Everything as service, even base metals isn't exactly what I was expecting from the phrase "You'll own nothing and be happy"

The banks are also a commonly mentioned reason to not use Grapheneos when it comes up on this site.

Attestation is already putting the screws onto open computing, and the frog is already on the boil.

Agreed the modern push against root access is a prime example of attempted enshitification lock-in.

If you don't have root rights, you don't really own it. All other arguments are talking past this key point.

Between podman docker and general VM's there hasn't been a better time to be selfhosting. I tend to find any abstractions on top of this to be quite limiting and difficult to extricate yourself once something goes wrong.

Or if you are using an alternative os you can use a fake google photos app.

It used to use your default gallery app, I see it as another anti-competitive choice on googles part

Ok this is not as bad as I feared, disable still works and that uninstalls any updates that app has gotten.

It was always a bit surprising you could uninstall an app in a "read only" partition

It would only uninstall it from the /data partition which would cause it to fallback to the version in the /system partition, taking you back to the version included in the last update of your phone's OS.

If an app is installed to both partitions Android uses the one with a higher version.

Probably because everything seems to be an "app" these days. Even when it has no business being one.

Exactly. Everything must be switched to Service as a Software Substitute. It's for your own safety, you see.

This is a really interesting signal tbh.

While it sounds like it already works on GrapheneOS having a corporation come out and say they won't go out of their way to break it is quite unusual.

It requires a positive action from the application developer to include GrapheneOS's keys as well as Google's keys. So this is a deliberate positive step, rather than a default.

Only if they are using hardware key attestation. From what I've read elsewhere it looks like it was never broken so maybe they never went that far before.

Apps rarely use hardware key attestation directly but rather use it via the Play Integrity API. Play Integrity device and strong integrity levels ban using a non-Google-certified OS. Play Integrity uses hardware key attestation for both integrity levels and it's a hard requirement for strong integrity. Developers enforcing one of those integrity levels to use their service need to either stop doing it or add explicit support for non-Google-certified operating systems via key attestation. Roblox's documentation shows they're taking the latter approach.

Even without koreader a kobo is refreshingly open to tinkering. Getting root and ssh access is just a matter of renaming a file on the disk.

I got the colour after being on an old paperwhite for many years so thankfully it's a big step up for me.

Not op but I have an opensense box and a semi managed switch and an couple of TP-Link omada controlled ap's for wifi.

It can make management a bit difficult if you're not careful, but I have wireguard listening on all the vlans so I can bypass any restrictions on any connection it can get my laptop onto if needed.