There was an interesting attempt at a decentralized web based social network built ontop of the old unix finger protocol. It was a number of years back. Anyone remember it?

Seperate from Webfinger.

Alternate OSes have a rougher path to relevancy than they did in the 90s.

LibreOffice requires a full Java runtime environment, GCC and Python to be ported to your OS.

Firefox adds Rust to that equation.

Modern web browser performance is tied to hardware acceleration on GPUs.

Keep in mind too that your users will consider you not functional for day to day operations if you can't read and write FAT32 exFat NTFS HFS+ UDF and communicate to devices over SAMBA and MTP.

@maiki Completely liberated silicon. Not only the instruction set but many of the chips itself are being designed completely in the open with no royalties. Also unlike other such attempts it's goal is to be competitive with proprietary silicon and scale from micro-controllers to general purpose computers.

Its also much cleaner on the instruction set level than x86 and Arm.

Its also going to possibly serve as the foundation of a new waive of SoCs many of which ought to be completely libre.

@maiki Not to keep waxing on about it but the EOMA68 project is definitely worth following. They are primarily working on a laptop and a microdesktop right now, but they have other form factors on their roadmap and actually care about RYF certification.

They have plans for tablets and other handheld devices down the road.

And honestly their trying to keep one on affordability in a way which doesn't seem to blip most other's radars.

@Cocoron Many years later:

Google exerts a lot of vertical control.

The android SDK no longer qualifies as free software.

A lot of Android Open Source development is rotting on the vine being replace by proprietary bits in googles growing proprietary stack

Google has grown actively hostile to ports and has allowed proprietary apps to discriminate against users who root.