Well if you say so, I defer to your higher authority on bullshit.

Not cheers, no. But it increased my problem-solving reputation within the company and it made Linux more appealing to key people in the company.

What’s wrong with that? What’s your butthurt? Are you bitter about something?

Well I’m sure they have very good reason and I’m not questioning them. I’m just talking from a user’s standpoint (and I’m a very poor Windows users): whenever I try to port any of our tools to Windows, wham the damn antivirus kicks in and puts my stuff in quarantine. If I use an engineering application that talks to some device on an unusual port - and I’m talking outgoing traffic, not incoming, wham it’s blocked. And unblocking it requires making a formal request to IT, that whitelists the application, until WithSecure updates itself and forgets about it, and here we go again.

It’s just a complete PITA. You constantly feel like you’re fighting an algorithm with stupidity built in just to get normal, honest-to-goodness work done.

Password are routinely stolen, then bought and sold on hackers’ marketplaces. That’s how.

2FA is great. It’s the best tool there is against impersonation and account takeovers.

But it’s only great PROVIDED

1. It’s a real, proper second factor like a hardware token or - less great but okay - a “secure” cellphone app. When it’s a totally insecure factor like SMS, 1FA is preferable.
2. It’s not such a PITA that you hate using it.
3. When it’s a proprietary app from one of the big data sonsabitches, it’s also an app to spy on you and your activities.

SMS is fine for 2FA, as long as you can’t use it for anything else

Oh yeah? Post your bank customer number and your telephone number on here and see how fast your account gets drained without you even getting a single confirmation code SMS.

It’s been known for years that SMS-based 2FA is terrible, terrible security. The sites that use them have no interest in their users’ accounts’ security: all they’re interested in is harvesting their phone numbers.

Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

What if you don’t want a Pixel? Or a Fairphone? Or one of the very, VERY few cellphones that you can install a deGoogled OS on?

There are precious few ways of escaping the Google monopoly. I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS, and it happens to be the phone I want because of its excellent repairability. So lucky me. But if I didn’t want a Fairphone, nor any Samsung phone, nor any Chinese cellphone, and certainly not a fucking Google phone - because I’d rather cut off my left nut than give Google money to escape Google’s surveillance, that’s just too rich for me - then I’d be SOL.

My point is, if you refuse to be Google’s bitch, Google backs you into a corner. Just because you’re happy with the corner doesn’t mean you’re not stuck in a corner.

Google “might let me” do something…

If that doesn’t summarize everything that’s wrong with this fucking monopolist, that controls YOUR device that you paid with YOUR money but ultimately isn’t yours to do as you please, I don’t know what does.

The only thing that makes Google a bit tolerable in the mobile space is Apple, because Apple is even worse. At least you can (still) sideload stuff in Android - although Google is about to make that impossible very soon too.

Fuck the monopolists.

It’s a problem if you need a fucking banking app for example, and the bank won’t let you sideload it and you’re running a deGoogled OS. Then you suddenly need a backup phone with the full surveillance Android just to do banking.

I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy

It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.

If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.

If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.

Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.

I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.

Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.

Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.

MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:

• What do I care looking at the source code of a Google Play Services replacement when Google still holds my cellphone by the balls for certain critical functions?
• Why do I need permission from Google for apps to function properly on my cellphone?

I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.

MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.

I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.

Google Play Services

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I’m a kid of the cold war.