I’d like to mention that most IRL trots don’t “hate” MLs - it’s recognised that there are in general far more points of agreement than disagreement nowadays. This of course can greatly vary by specific Trotskyist and ML tendencies, but the major exceptions are very fringe.

I use Graphene OS. While you can run it completely de-Googled, in order to run Play Store applications Graphene OS takes the route of sandboxing Google Play services. This means that they run with the privileges of a regular application and you can deny it access to e.g. sensors.

Sandboxed Google Play is practically identical in functionality to its non-sandboxed counterpart from the stock ROM, and nearly all applications should work. I can confirm that WhatsApp works for certain, as well as my banking app.

Calyx OS is another one that uses MicroG as a replacement for Google Play Services instead, but I have not used it.

“Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia”

Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today’s Russia “be said to be communist”, and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?

Claiming socialism had “barely any social climb except at the beginning” unlike capitalism is not something that you can do while maintaining any shred of honesty. The reality is objectively the complete opposite. While there are plenty of valid criticisms of the USSR, access to education was not segregated by wealth, top universities were open to all who knew their shit, and throughout its entire history party leaders tended to come from humble backgrounds.

Now, compare the above with the USA.

Russian people are not as unaware of current events as you may think. It’s not like they don’t have access to the internet, and the Russian media reporting on the day was not any less detailed or timely than Western media.

A common take that I’ve seen is that both Putin and Prigozhin appeared weak: Prigozhin by backing out, Putin by having no one standing up against Prigozhin as he drove into Rostov, and then letting Prigozhin off without any major repercussions.

It’s unlikely that Prigozhin will come back due to completely discrediting himself in front of whatever support he had, but it’s possible someone else may attempt the same thing at a later point. After all, if they win, they take everything; if they lose, they get a slap on the wrist.

xManager is a bit sus IMO because they claim their installer is open source while consisting of 15000 lines of unreadable machine-generated Java code: https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/blob/main/app/src/main/java/com/xc3fff0e/xmanager/MainActivity.java

They are also quite opposed to publishing the source code of the actual Spotify patches for rather vague reasons: https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/issues/324

Mind you, I still use it because it’s pretty much the only option apart from YouTube front ends on mobile, but I would advise being very careful with the permissions you give it.

Hexbear uses “comm”

The Xbox app had a tendency to silently break for no apparent reason the last time I’ve tried gamepass, and they also made it quite difficult to access game files. A torrent client provides a much better user experience.