I use RedReader sporadically for browsing Reddit. I like it’s compact UI style and customizability. Even when I had proper paid Boost for Reddit back in the day, somehow, the UI of RedReader made it more intuitive for me to use it.

I think one can technically use Boost still via patching it, but it’s a grey area and not worth going after when RedReader exists.

Either case, the official Reddit app has to be purposefully coded to be as unoptimized and useless as possible. The bloat, the wasted white space; it all stands testament to the travesty that is modern software design.

But in the vast seas of phones, Lineage OS still supports a very small subset. Major players like Google or Samsung are covered but a LOT are skipped.

If one’s phone supports Lineage OS, well and good but it’s not a fix all

I think even some Chinese OEMs throttle somewhat post 80% (and/or give user the option to limit charging upto that point only). I have a spare entry level Samsung phone. It supports 25 W charging though it gets very slow post 80%. It’s not a big deal because the battery capacity is good and with an efficient chipset and 60Hz display, it does way better than my main Realme phone which I need to charge almost twice daily.

Back in the day, malware makers could only dream of collecting as much data as Gemini does.

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I am on Boost. It’s a one time purchase for Android Atleast. The dev is same behind Boost for Reddit(now deprecated) and it implements a similar UI as the previous Reddit Client.

Of course, as you said, there are many FOSS solutions as well. I have heard good praise for Voyager and I think Atleast couple of more clients like Jerboa also exist on F-Droid.

The official Reddit app is an exercise in travesty. Any third party client for either Android or iOS in the past was better the official solution is even now. It’s slow, bloated and UI looks like it’s designed for toddlers in mind.

I have Waterfox setup as an alternative browser but it does not have much stuff to differentiate itself from mainstream FF, as you said.

Discord reminds me they are introducing ads to their mobile platform right?

As for the article, one of the reasons for the demise could be that instead of signing up on dozens different forums, users now just do it on Reddit. I don’t appreciate it, because Reddit’s conversations only focus on newer active threads and even if one replies to older ones, it does NOT bump them. This isn’t the case with forums, where usually you can respond to old conversations and it gets bumped up.

Firefox can do so too with TST or one of the other extensions in the store. Sometimes(atleast for me), they introduce slightly more lag when opening the browser but otherwise, they can do much of the job. I use Tree Style Tabs even though I might not be a power user of it (read:not actively using every nitty gritty of the extension).

I think I remember Opera Mini’s layout though I didn’t much use it. It was a great alternative especially on mobile more than a decade back.

But yes especially after changing ownership, switching browser engines and years down the line; things have changed.

I think I gave their desktop variant a try sometime ago but didn’t find it compelling enough. I haven’t even used their Android fork. I keep using a Firefox fork only :p.

I think 4K is only available on Edge on Windows for Netflix. I never bothered with 4K since that’s above and beyond my device’s native resolution but I didn’t have too positive a experience with Netflix, IMO.

I just want to watch something in full HD without intermittent streaming or buffering. Legal streaming services including Netflix treat one like a criminal by forcing them to watch in a Web browser with constant Internet connectivity forced upon them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to increase playback speed by 0.1x each time in mpv, does Netflix allow me to do the same? No, instead it gives me a dusty experience.

I gave Vivaldi a try way back in its early days when I was on Windows. IIRC, it was bundled with lots of features even then and I think, for some weird reason, had Philips Hue Lighting support integrated (unless I am really confusing it with something other, this is multiple years old experience of mine).

I used it as my main browser for Atleast couple of months then.

I am surprised they abandoned it. It was originally launched as a macOS variant only, correct? And Mac users praised it a lot, on the Web. I thought with that level of traction they will keep going.

In contrast, there are projects that have a much lower user base though vocal (read: Pale Moon) and despite struggling with half of the available modern Web pages, those projects still keep going.

Many sites have become worse. I think stuff like Cnet, PCMag (which still has a digital magazine I think)were much better in the previous era.

I will give Zen browser a try. As for Netflix, I only used it for a one month since it’s quite expensive in my country and it crawled like anything on Firefox for Linux. I was getting consistent 720p video but not sure about full HD. Eventually I canceled it.

Opera also was a good alternative on Symbian phones right or whatever OS Nokia used before they switched to Windows Phone, I think.

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I think the company behind Fairphone makes wireless earbuds as well with replaceable batteries. They are priced in the mid range segment but sadly not available worldwide.

Haven’t Spotify mods already been clamped down in one way or the other(in terms of having a trimmed down feature set)? I used to follow Balatan’s mod from Mobilism and last I saw, Atleast some stuff was server sided.

Either case, mods can only go so far. I only used Spotify Premium once for a short while before returning back to YT Music and one of the things I liked was third party clients on desktop. ncspot is a terminal based client for Spotify that rakes in one tenth of memory requirements but sadly requires Premium and I don’t think there is any way to bypass that as of now. (though of course, most users won’t even care about such a niche client)

But if someone is serious about music, then Soulseek is the way to go. It has most genres of music, usually in flac and locally stored music is any day superior to cloud.