three days ago, it's back to normal now. No idea what that was about. Restarting was the only way I found to get things working again during that period.
While on the stock Android keyboard, it is clear that the Google one is much better at correcting my taps than the stock one. My typo count has gone up significantly.
Every several weeks the mobile connectivity stops working and nothing short of a restart will get it working again. This might be a bad interaction of the very weird way Google Fi works with a secondary user account.
I've encountered one case of the phone shutting itself off to install an update overnight and not turning on, making me miss my morning alarm.
In the US, there's no way to side step the lack of tap to pay.
Getting apps to work with Android Auto requires some finessing.
These are the things I've encountered in the last 2 months of using Graphene.
Aside from all of that, I really like everything else about the OS. As it stands, it does lacks polish when straying outside of the common path. Not using a secondary account, nor Google Fi on an eSIM, and using the stock browser would likely improve my experience significantly.
I haven't encountered an app that wouldn't work yet (but have installed play services as I do want to use Android Auto).
I would still recommend Grapheme for normal-ish users, as long as you don't go "paranoid mode" with secondary accounts and skipping play services or don't want to use the phone for tons of things beyond phone calls and web browsing. The base experience is that much calmer than stock Android on Pixel.
Thanks for writing all this, this really shows how the failures you encountered don't overlap with my use of the phone.
I don't use RCS and Android Auto.
I have HeliBoard to replace Stock/Google Keyboard. It is way ahead the stock keyboard experience but far behind Google Keyboard's, especially when writing in two languages.
Tap-to-pay works with my bank apps. But that means I can only use one card unlike with GPay.
I rarely use second account as the latency to switch from one account to the other is a pain. I only have a secondary sending notifications to the first one.
I don't let the phone auto-reboot for installs, I let it install automatically and click reboot when I want it to install.
I am on a physical SIM / different carrier and never encountered network issues so I can't comment on that one.
I use GrapheneOS too. Most of the time it works great, with some weird bugs around group messages and needing to restart every now and then to get to a fully functional state between the browser and keyboard properly working with each other and the network connectivity going away. I do enjoy full control on network connectivity and notifications.
But beyond whether the OS is good or not, "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice, because over long enough timeframes you can't assure that you can keep yours if others are deprived.
I agree about "I got around the system so I don't care how bad it is.", but it is at least still a form of saying "an alternative to this problem is Graphene", and that can't be repeated enough until a whole lot more people are using it, or anything else like Lineage.
Graphene (or anything else) will only stay a useful option if a whole lot more people use it so that government agencies and banks can't ignore that many people. A whole lot more people need to feel they aren't completely alone if they thought about using it, that it's actually a real option and not a kooky crap option.
Right now agencies & companies can totally ignore them all, and everything that still works today is just luck.
I haven't used Graphene myself. At the moment I have a stock rom that's merely rooted using the official manufacturer supplied bootloader unlock, and my small local credit union bank apps work, and the LG app that controls my air conditioners and microwave does not. Even if the bank apps didn't work it wouldn't matter because they have working web sites, and I never wanted an an app for my appliances in the first place.
But any day that could change.
It's just luck the banks have web sites that work in firefox on linux, and just luck there are no functions I need on those appliances that require the app.
> "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice
I don't think the parent was saying that.
My opinion is that it is actually the real fight: it should be mandatory for manufacturers to make it possible to have an alternative OS (which includes allowing to unlock/relock the bootloader and add custom signing keys) and it should be mandatory for big companies (e.g. banks) to not ban those alternative OSes with Play Integrity or whatever goddamn checks they make.
Fighting about what Google does on the Google flavour of AOSP is a distraction, IMO.
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