The future of this elegant and proven system was put in jeopardy last month, when Google unilaterally decreed that Android developers everywhere in the world are going to be required to register centrally with Google. In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents[^regid], including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
Linux desktop isn’t even as polished as closed source OS even after all these years. Windows always gets better battery life on the same hardware.
Linux is pretty damn polished now, in some areas more polished than Windows.
Battery management seems to depend on the specific device and how well supported and optimized it is. As an example, the steamdeck gets better battery life on Linux than it does on Windows.
But we’re at a point where the ‘polished’ options are so user-hostile, that a ‘good enough’ community built alternative is enough.