How things have changed, late 90s, early 2000 was an exciting in Linux Land. Now, not as much excitement.

This feels like biblical Pharisees putting ritual cleanliness above practical concerns. The professors see themselves as pursuing higher intellectual goals, but the reality is most of their students want programming jobs, and need to be taught skills that will be essential to those jobs (like using git).

AAA games suck compared to 10 years ago though.

I'm a contractor for one of these companies. It pays okay ($45+/hour) if you can pass qualifications for your area of expertise but the work isn't steady and communication is non-existent. The coding qualifications I did were difficult FAANG algorithm analysis questions. The work has definitely gotten harder over the last year and often says we need to come up with Masters/PhD level work or problems that someone with 5+ years of experience in a field would have difficulty solving. I wish I had a regular job but I live in rural North Carolina and remote work is hard to come by.

Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.

Meaning to use your device you need to have a contractual relationship with a foreign (unless you are in the US) third party that decides what you can or cannot do with it. Plus using GrapheneOS is less of an option every day, since banks and other "regulated" sectors use Google Play Protect and similar DRMs to prevent you from connecting from whatever device you want. Client-side "trust" means the provider owning the device, not the user.

Android shouldn't be considered Open Source anymore, since source code is published in batches and only part of the system is open, with more and more apps going behind the Google ecosystem itself.

Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS, whether it comes from China getting fed up with the US and Google's shenanigans (Huawei has HarmonyOS but it's not open) or some "GNU/Linux" touch version that has a serious ecosystem. Especially when more and more apps and services are "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" like banking.