Somewhat stretching the analogy there

Your analogy is looking a bit leggy at this point.

This is snobbish and elitist. The evidence of this thread alone is that people who interact with this instance or use Lemmy generally also use Whatsapp. For many, it is convenient, relatively secure and private, and free. It engrained itself as the default communications platform in many countries, and Meta ownership doesn't have any tangible impact on its use for anybody, so far as I can tell. The "people are stupid" line is just ignorant bollocks.

Inb4: so you just think all content should be free huh.

I have not found another launcher that has the swipe up and down on home screen icons to open other apps

Do you mean using folder icons as app list covers, so that a tap opens the app and a swipe opens the folder? If so, Action Launcher does that (if I'm not mistaken it was the first to do so, and it's swipe up or down). Neo Launcher also has it (swipe up only).

What's genuinely sad is that the people who can't bail from twitter quickly will be spitroasted by musk in the process.

It takes two to spitroast.

but apparently nobody wanted SD cards so they dropped them from all the devices.

I think you have that the wrong way around. It is not that nobody wanted SD cards, but that phone manufacturers realised limiting storage capacity while making continually thinner devices (up to a point) would increasingly drive cyclical demand. "Is your phone getting full after a year or two? Well this one has MORE storage and look how slim and sexy it is by comparison!" It is not as though there was an organic consumer demand for phones without memory cards; the profit-motive drives these changes.

Yup that's my one issue, otherwise I'd swap in a heartbeat. You can do it through nextcloud servers but not any free one so far as I can see. Wouldn't know where to start with a paid alternative.

Edit: Podverse, also FOSS, has a sync feature as part of their subscription. It's $18/year. Haven't used it to know how well it works, but much cheaper than Pocket Casts anyway (and a 3 month free trial it seems). It's on F-Droid.

Thanks! Re switching - yeah, I agree. What do most people do in this situation – buy second hand or find older devices and just boot Linux off those? Use separate drives and boot off those? Like, what are the typical range of hardware decisions facing someone who thinks they wanna give Linux a real go?

Quick question: What's the goto distro for newbies these days, is it still Ubuntu? Back in the day (like a decade ago I think) I played about with both Ubuntu and Mint. I'm curious to try again, but no idea where to start. Also, is it possible/feasible/okay to dualboot on MacOS?

That was actually a correct usage, fwiw (said as a native speaker with a penchant for caring about language – so that's all but confirmed).

Think it's possible if you can install via KDE/Macports

I tried Floris recently. It looks really promising, but I found the swipe input to be maddeningly frustrating - obscure words chosen over common alternatives etc. That was the reason I most wanted to migrate from Gboard. Alas. There's still nothing out there in this respect which beats the old Swype back in the day for me (though of course it wasn't FOSS).