On Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 02:32:19PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
ps: i've pretty much decided on a Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Plus....
I got one of these on Monday, played with the stock Lenovo version of Android for a few hours, then rooted it and installed the micro-g no-google-apps variant of the unofficial Lineage OS port for it. It's been working very nicely so far. The only app I've found that didn't work was Weatherzone (no big deal, I installed the BOM's own android app instead. it's better). FBReader works on it, as does muPDF and Xobo. The 10" 2560x1600 screen makes reading even more enjoyable than on the 7" 1280x800 Nexus 7...and a night's reading with FBReader (6+ hours) seems to take the battery from around 100% to around 95%, so that's good too. It's nice to not have Hangouts or Youtube or whatever running in the background whether I want them to or not. It's even nicer to know that the core APIs of the system, even though incomplete, are written to serve the users rather than to support google's surveillance-based business model. This is the first android device I've owned that HASN'T been logged in to google's services, and I like that. I like it a lot. All this works well for me. YMMV if you use or try out lots of apps from the google play store. I hardly use any, and most of the apps I do have installed are FOSS from F-Droid anyway. As well as F-Droid, even without a google login i still have access to the google app store via the YALP app - kind of a proxy to the Google Play Store which lets me download and install free apps....and it's easy to filter out ad-supported apps too. If I wanted to, I could use my gmail login with it and gain access to any paid apps I may have bought (none because there's no way I'm ever putting credit card or other banking details anywhere near an insecure mobile device like a phone or tablet). About the only thing i don't have that I actually care about on the new tablet yet is a calendar that syncs with my desktop calendar (iceowl)...but that's mainly because I want to stop using google's calendar service and use my own. In fact, I want to run my own services for all the usual mobile sync/cloud/backup/storage stuff. Apart from the calendar, I currently don't use any of these features on any of my devices because I don't trust google or anyone else to safely and privately store my data. I'll be looking into running nextcloud or owncloud or something, or maybe just a simple CALDAV server - I don't need much. In the meantime, i've still got google calendar sync on my phone and my nexus tablet. and it'll be nice to be able to input full details (names, locations etc) and stop using cryptic little abbreviations in my calendar entries (I may have nothing to hide but that doesn't mean I WANT google to have full details of, e.g., my appointments at the renal clinic in the hospital). Sometime in the next few weeks, when I've got all that set up and working, i'll root my Nexus 7 and install Lineage on it too. ------------ The biggest problem is the fact that the whole android scene is woefully documented and relies far too much on random but crucial snippets of information that are buried 30 pages deep in forum threads that are mostly garbage, and, even though it's all based on linux and open-source software, it feels a lot more like the freeware/shareware scene of the 80s and 90s. Crippleware (i.e. free & "premium" versions of tools) is common when it just shouldn't be - that's missing the point of free software. Don't get me wrong, there's a solid core of free software and open source people (both devs and users), it's just that they're surrounded by hordes of people who don't give a shit about any of that, and a whole bunch of parasitic hangers-on seeing it as a market to make a fortune in (yeah, right - a crappy app will make you rich) overall, i find it quite distasteful. it's like the amway-ification of linux but even worse because it also involves the normalisation of advertising as a way of life. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>