You may want to escape to Panama, but the cellphone will bring the mess to Panama with you.

BTW, the mobile scene is even messier. Big corporations duking it out and even supposedly Linux-based OSes like Android actually only use the Linux kernel, and even then, heavily customized and shielded from the user. It might as well be Windows NT for all I care, and the user wouldn't know the difference. (Except maybe having to reboot a lot more often. )

One of these days I really need to take a break from the world of corporate competition and install Devuan on my mobile device.  Has anybody done this before?  And I mean done it to the point that's actually usable for day-to-day use, not just a proof-of-concept "see I can do it" deal.

This is why I'm a big skeptic of the cloud hype and this whole "application over the network" thing. "Entrust your data to us, we're a big corporation, we have the resources and expertise to guard your data." Yeah right. More like "single point of failure: if AWS goes down, 1/4 of the web also goes down. If it gets hacked, then ... 1/4 of the population gets hacked?" *shrug*

How do you survive on a desert island with no boat and no food?

You eat the sand-wich is there.

What about Librewolf and other FF derivatives/forks?  Do they also suffer from upstream bogonity?

The thing about completely independent browsers is that the browsers of today are no longer merely some app, they are an OS unto themselves (for better or for worse). That means a one-person dev team isn't gonna cut it. Current web standards are huge, there are tons and tons of "standard" specs and de facto standard features that websites simply assume to exist.  If it were up to me, I'd stay away from browsers completely... but it's no longer possible because nowadays just about everything depends on it -- online banking, paying bills, etc., all require browser access of some sort.  And while I usually browse with JS turned off (IMO allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code written by arbitrary online personae of unknown trustworthiness to run locally is a horrible idea), some critical sites like banks simply don't work without it. So I have to enable JS at least for those sites.  And many of those sites depend on bleeding-edge features that break in subtle ways when you're not using Chromium or FF's JS engine. Some sites outright don't work on FF, you have to use Chrome/Chromium.

It's a horrible situation, and I'm not sure what we can do about it. Perhaps sandbox the browser itself and use separate instances per website that share no data with each other?  That's an idea. But again, an independent browser project is a very big one, that needs a lot of resources to pull off.  The good ole days when anybody could write a HTML parser that renders some semblance of a page on-screen are long gone.

Building a kernel yourself is much easier today than before. If your current running kernel supports config.gz, you don't even need to know how to configure the kernel yourself, just download the sources and run make menuconfig to extract your current config, then make bindeb-pkg. That's all there is to it.

Once you have a working kernel package, you can start experimenting with changing the config and testing options.

Right, but I probably won't be able to help with those packages since I don't use them.

Cool, thanks! Good to know.

Awesome to hear, that's exactly my original reason for going with Debian, and why over the years I became more and more disillusioned, because gradually they started taking away the user's choice. It's my personal thesis that the best technology is the one that empowers the user, rather than the authors/upstream/whoever it may be. After all, the reason for the computer's existence and the existence of software that runs on the computer is to serve the user. If we don't empower the user, we've defeated the whole purpose. What use is a tool that no longer serves its user?  The whole raison d'etre of FSF, the open source movement, etc., is the empowerment of the user, as opposed to some other entity.  Interesting (and sad) to see how people lost sight of this over the years and returned to the bad old paradigms of restricting the user and shoving things down the user's throat instead of letting the user choose for himself.

OK, I'll get off the soapbox now. :-D

Ouch. Core Desktop sounds like my worst nightmare from the depths of hell: an immutable system handed down from the PTB that you cannot customize, shoved down your throat whether you like it or not. They get to decide what runs on your PC, you have no control over what runs on your system and what doesn't.  Sheesh.  Might as well go back to Windows, folks.  I ditched Windows in the 90's and went to Linux precisely for this reason: in Windows-land, everything is dictated by MS and shoved down your throat, whether you like it or not. If you don't like it, you're left out in the cold.  (Once, I dared to try to customize mouse focus behaviour on Windows.  Let's just say it was an experience I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. In Windows, you either do things the MS way, or you'll burn in hell for daring to do things differently.)  I remember my first Linux install: it was back in the 90's before automated installers, I had to install everything manually. But man it felt good: I was in control!  I get to decide what runs on my system and what doesn't.  If I don't like something, I can uninstall it and/or replace it with something else. It was revolutionary.

And now these people want to move back to the Windows way of doing things.  No thanks.  Not in a million years!  Recently I had the misfortune of having to deal with a "standardized" Ubuntu PC, dictated by employer policy. It came with Snap, and I tell ya, that was a total disaster.  There were more problems with it than I can enumerate. Eventually I said, enough of this crap, I'm not being paid to spend hours on this nonsense, I have work to do! Just installed the pure Debian package instead of the snap crap, and I was in business again in 5 minutes.  I am NOT looking forward to the day they shove Snap down my throat...  If this continues, I'll have to run Devuan inside a virtual machine just to get any work done at all.  Very disappointed with the direction Ubuntu is moving in.

I first got into Unixes and Linux in my college years, back in the 90's. It was on the university's computer lab, running SunOS/Solaris with X servers running on thin clients connecting to the central compute server. The window manager was twm, an ancient WM that nevertheless did its job.  The stuff that came later, esp. the whole "desktop metaphor" nonsense that started with MS Windows and later trickled down to Linux "desktops" like GNOME never appealed to me -- I was never one to be happy with what I was handed, I want to be in control.  So I stuck with twm, and later with various more modern incarnations of it.

After a while, though, I started to think to myself, what do I really need a WM for?  Most of the time, what I really do is just work on one application at a time, e.g., a text editor editing code, or browser to browse online. Why do I need to waste time fiddling with windows that partially overlap each other and mouse focus issues and all of that nonsense?  Eventually this led me to use Ratpoison as my WM: a completely keyboard-driven tiling WM that has no overlapping windows (don't need 'em) and no need to take your hands off your keyboard.  Also, super lightweight -- all you need is literally a bare bones X server, and ratpoison itself. No toolbars, no window deco, all your apps get maximum screen space to do their stuff. Split-second switching between windows.  Split the display into two tiled panes when you need to look at more than one window at a time (I find this quite rare IME, but of course YMMV). None of the bloat that "modern" "desktop environments" bring with them. Everything is lightning fast without needless eye-candy.

Well this is probably a bit too extreme for you, but just wanted to say that it's actually possible. ;-)