None of this even attempts to address the problem of Google Play (the primary android app marketplace) being filled with malware. Every single app that’s being distributed through Google Play today already has a “verified” developer by the same criteria they’re applying system-wide. That malware can continue working as it already does without any changes.

This is exclusively about Google imposing control on all apps distributed through channels that otherwise used to be outside Google’s control.

Google’s claimed reasoning is that this control is a good thing and makes them be able to block apps made by malware developers in the same way they already do in Google Play, even for users who install apps from other sources. Critics disagree because Google forcibly taking personal information and money from all software developers and wielding the ability to remotely kill any app they don’t like for any reason have far wider consequences than protecting users from malware, and the proliferation of malware on Google Play shows how (in)effective Google’s measures against it are. Neither side believes or claims this can or will make Google Play any safer.

The common issues with RISC-V laptops, or rather any laptops made with SoCs that weren’t designed to be laptop-first, include things like sleep not putting the system in a low enough power state (battery will run out if you leave it folded without turning it off), underwhelming GPU, higher power draw when idle, and lower peak performance for intermittent load. If none of those are a dealbreaker, the newest DeepComputing Framework board (on K3) can arguably be considered a viable daily driver RISC-V laptop option, though I wouldn’t want to use it as one.

Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are the big names for GPUs and they all have products that integrate a GPU into the same SoC as the CPU, but none of them would be likely to license out their GPU IP to other SoC vendors in modern times. Same goes for the in-house GPU designs for Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung. ARM does license out its Mali GPU IP, and that’s often the go-to option for SoC vendors that don’t have their own in-house GPU, but RISC-V systems can’t use that. So RISC-V systems’ GPU options effectively amount to either:

1. Use separate processors for your CPU and GPU. Desktop/server can just slot in a video card. Laptops in the 15-inch or larger space often solder a GeForce or Radeon chip to the board. Smaller 13-inch laptops normally don’t do this because of cooling and battery life concerns.
2. License the integrated GPU from Imagination. That seems to be the only notable GPU offering available to license on non-ARM. Users don’t seem very fond of Imagination GPUs but they’re better than nothing.
3. Pray that one of the companies with an established GPU portfolio decides to not only enter the RISC-V space but also makes a RISC-V processor that can be used in laptops. I think that’s unlikely and they’ll probably focus on server only.

In the first place, consider why you even want to switch to RISC-V. If it’s because of an enthusiasm for open-source and hearing the ISA described as open, know that any performant hardware you’ll get likely won’t be as open as you expect. The SoC won’t be open-source, the CPU cores in it won’t be open-source, the firmware and bootloader might be an open-source u-boot fork but there’s a good chance it’s proprietary. Even the actual implemented ISA won’t be open since major core designers add custom instructions that aren’t part of the RISC-V spec.

Distros like Ubuntu and Fedora seem slated to treat RISC-V as a main architecture that has close to the same number of packages and the same update schedule as x86/ARM by the end of next year, if not sooner. Just like is also the case for ARM, proprietary software like games can run with a nontrivial performance overhead, and other binary software distributed through other channels outside the distro repos (like docker containers, third-party apt/yum repos, or appimage) is often only distributed for x86 even for things that are open-source and can be compiled for other arches without issue.

The software situation can be either a major annoyance or completely seamless depending on how closely you stick to just the distro repos.

Hardware vendors will probably have stuff comparable enough to recent Intel/AMD for desktop in about a year from now. Likely not better, but within the same realm at least. Within another couple years after that you’ll almost definitely see more than one of the established major SoC vendors (like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung) release something RISC-V in the desktop, server, or mobile space, which is sure to be competitive with x86 and ARM hardware in that space.

Laptops might not see anything good. An alternate ISA can be viable on servers and mobile (both being Linux-first ecosystems), and desktop can easily inherit from stuff made for server, but laptop has unique hardware needs and the market isn’t there for vendors to bother investing too much R&D on laptop chips that can’t run Windows nor Mac. RISC-V laptops do exist but they’re basically taking chips designed for SBC/edge and throwing them in a laptop shell, with the result naturally being awful at power draw since it was never meant to be a good laptop chip, and the iGPU situation is a mess too. That’s unlikely to change in the next few years.

I’ve been using Proton Unlimited for a few years and I’m planning to switch to Fastmail soon.

Mostly because I dislike Proton not supporting the standard client protocols. I know Proton’s “zero-knowledge encryption” is the reason why, but that doesn’t feel like the most meaningful privacy gain to me considering it’s only for the message body and doesn’t apply to email metadata. Proton could try collaborating with and extending open standards with the encryption features they need, making it feasible for third-party clients to implement sync without a bridge, but they haven’t.

Needing a mail bridge is a moderate annoyance on desktop. But on mobile it means you’re basically forced to use their app. At least the Proton Android app is GPL and I haven’t had issues with it, but I don’t like the lock-in existing at all. Fastmail in contrast has been pushing forward JMAP as an open standard to make mobile sync on third-party clients better than what’s possible in IMAP.

I also don’t like Proton Unlimited being limited to 3 domains and 15 total addresses (not counting simplelogin). Fastmail has far higher limits there.

Both services seem to use a fair bit of proprietary software server-side but I think Fastmail has more of the important stuff be FOSS including their main imap/caldav/etc server (Cyrus).

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.

That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.

I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.

For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

I stopped using Arch a long time ago for this same reason. Either Fedora (or derivatives like Nobara) or an atomic/immutable distro (like Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite) is probably the way to go.

I used to feel like Ubuntu was a good option for this, but it no longer is: too often they try to push undesirable changes that need manual tweaking to fix after release upgrades. Debian Stable is generally good for low-maintenance use but doesn’t keep up as well with newer hardware or newer updates to video drivers and mesa, which makes it suboptimal for typical gaming use. Debian Testing can be prone to break things in updates (in my experience, worse than Arch does).

I saw another comment recommend Rocky/RHEL, but note that their kernel doesn’t support btrfs. Since you mentioned a root snapshot, I expect you probably use it.

I tried to do this a while ago with a GNOME system, setting GDM to automatically log me in, but I ended up always getting prompted for my password from gnome-keyring shortly after logging in which seemed to defeat the point. If you use GNOME, you might want to look at ArchWiki’s gnome-keyring page which describes a couple solutions to this problem (under the PAM section) which should be applicable on any systemd distro.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll give it a try sometime.

Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.

If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.

Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.

I have configured custom Android kernel builds to enable more USB drivers, enable module support, and tweak various other things. For one tangible example of the result: I could plug in a USB Wi-Fi adapter and use it to simultaneously connect to another Wi-Fi network with the internal NIC while also sharing my own AP over USB. On an Android device of all things. I have also adjusted kernel builds for SBCs (like Pi clones) to get things working at all.

I have never seen any reason to configure a custom kernel for my own desktop/laptop systems. Default builds for the distros I’ve used have been fine for me; if I’m ever dissatisfied with anything it’s the version number rather than the defconfig. The RHEL/Rocky kernel omits a few features I want (like btrfs) but I’d rather stick to other distros on personal systems than tweak a distro that isn’t even meant for tweaking.

I’ve been using it since it felt usable enough in GNOME to me. Around 2015-ish, give or take a year. GNOME leading on Wayland support is a big part of why I switched to it from Xfce back then. Nowadays KDE and others have plenty good Wayland support too (better in some ways like allowing server-side decorations and global shortcuts) but I just haven’t felt like trying to properly experiment to see what I like.

I’ve always avoided Nvidia on my desktops. Stuck with either radeon or intel and never had any exceptionally big issues with them on Wayland. Though other things like hardware accelerated video decoding have had a history of being spotty on some drivers/GPUs.

Ethically, I agree with you. More than that, using a lockpick on a lock you bought shouldn’t make you a thief. Unfortunately, DMCA has abysmal anti-circumvention measures that make the legality of using a device you own in ways you should be able to become questionable under US law, in the digital equivalent of Master Lock suing you for picking a lock you bought from them.

instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch

Yuzu’s quick start guide links to the old download link for Lockpick RCM from the same repo that is still inaccessible ever since Nintendo’s DMCA takedown last year (source: arstechnica). They never updated the page to link to any mirrors of Lockpick RCM or any other options to extract the keys; the guide doesn’t even work right now. You can see in Yuzu site’s changelog on github that the only changes made to that page in the last year are to minimum/recommended hardware requirements.

It seems even more absurd to argue that instructions are somehow infringing when the allegedly infringing part of them has already been broken for almost a year. Even the standing for taking down Lockpick RCM in the first place seems questionable, and telling users to use it with a broken link seems several layers further detached from that.