Have you ever tried abiword? It’s really lightweight.

Could you elaborate about the privacy part?

I understand your bad experience with GSIs, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. The way custom roms have been made through the years isn’t sustainable for the long run. It’s too much work for the few people involved, that goes obsolete so fast. But with GSis, the projects will one day be able to maintain just a few images, and the porting community will just have to focus on unlocking the devices.

GSIs aren’t working 100% today, but it’s something still new in the perspective of manufacturers, and the tendency is to have better support with time.

Just to put things into perspective, my experience, as someone poor from a third word country, is just the opposite. In the past, only the more expensive phones had custom rom support, and the cheaper ones I got access to, wouldn’t even get results if I searched for the model on xda. Nowadays, even cheap chinese phones or the ones locally manufactured in here allow me to put a GSI and have a customized experience, up to date with security patches.

But what do you do when services and institutions in general require you to use whatsapp? That’s what is mostly keeping me from deleting that app.

I have been looking at this possibility, but running a bridge means that I will need to self host a service, which adds one more point of failure, while not really removing whatsapp from my life, so I’m not convinced it’s a good alternative.

Whatsapp

And no, I can’t simply stop using or ask friends to move to an alternative. I’m from Brazil and that thing is so popular and mainstream, that even stores or public services use it.

Just this week, I had to report an animal abuse case to the authorities, and the official communication channel I had to use was through whatsapp.

It’s sad to see how dependent of a single proprietary service for something so important we allowed ourselves to become…

One trick is to have anold android phone. I created a couple of accounts last year without giving any personal data by using a device with android kitkat.

I used to think like that, but now I think about it in a different way.

These small distros often come with new approaches the big distros aren’t willing to risk yet, or provide an alternative to their dependence. Most of them will fail, but they’re important for bringing innovation to the linux-based OSes space.

Small distros come and go, but sometimes, even if they fail, their proposed idea gets integrated into the main ones, and that’s a bonus.

That particular one might not be so innovative, because there are already big distros pushing the immutable system concept, but, is doing the same while maintained by community effort, uses debian as a base, and focus on ease of usage. I think it still adds some value to the community